I confess it’s with considerable relief that I’ve now cancelled my subscription to the Nelson Mail.

It’s taken me a very long time to do this (and I still must follow up my complaint to the Press Council), but I felt at this stage that I had little choice. It’s a shame to see how basically third-rate, non-objective and biased this newspaper has become – as have all in the Stuff stable, I understand,  from feedback all over the country.

Read the rest of this letter by author Amy Brooke on the Kapiti Independent News site.

This print media decline isn’t confined to NZ, but here the decline in newspaper sales has been accompanied by a decline in journalistic standards because there is a decline in journalist numbers and calibre, and the amounts editors are willing to spend on investigative journalism are very small.

In Kapiti both local freebies rely on advertising for their existence and the advertiser is king.  They know they need editorial content for the people whose mailboxes they get stuffed in (pun intended) to want to read them — but they don’t want to upset their advertisers, of which the Kapiti council is a major one.

The consequence … well, that’s pretty obvious.  And that’s why we and KIN play an important role