Jasmine Business Directory

This section of the directory gathers organisations that produce, distribute, regulate, or fund news and media in New Zealand. The listings reach across newspapers, radio, free-to-air and pay television, online news sites, magazines, news agencies, Maori and Pacific media, and the public bodies that shape the sector. Aotearoa New Zealand is a small market of around five million people spread over two main islands, so its news ecosystem differs from larger English-language markets. Ownership is concentrated, public funding does a lot of the work, and a handful of national mastheads and broadcasters carry most of the audience.

A New Zealand news and media web directory exists to make that sector easier to search. A reader trying to find a regional daily, a te reo Maori radio station, a fact-checking outlet, or the regulator that handles broadcasting complaints should be able to locate it without guessing at brand names that change hands every few years. The categories below organise entries by function rather than by corporate parent, because companies in this sector merge, close mastheads, and rebrand often. Mass media in New Zealand includes publicly owned broadcasters such as Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand, commercial groups including NZME and Stuff, and a smaller set of independent and online publishers (Mass media in New Zealand, 2025).

What belongs here is editorial and broadcast media plus the institutions around it. That covers daily and community newspapers, talk and music radio networks, television channels and their on-demand platforms, wire and photo agencies, press and broadcasting regulators, and funding agencies such as NZ On Air and Te Mangai Paho. Trade bodies, journalism schools, and media research centres also fit, since they sit close to the production of news. Listings that describe themselves only as marketing, public relations, or advertising agencies usually belong in adjacent business directories rather than a news-focused one, though the boundary is not always clean.

People reach this part of the catalogue for several reasons. Some want a trustworthy outlet for daily news; the listings point them to mastheads and broadcasters with long records. Others are researchers, students, or overseas readers trying to understand how a small democracy keeps itself informed. The page also helps advertisers, media buyers, and communications staff identify which outlets still operate in a given region, a question that has become harder to answer as titles close. Because the entries describe each organisation in plain terms, the page works as both a finding aid and a record of who is still operating.

Geography shapes how the listings are arranged. National outlets cluster in Auckland and Wellington, while the South Island and provincial North Island rely on regional dailies and a thinning layer of community papers. The listings keep regional structure visible so that a reader in Dunedin, Invercargill, or Gisborne can see which titles still cover their area. That regional structure is one reason a curated news and media directory for New Zealand stays useful: it records local coverage that national brand recognition tends to hide.

New Zealand newspapers predate most of its other institutions. The first daily, the Otago Daily Times, published its opening issue on 15 November 1861, founded in Dunedin during the Otago gold rush by Julius Vogel and William Cutten (NZ History, 2014). Christchurch's The Press had begun slightly earlier as a weekly and turned daily in March 1863. In Auckland, the New Zealand Herald appeared on 13 November 1863, started by William Chisholm Wilson, who left a rival paper to pursue the business opportunity in a fast-growing port town (The New Zealand Herald, 2025). By the late nineteenth century the country supported scores of titles, and in 1892 the Herald, the Otago Daily Times, and The Press agreed to share the cost of a London correspondent, an early instance of cooperation in a thin market (Te Ara, 2014).

Radio arrived in the 1920s. The Radio Broadcasting Company began operating in 1925 under an agreement with the government to run a national service, taking over a scatter of earlier stations that small state subsidies had kept alive (Te Ara, 1966). Public control followed, and over the decades the radio arm became the body now governed by the Radio New Zealand Act 1995. Wellington's Evening Post, founded in 1865, merged with its morning rival the Dominion in 2002 to form the Dominion Post, a consolidation that came before the wider contraction. Anyone using a New Zealand media web directory to trace a masthead's lineage will run into these mergers repeatedly, because few titles kept the same name across their full history.

Television came late and slowly. The first official transmission began at 7.30 in the evening on 1 June 1960, broadcast from Shortland Street in central Auckland (NZ History, 1960). State broadcasting passed through several structures: the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand formed in 1977, and in 1980 separate channels were merged into Television New Zealand. For decades a two-channel public system dominated viewing. Deregulation in the late 1980s and 1990s opened the field to commercial competitors, private radio networks multiplied, and the Broadcasting Act 1989 set up both a standards regime and a public funding agency. That Act remains the backbone of broadcasting law, which is why it appears so often in entries describing how the sector is governed.

