Kiwi blogger Cactus Kate found a memo sent to staff at the New Zealand Herald and other APN titles telling journalists to adopt a “more conservative editorial approach”.

The memo, apparently sent to staff from the company’s Sydney headquarters follows a decision to cut the budget for legal action and defence to zero.

According to Cactus Kate, APN instructed editors to spike stories that could trigger legal action or are otherwise risky.

The New Zealand Herald has never been considered the nation’s hardest newspaper, but Cactus Kate’s APN Chicken Out says the company is no longer ‘real media’.

This creates a news gap in the nation's largest city – one that television and radio seem equally unable to fill. Bloggers alone can't fill the void left when a major newspaper decides not to do its job properly.

In the last hour I checked the size of the front page of six news web sites using http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com. Here are the results:

• Fairfax's Stuff – 1.7MB
• The New Zealand Herald – 450Kb
• The Sydney Morning Herald – 940Kb
• The Australian – 874Kb
• Radio New Zealand News – 88Kb
• ABC News Radio – 294Kb

So you can read the Radio New Zealand News page 200 times and still download less data than a single read of Stuff.

While these numbers may not be important if you've got broadband and an unlimited download plan, they make a huge difference when you are on the end of a slow link or paying through the nose for each megabyte of data.

None of the sites attempted to show one of those awful TV style advertisements during this test. I hate to think what they might add to the totals.

Update: The National Business Review weighs in at 398Kb.

Things might not look too hot now, but knowledge workers will soon be in demand again. Employers who showed a dark side during the recession will struggle to fill vacancies.

Despite the recession, New Zealand still has a severe shortage of building industry skills and there are pockets of the IT business where vacancies have remained since the global economic meltdown began.

Australia already shows signs a severe shortage of IT skills could hamper companies and government departments as early as next year.

In Demand for ICT professionals on the rise, bottom is in Stan Beer at iTWire reports; “The bottom in ICT employment has been reached and demand for skilled jobs is once again on the rise, according to the latest market survey from a major technology recruiter. The news adds to a growing list of evidence of a return to health of the ICT jobs scene.”

A week earlier ITNews covered a report from Australia’s largest recruiter Peoplebank saying the demand for contractors was rising. A similar story appeared in CIO magazine in June with Seek Employment noting the overall job market was stabilising with IT consultants in high demand.

Australia’s ITNews reprinted a story from Britain's Computing newspaper on July 7 saying the antipodean nation is busily recruiting IT specialist in the UK to meet a shortage.

The Australian reported on a skills shortage in research organisations in Upgrade ignores skills shortage (story no longer online). And the New Zealand Herald reports there are many shortages in engineering.

New Zealand CIO magazine carried a report suggesting most IT employers face a skills shortage despite the recession. Despite downturn, opportunities remain for APAC IT candidates suggests one in four tech employers expect to increase their headcount this year. The story singles out specific skills in business analysis, datawarehousing, ERP (Oracle/SAP), web development and infrastructure (architecture) as being of particular interest.”

Some shortsightedness is in evidence in IT training budgets slashed at ITNews which suggests employers have slashed skills spending and can expect to see a serious skills vacuum by 2112.

What does this mean?

First, it’s a safe bet the skills shortage will return to Australia in the next year or so and to New Zealand soon after – the two countries are effectively a single market for knowledge workers. If anything it could be worse than before for a couple of reasons. Many skilled workers will have drifted off into other occupations or even early retirement. At the same time employers have cut back on training during the recession. While there are increased numbers of people taking tertiary courses in technology and similar subjects, many won’t enter the workforce in time for the recovery and they’ll have knowledge, but little experience, which means only a handful will hit the ground running.

Employers who behaved cut back staff, skimped on training or held on to skilled workers and pushed them too hard during the recession will all suffer once the skills shortage kicks in again. Knowledge workers will be able to drive better bargains – and recent experience will teach people to look beyond the pay packet.

Until the end of the 20^th Century, financial literacy was optional for knowledge workers. Sure there were people who understood how money worked, but they were usually either senior managers or company accountants.

Nowadays you need to understand basic economics – even if it’s only so you know when to bail out of a failing company, how to look after your personal investments or just navigate the global financial crisis.

More to the point, knowledge-based skills are now central to the commercial world. So knowledge workers need financial literacy.

You’ll have to do the hard stuff yourself. At the least read local business news stories every day. Start out by reading about companies that are either partners or direct competitors to your employer or your own business.

Make a point of relating what you read about business up and downs, share price movements and similar news to what you personally know about the company. Soon you’ll realise you probably know at least as much as the so-called professionals – at least in your own niche.

If you’re in Australia. I recommend you also read either BRW (http://www.brw.com.au) or the Australian Financial Review (http://www.afr.com.au). You don’t have to carry newsprint around – both publications have good web sites.

Though you will have to pay for the content and it isn’t cheap. Buying the printed newspapers is cheaper than subscribing online and you only need to buy the print paper when you’ve got enough time to digest it.

The feature stories are where you’ll learn the most because writers are less inclined to assume you know all the background and jargon.

If you’re strapped for time, the weekend edition of the Financial Review is your best bet. It has the strongest financial features of any local publication.

