The Press

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Press first appeared on the 25th of May 1861, printed inside a small cottage on the west side of Montreal Street in Christchurch, New Zealand. That cottage belonged to a clergyman named Raven, and the land around it was simply known as Raven's paddock, sitting between Worcester and Gloucester Streets. From that unlikely beginning, six pages long and priced at sixpence, a newspaper emerged that would outlast every other daily in the South Island. The questions worth asking are not just how it survived, but who built it, why they built it from scratch rather than working with what already existed, and how a paper conceived in a riverside paddock grew into an institution that once commissioned its own fleet of diesel railbuses to deliver copies through the mountains before dawn.

• 2. A Dinner That Started a Newspaper

  ›

  James FitzGerald arrived in Lyttelton aboard the Charlotte Jane in December 1850, and by January 1851 he was editing the Lyttelton Times, Canterbury's first newspaper. He left that post in 1853 to focus on politics, spent several years in England, then returned to Canterbury troubled by the provincial government's spending plans. His sharpest objection was to a proposed rail tunnel linking Christchurch and Lyttelton, a project he judged fiscally irresponsible. His old paper, the Lyttelton Times, supported it. Its editor, Crosbie Ward, then made an imputation against FitzGerald, the exact nature of which is no longer known, and that slight appears to have been the spark. FitzGerald had dinner with John Watts-Russell, who agreed to put up 500 pounds on the condition that FitzGerald would lead the new enterprise. The Reverend John Raven was enlisted next, organising practical matters including a printer and a printing press. Henry Porcher Lance, Henry Tancred, and Richard J. S. Harman rounded out the founding committee. The public assumed FitzGerald was the proprietor, but the paper felt it necessary to state publicly that he had no pecuniary or official connection with it. He was, by the paper's own later account, the driving force behind it nonetheless.

• 3. Darwin, Butler, and the Early Pages

  ›

  On the 13th of June 1863, The Press published the first instalment of what would become one of the more unusual literary documents of the Victorian era. The piece was signed with the pseudonym Cellarius and headed "Darwin among the Machines." Its author was Samuel Butler, and the article would eventually find its way into Erewhon, Butler's satirical novel about a society that had abandoned machinery for fear it would evolve beyond human control. That a small colonial newspaper in the South Pacific became the first venue for such ideas reflects something about the intellectual ambition of the paper's early years. Ownership during this period was tangled. In February 1862, a deed of association was drafted for "The Proprietors of The Press," listing ten individuals including Watts-Russell, Raven, Lance, Tancred, Harman, Alfred Richard Creyke, John Hall, Joseph Brittan, Isaac Cookson, and James Somerville Turnbull. The deed was never signed. Four months after that failed attempt, FitzGerald found himself the sole owner, a transfer he later attributed to the liberality of the proprietors. He held on until 1868, when he lost control and the Press Company was incorporated in his place.

• 4. Stone, Steel, and Railbuses

  ›

  In 1905, the newspaper spent 4,000 pounds to acquire a block in Cathedral Square, then paid a further 5,000 pounds for the right of way known as Press Lane and a site that had been earmarked for the Theatre Royal. Construction of the Gothic-style Press building began in 1907, and staff moved in from their Cashel Street premises in February 1909. That building stood as the company's home until the 22nd of February 2011. In the 1930s, the paper faced a different kind of infrastructure problem: the West Coast of the South Island was difficult to reach on time. Roads were poor, and the New Zealand Railways Department refused to reschedule passenger trains to the early morning hours The Press needed, judging such routes commercially unviable. Freight trains were too slow. The paper's response was to subsidise the construction of two small Leyland diesel railbuses. They entered service on the 3rd of August 1936, departing Christchurch at 2:20 in the morning. They ran down the Midland Line to Greymouth, arriving at 6:40 am, then continued along the Ross Branch to Hokitika just before 8:00 am. The arrangement was always intended as temporary, and once larger Vulcan railcars arrived in New Zealand in the early 1940s, the little Leyland buses were retired.

• 5. Earthquake and Aftermath

  ›

  The earthquake of February 2011 badly damaged the Press building in central Christchurch, the Gothic structure the company had occupied since 1909. All production shifted to the printing plant near Christchurch Airport, where it remained until June 2012. At that point the central building was partially rebuilt and reopened, placing The Press among the first operations in the Christchurch CBD to return to functional premises after the disaster. The paper's format shifted as well: weekday editions moved from broadsheet to compact in 2018, though Saturday retained the larger broadsheet size. On the digital side, the paper had been moving online for decades. In 1995, The Press became the country's first news outlet to launch a website for news. When Independent Newspapers Ltd introduced the Stuff brand in 2000, The Press and Stuff began collaborating on online content. On the 29th of April 2023, the paper launched a new subscription-based website alongside a new logo, with all content placed behind a paywall.

• 6. Ownership, Editors, Awards

  ›

  George Stead bought the assets when the original Press Company dissolved in 1890, establishing the Christchurch Press Company and becoming its chairman. That company passed to Independent Newspapers Ltd in 1987, which was itself acquired by Fairfax New Zealand in 2003. The Australian parent, Fairfax Media, merged with Nine Entertainment Co. in December 2018. The paper is now owned by Stuff Ltd. The list of editors since 1861 runs to more than a dozen people, spanning from George Sale in 1861 through to Kamala Hayman, who became editor in 2017 and remains in the position. Hayman herself won a Best Feature Writer award at the 2004 Qantas Media Awards, back when she was a journalist rather than an editor. The paper has won the New Zealand Newspaper of the Year title in its circulation category three times, in 2006, 2007, and 2012, and the overall title twice, in 2006 and 2007. Its masthead once carried the Latin motto "Nihil utile quod non-honestum" and the Royal Arms, a distinction shared with The Age in Australia. Sharon Murdoch, the paper's cartoonist, won Cartoonist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2016, 2017, and 2018.