Maori broadcasting grew from activism over the place of te reo Maori in public life. Iwi radio stations emerged through the early 1990s, and a dedicated funding agency, later renamed Te Mangai Paho, was established in 1993 and separated from NZ On Air in 1995 (Te Mangai Paho, 2025). The Maori Television Service Act 2003 created a statutory broadcaster whose principal function is to promote te reo Maori me nga tikanga Maori, the Maori language and customs. The channel launched in 2004 and adopted the name Whakaata Maori officially in 2022 (Whakaata Maori, 2025). These organisations now anchor a distinct strand of the news and media listings, because New Zealand treats indigenous-language journalism as a public responsibility rather than a commercial afterthought.

The internet reshaped the economics from the late 1990s onward. Classified advertising, once the financial engine of metropolitan dailies, drained to online platforms, and the audience moved to free websites and, later, to social feeds. New Zealand publishers launched their own news sites early, but advertising revenue did not follow at the scale that print had enjoyed. The history recorded across a business directory covering New Zealand media therefore falls into two phases: a long expansion from 1861 to roughly the year 2000, then a steady contraction in titles, staff, and revenue that accelerated sharply in the 2020s and still defines the sector today. A web directory that tracks these companies has to keep pace with that decline rather than freeze the sector at its peak.

Ownership followed its own path. For most of the twentieth century, family firms and local companies ran the metropolitan dailies, but the 1990s and 2000s brought overseas owners. Australian and other foreign groups bought into the print and radio markets, then sold out again, and the assets eventually consolidated into two large commercial groups. NZME now owns the New Zealand Herald, the Newstalk ZB radio network, and a string of regional titles, while Stuff, once owned by the Australian company Fairfax and later by Nine Entertainment, returned to local ownership in 2020 when its chief executive bought it for a nominal one dollar. Anyone trying to trace a masthead's owner will often find three or four different parent companies attached to a single title across its life.

News agencies sit quietly in this history. The New Zealand Press Association, a cooperative wire service owned by the country's newspapers, supplied shared national and international copy from 1879 until it closed in 2011, a casualty of the same revenue pressures that later hit individual newsrooms. Its closure pushed publishers toward Australian and international wires and toward sharing content among themselves. Pacific media also grew over the late twentieth century, with Pacific Media Network radio and various community outlets serving the large Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands, Niuean, and Fijian populations concentrated in Auckland. These outlets matter because the main mastheads alone do not give a complete picture of New Zealand news. Business directories that list New Zealand news and media outlets often record these wire services and Pacific stations long after the headline mastheads have absorbed or replaced them.

Public bodies do an unusual amount of the work in the New Zealand news and media system. Radio New Zealand, known as RNZ, is an independent Crown entity created by the Radio New Zealand Act 1995, charged with serving the public interest through reliable, independent, freely accessible news and information (RNZ, 2025). It runs RNZ National for news and current affairs, RNZ Concert for classical music and jazz, and an AM network that relays parliamentary proceedings. Parliament reviews its charter every five years, and it carries a statutory role under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 as a lifeline utility during emergencies. Listings for RNZ in a media web directory usually note that it takes no advertising and is funded through NZ On Air.

Television New Zealand works on a different model. TVNZ is state-owned but commercially funded, selling advertising around its channels and its on-demand platform. NZ On Air, formally the Broadcasting Commission established under the Broadcasting Act 1989, sits between the state and producers: it funds public-interest content and independent New Zealand programmes, with a remit to reflect national identity and to promote Maori language and culture. Te Mangai Paho performs the parallel role for Maori media, funding a national network of iwi radio stations that each deliver several hours of te reo Maori content daily (Te Mangai Paho, 2025). For a reader using a business and web directory covering New Zealand media, these funding agencies explain why outlets that could never survive on advertising alone continue to exist.

