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None of those New Zealand men who served as official war correspondents in World War II are alive today to tell their stories. It is left to the media historian to try and piece together their lives and actions, always regretting that research had not started sooner. Sadly there is more information available about World War I and the life and actions of Malcolm Ross, the country's first official war correspondent, than there is about New Zealand's World War II correspondents. Nevertheless, remembering the work of these journalists is important, so this is a first attempt at chronicling the circumstances surrounding the appointment of the first of the official correspondents, John Herbert Hall and Robin Templeton Miller, for the 1939-45 conflict. The story of the appointment of men to cover the war, whether as press correspondents, photographers, artists or broadcasters, is one of 'absurd delays' which were not resolved until nearly two years of the war had passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We enjoy freedom of speech in New Zealand, even though the Bill of Rights Act guarantee can be over-ridden. We have a variety of privately owned news media, even though the vast majority are owned by overseas interests. We have state-owned radio and television, even though our major television network was freed of its public service broadcasting obligations in order to pursue commercial goals. We have high quality tertiary institutions to train our future journalists, even though the ranks of our newsrooms have been systematically depleted. We have sophisticated telecommunications services, even though only 1 percent of us have optical broadband. The qualifications will not be lost on you. In other words, when I reflect on our good fortune I see that it is tempered by shortcomings, actual and potential. In this address I argue that the shortcomings are increasing and, if unchecked, ultimately threaten the way we function as a society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of New Zealand's press agency, the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA), as a co-operative news gathering agency in 1880 has traditionally been regarded as reflecting a pioneering spirit of newspaper unity or as being largely determined by the political situation of the time. But these explanations are insufficient. Applying economic and organisational theories of co-operatives to the history of NZPA, this paper reveals it was market conditions that led to the creation of NZPA as a co-operative news gathering service. Following profound changes in those market conditions, NZPA recently abandoned this co-operative news gathering model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the transparency of journalists’ methods of newsgathering in New Zealand. By examining media coverage of genetic engineering, the study reveals that reports lack explicit markers of place, time and means by which the information has been obtained; the paper explains how this ambiguity leads to disappearance of context and it demonstrates that there is a link between the use of sources and the precision of news. It also discusses how the disappearance of newsgathering transparency alters knowledge about a subject, and indicates that the process might be related to a specific, Anglo-American understanding of objectivity that resists the practice of “interpretative” reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]