Garth George: Along for the ride on a sea change under Captain Ellis

A highly significant era in the annals of the press in New Zealand comes to an end next week when Gavin Ellis hands over the leadership of this newspaper.

For four years as editor and four years as editor-in-chief, Ellis (like entertainers, sportspeople and criminals, journalists don't get an honorific) has presided over a revolution - and not just in the Herald.

And as one who has not been involved in the planning and execution of the extraordinary developments that have taken place over those years, I have been able to sit back and watch - sometimes in consternation, usually with astonishment - while Ellis and his minions have changed the face of the newspaper industry.

In 46 years in the newspaper game here and in Australia I have seen things happen that were unimaginable to a young journalist starting out in the late 1950s. And few of them were favourable.

Back then newspapers were indispensable. The only radio news was the BBC feed on the national stations of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service and television had not arrived.

In every town and city the populace depended on their newspapers to keep them informed of what was going on in their nation and their world.

They were led by some of the finest journalists this nation has known, men who were held in high regard in the communities in which they served and whose opinions, expressed through their editorials, were respected, if not feared, by those who held political and commercial power in the land.

The likes of J.L. Grimaldi of the Southland Times, George Gaffney of the Timaru Herald, George Burns of the Christchurch Star, O.S. Hintz of the New Zealand Herald and Monte Holcroft of the Listener watched over the nation with an objective zeal that was the hallmark of the journalism of the day.

But unfortunately they passed the baton to a generation of editors who seemed baffled by the inroads made by radio and television and who, over the decades that followed, watched, apparently impotently, while respected title after respected title disappeared into newspaper history.

The industry was decimated. The evening dailies, which gave all our cities and most major towns a choice of newspaper, were dissed one by one - the Taranaki Herald, the Wanganui Herald, the Southland Daily News, the Evening Star in Dunedin, the Christchurch Star, the Auckland Star and, lately, the one that survived the longest, Wellington's Evening Post.

And as time went on and life got busier and more electronic, even the morning dailies, including this one, began a bleeding of circulation which threatened in the mid-1990s to become a haemorrhage.

Enter, in 1996, Gavin Ellis, a Herald staffer since 1972, appointed editor in the wake of the sale of Wilson and Horton to Tony O'Reilly's Independent News and Media after a raid on its shares by the accursed Brierley Investments.

Gathering about him a team of committed and like-minded professionals - who shall, except for Wayne Harman, remain nameless for fear of missing one out - Ellis began a revival of the fortunes of this newspaper which continues to this day.

He will tell you in his modest and unassuming way - two of his more likeable traits - that all he did was let loose the talent which was there all the time but which had never been given the chance to develop and shine.

In a sense that is true, for I have watched with huge pleasure while young journalists who back then appeared to be nothing more than average have transformed themselves into some of the finest practitioners of the craft we have produced.

But without the guiding hand at the top, without the support and the encouragement coming down from above, without the certainty provided by discipline and trustworthy backing when the going got rough, it would not have happened.

Newspapers throughout the nation have scrambled to emulate the Herald in layout and design and additional features - and thus has the Ellis revolution spread through the land - but none has ever been able to match us for content.

The Herald today is the best-reported, best-written, best-illustrated newspaper in New Zealand, indeed among the best in the world, and it's all down to the vision, talent and determination of a journalist par excellence and the men and women to whom he has given supervisory responsibility.

Parallel developments in production systems have, of course, played a huge part but Ellis has been at the forefront of those, too.

Freed from the stultifying restraints imposed for decades by the Printers' Union, this newspaper has been able to acquire technology which is as up-to-the-minute as the latest picture from Baghdad.

Which means that today on my computer terminal I can do in 10 minutes what used to take four men an hour or more. But - and I think it grossly unfair - I still get only one man's pay.

These have been intriguing times to be a journalist and I will leave the trade the better for having been part of them.

That urbane and enigmatic genius with the heart of a liberal and the mind of a conservative ethicist I will always remember fondly, not for what he did for the Herald in particular and the Kiwi press in general, but for being a man of staunch, even inflexible, principle.

And a man of great courage, before whose implacable determination to protect the freedom of the press politicians and judges and others in authority who would carry out their nefarious schemes in secret have quailed and backed off.

He was, indeed, the newspaperman for his time.