Quenching thirst for news, promotion

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

It is a proud day for this newspaper and all associated with it to celebrate 150 years of publishing today.

We were not the first newspaper of the district — that was The Poverty Bay Standard, a four-page weekly first printed by Henry Webb on October 5, 1872. The first edition was snapped up quickly and immediately reprinted.

Clearly there was a thirst for news and promotion in the frontier colonial settlement. Gisborne was starting to grow quickly as the threat of Māori unrest subsided, after the horrors of the mid-to-late 1860s that culminated in the massacre at Ngatapa on this day in 1869. There is a sad irony in sharing our anniversary with one of the darkest days in New Zealand history, five years earlier.

A steady stream of settlers trekked north from Hawke’s Bay and it was the proprietors of the Hawke’s Bay Herald who established this district’s second newspaper, The Poverty Bay Herald, first printed on January 5, 1874.

William Carlile, a partner in the Hawke’s Bay Herald, moved to Gisborne as manager and editor of the new Poverty Bay Herald — along with AC Pratt, a previous manager of the Napier Daily Telegraph, and 18-year-old John Mogridge, a printer.

They brought with them an Albion hand-press and set up in a small wooden building beside the town’s music hall. Printing was laborious, requiring nine distinct processes to print one side of a sheet of paper. Prior to printing, every piece of type was set by hand and then replaced back in its case. A large amount of expensive, heavy metal was tied up in the stock of typefaces. Publication was bi-weekly with a cover price of 3 pennies.

For the most part information arrived by boat, initially. From 1875 a single, frequently unreliable telegraph cable linked Gisborne with Hawke’s Bay. A year later New Zealand was linked to Australia, and onward to England, by a single underwater cable.

Several newspapers came and went over the next two decades, and there was a great rivalry between this paper and the Gisborne Times (1901-1938) in the early decades of the next century.

In the book Printer’s Progress, Margaret Rees-Jones wrote: “It was not long before more entered the fray and considerable jostling went on for years thereafter, as aspirants struggled, succeeded, failed, tried again or even lost their health in their bid to establish or re-establish a newspaper.”

She also noted that nearly 30 years after the Herald began, the Cyclopedia of New Zealand applauded its survival: from its birth it “had been published regularly without intermission ever since, and, like Tennyson’s brook, bids fair to go on for ever”.

As we celebrate 150 years of publishing we thank you, our readers and advertisers, for your involvement with The Gisborne Herald.