These days The Australian has a strong business section, though it runs fewer features than the AFR. The Australian’s content is available online for free – in fact the web site includes breaking stories throughout the day that do not necessarily appear in print.

New Zealand’s strongest business publication is The National Business Review. A lot of the paper’s best material doesn’t appear online. I recommend its features. While both the New Zealand Herald and the Fairfax newspapers including the Dominion-Post have busy-looking business news sections, they compare poorly with the Australian business press. Frankly they are seriously under-resourced.

Which means it can pay to look overseas to understand local events. I subscribe to The Economist (www.economist.com) and Businessweek (http://www.businessweek.com). Again, both have good web sites – though only paying subscribers to the print editions get to see the best stuff. And, like the Financial Review and BRW, both offer plenty of background.

Pure online financial news services (such as Bloomberg www.bloomberg.com) are written for insiders – you’ll get the news, but fewer explanations. On the other hand, their news is more up to date.

There isn’t enough time to read everything published in all these publications. Be selective. Pick out the juicy bits and move on. Apart from your own niche interests, make a point of reading the big picture and currency stories to get an idea of where the Australian or New Zealand economy is heading.

Last night my neighbours switched off their power for Earth Hour. It wasn't an  unusual event.

That’s because there have been at least four major power cuts in my North Shore suburb since I moved there at the end of 2004.

In the last five years, the power would have been off for roughly one day each year. I’ve also seen two disruptive power cuts while working in Auckland’s central business district. In at least one of those cases, the city, and my newspaper, lost an entire day’s production.

Earlier this year the upmarket suburbs of Newmarket and Parnell suffered two more power cuts. The New Zealand Herald covered the story on February 19 in Power restored to Auckland suburbs saying shop keepers' confidence in Vector (the local power company) was at an all time low.

As we shall see, that is saying something.

Not good enough

To be frank, it just isn’t good enough. Admittedly things in Auckland aren’t as bad as, say, Manila or Jakarta, but for a first world country like New Zealand, frequent power cuts are not a good look.

Ten years ago when US President Bill Clinton visited Auckland for the APEC meeting he brought a portable electricity generator. It was parked outside his chic city centre hotel on the back of a large, dark, unmarked truck that some locals dubbed the ‘stealth generator’.

In any other major western city, Clinton’s precaution might have seemed over the top. It would have insulted his hosts.

But Auckland is different. A year and a half before the leader of the free world flew into New Zealand’s largest city, the locals were checking their shopping change by candlelight when the Auckland’s lights went out and stayed out for almost six weeks.

Wikipedia entry on 1998 Auckland power crisis.

Even now, more than ten years after that blackout, many Auckland residents fear their city’s power supply is still not secure. With good reason because at 8:30 on 12th June 2006 the power went off again. Half of Auckland including the entire CBD was without power for over four hours. Some parts of the city suffered a longer outage.

Wikipedia entry on 2006 Auckland power cut

The problems are partly a result of over zealous free market reforms. The greed and arrogance of power company managers are also a cause.

There's an obvious parallel here with the global financial crisis.

And then there are New Zealand's ridiculous planning laws. These have ensured no new power stations have been built to meet booming demand. Thankfully this looks set to change with the new Kaipara gas-fired power station finally getting the green light. But that’s only the start. More, much more, is needed.

The robust networks needed to send power from where ever it is generated into the city are still held up by endless bureaucracy and over the top planning processes.

At the time of earlier crises, Auckland’s power supply depended on four cables: two gas-filled cables and two oil-filled cables. On 22 January 1998, one of the gas-filled cables failed. Power wasn’t disrupted as the remaining three cables took up the load.

On 9 February, the second gas-filled cable was cut. The power went off and Mercury Energy Limited, which operated the cables, asked its customer to voluntarily cut power consumption by 10 percent.

On 19 February, the emergency started in earnest when a fault in one of the oil-filled cables caused both remaining cables to shut down, cutting off all power to the city.

Mercury repaired one of the cables quickly, but it could only supply a reduced load. Power rationing was introduced to the city centre, which saw rolling two-hour power cuts.

At 5.30pm on Friday 20 February, the final cable failed. Mercury issued a statement that it “could no longer supply the Central Business District with electricity”. A limited standby cable managed to provide power to the district’s two hospitals and other emergency services.

For more than five weeks the nation’s largest city was plunged into chaos. Many businesses had little choice but to close down temporarily. Others relocated staff to other New Zealand cities or even flew them to Australia.

50,000 workers affected

At least 50,000 workers and 8,500 businesses were affected. The costs were estimated at around $NZ400 million, though that figure does not include tourism, international trade and financial services. In a small nation like New Zealand, the shut-down was serious enough to tip an already fragile economy into recession.

Who knows how much investment hasn't happened because of the flakey infrstructure?

At the time of the blackout, Jim Macaulay, chairman of Mercury Energy, the company that supplied Auckland’s electricity, told the media, "It's the most incredible, freakish bad luck you could ever imagine.” However, the government inquiry into the blackout found that there were many warnings that such an event could occur.

Well, it could happen again. Earth Hour should have acted as a reminder to people living in a city where power and light can't entirely be taken for granted.