Regulation has long been split between broadcast and print. The Broadcasting Standards Authority, a Crown entity created by the Broadcasting Act 1989, developed and enforced standards for radio and television and could uphold complaints with legal force (Broadcasting Act 1989, 2025). Print and online media instead answered to the New Zealand Media Council, an industry self-regulatory body founded in 1972 as the New Zealand Press Council. Newspaper proprietors and journalists set up the Council partly to head off a statutory press regulator, and it broadened over time to cover magazines, websites, blogs, and, after 2017, the work absorbed from the Online Media Standards Authority (New Zealand Media Council, 2025). Its board mixes public and industry members under an independent chair, and lodging a complaint costs nothing.

That regulatory split is now narrowing. In May 2026 the Minister for Media and Communications confirmed legislation to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority and move its functions toward self-regulation under the New Zealand Media Council (1News, 2026). The change matters because the Media Council, unlike the statutory Authority, cannot impose financial penalties or legally enforce its rulings; it relies on members agreeing to publish corrections and adjudications. Entries in a curated New Zealand media directory increasingly flag this transition, since the body a reader complains to about a broadcast may shift during the life of any single listing. Government media reform proposals from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage have also looked at modernising content funding and the rules that apply to streaming services (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2025).

Commercial broadcasting runs in parallel to the public system. MediaWorks operates a large commercial radio business, with brands such as More FM, The Edge, and Magic spanning music and talk formats, after it exited free-to-air television in 2020 by selling its Three channel to Discovery. NZME runs the competing radio arm built around Newstalk ZB, the country's most listened-to talk station, alongside music networks. These groups answer to advertising markets rather than to a charter, which affects the kind of journalism they can sustain. An entry in this category for a commercial broadcaster therefore reads differently from one for RNZ, because the funding model and the public-service obligations are not the same.

Around these statutory pillars sits a layer of supporting institutions. Universities such as the Auckland University of Technology, through its Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy, produce the research that tracks public trust and audience behaviour. The National Library's Papers Past archive digitises historic newspapers and supports much historical work on the sector. Journalism training programmes, the union representing media workers, and press-freedom monitors fill out the rest. A New Zealand news web directory that lists these bodies alongside the outlets themselves gives readers the context to judge how independent and accountable a given source actually is.

The 2020s have been hard years for New Zealand news. In 2024 Warner Bros. Discovery proposed closing the Newshub television newsroom, citing advertising revenue that fell faster than expected; the operation ended in mid-2024, replaced by a smaller bulletin produced by Stuff under the name ThreeNews (RNZ, 2024). Television New Zealand cut more than sixty roles the same year and axed several programmes, including its long-running Sunday current affairs show and some bulletins, with management pointing to structural pressure across the sector. NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, proposed cutting regional news roles and closed more than a dozen community papers. Tracking which titles remain is now one of the practical reasons a business directory covering New Zealand media earns its place.

The financial cause is plain, even if the effects are messier. Advertising that once funded newsrooms moved to global platforms, and subscription income has not closed the gap in a market this small. The Spinoff estimated in 2024 that New Zealand had roughly 1,400 working journalists left, fewer than a single large overseas newspaper employs (The Spinoff, 2024). Commentators began describing emerging news deserts, regions left without dedicated public-interest reporting as community titles fold and regional bureaus shrink (NZ Herald, 2024). The South Island, rural districts, and smaller provincial centres carry the highest risk, which is why regional structure stays prominent when these outlets are listed.

Public trust has moved unevenly. Research from the Auckland University of Technology found general trust in news fell from 53 percent in 2020 to 32 percent in 2025, with the share of people avoiding news to some degree climbing toward three-quarters of the population (AUT/JMAD, 2026). The same researchers recorded a modest recovery in 2026, with general trust at 37 percent and trust in the news a person personally consumes rising to 50 percent. RNZ, the Otago Daily Times, and TVNZ ranked among the most trusted outlets in that work. These figures, gathered by Dr Greg Treadwell and Dr Merja Myllylahti, are the kind of sourced data that a careful entry can point a reader toward.

