Trialing the new NZ Herald print edition

ou can’t blame the NZ Herald for trying. Over the last few weeks we’ve had a free trial subscription to the paper’s print edition. Each morning a copy arrives in our letter box before breakfast.

As the paper’s headline writers might say: the Herald is a blast from the past.

For most of my life I’ve had a daily newspaper – for most of my adult life I’ve worked on daily newspapers, that’s another story.

Daily newspaper habit

We got out of the daily paper habit after moving back to Auckland. One reason is we get our news online. Another reason is the NZ Herald is, well, not a great paper. Not awful, just not great.

In Australia we had the Sydney Morning Herald and either The Australian or The Financial Review. At various times both myself and Jo worked for these titles.

In Wellington we had the pre-merger Dominion. Again, we both worked for the paper. In London it was The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. All of them packed with good reading material. The Daily Telegraph of the 1970s was a long way from the mess it is today.

Good, but...

My free trial subscription to the print edition of the NZ Herald ends today. I won’t renew.

It's worthwhile, but I have to pass.

There are good journalists working for the NZ Herald. But not enough interesting, readable material to make it worth paying for. And anyway, the main news stories are all available online anyway.

Tabloid format is a drawback

We found we like the weekday paper more than the weekend editions. Whatever the Herald says, the paper has moved downmarket since moving to a tabloid format (for some reason the Herald is keen to describe its size as ‘compact’ and not tabloid). There’s too much celebrity nonsense, a lot of silly filler material and not enough serious news. Sadly there’s little intelligent comment.

I can read the world’s best papers, the ones I named above, plus the New York Times online each day. Better still I can get the best stuff from the NZ Herald free on my iPad.

Would I pay for an iPad subscription? That depends on the price. Anything more than $100 a year would be too much.