Audience habits have shifted toward screens and feeds. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report documents a global move to social media and video for news, with younger audiences in particular naming social platforms as their main source and video overtaking text for many readers (Reuters Institute, 2025). New Zealand follows that pattern, and the country's online-only outlets, from Newsroom and The Spinoff to Interest.co.nz and BusinessDesk, have grown audiences as legacy print declines. RNZ, fully publicly funded, expanded its online work and built a digital reach well into the millions. A business directory listing New Zealand media now has to account for outlets that exist only on the web and on apps, with no print or broadcast footprint at all.

The relationship between publishers and global platforms has driven policy debate. A Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, modelled on Australia's 2021 mandatory bargaining code, would require large platforms such as Google and Meta to negotiate payment with New Zealand outlets for news carried on their services (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2024). Google responded that, if the bill passed in its proposed form, it would stop linking to New Zealand news across Search and its other surfaces, while publishers argued the platforms had captured the advertising that once funded reporting. The outcome stayed unsettled, and the episode showed how dependent a small market's newsrooms have become on distribution they do not control. For a reader, it is one more reason the roster of working outlets changes from year to year.

Public funding has been politically contested through this period. The Public Interest Journalism Fund, administered by NZ On Air, distributed about 55 million dollars between 2021 and 2023 to support reporting on local democracy, courts, regional issues, and Maori and Pacific affairs, areas judged no longer commercially viable (NZ Herald, 2021). The fund was created as a pandemic-era response to collapsing advertising and wound up in 2023; it drew sustained criticism from politicians who argued state money compromised editorial independence, a charge the agency and recipients rejected. The episode shows how closely funding, trust, and independence are tied in this market, a tension that an honest account of New Zealand news and media should keep visible rather than smooth over. A news and media web directory that records who received that funding, and when the scheme wound up, gives readers a way to weigh those independence concerns for themselves.

The listings in this category are organised so that a reader can move from broad to specific. Top-level groupings separate newspapers, radio, television, online news, and the public bodies, and within each the entries note region, ownership where it is stable enough to record, and the regulator or funder an outlet answers to. Because corporate structures change so often in this sector, an entry ages better when it describes function and coverage rather than leaning on brand names alone. Where a masthead has merged or closed, the entries aim to say so plainly, since a dead link helps no one and a missing title can mislead a reader into thinking coverage still exists.

For practical searches, a few habits help. Readers looking for daily news are usually best served by the established mastheads and the public broadcasters, while those after regional coverage should start from the relevant area rather than from a national brand. Anyone wanting indigenous-language journalism should look to Whakaata Maori, the iwi radio network, and the outlets funded by Te Mangai Paho. People with a complaint about something published or broadcast can use this New Zealand media directory to find the right regulator, keeping in mind that the broadcasting and print complaint paths are converging under the New Zealand Media Council as the Broadcasting Standards Authority is wound down. These everyday uses are the reason business and web directories covering New Zealand media have to stay current and accurate.

This category is also a research tool. Students, overseas journalists, and policy analysts use it to map a small media system under pressure, and the institutions listed, from the Auckland University of Technology research centre to the National Library's Papers Past archive, point toward deeper sources. The references below are the starting points behind the facts summarised across these sections: government legislation, regulator and broadcaster sources, the responsible ministry, encyclopedic and historical records, and independent audience research. Readers who want to verify a date, a funding figure, or a regulatory change should go to these directly. A directory that lists New Zealand news and media organisations works best when it sends people on to primary sources rather than asking them to take its summaries on trust, and the entries here are written with that in mind. The most useful resources gathered on this page are the official statutes, the regulators' own published standards, and the annual trust research, which readers can consult to check the state of New Zealand news and media in 2026.

1. New Zealand Legislation. (1989). Broadcasting Act 1989. Parliamentary Counsel Office, legislation.govt.nz
2. New Zealand Legislation. (1995). Radio New Zealand Act 1995. Parliamentary Counsel Office, legislation.govt.nz
3. New Zealand Legislation. (2003). Maori Television Service (Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi Maori) Act 2003. Parliamentary Counsel Office, legislation.govt.nz
4. Radio New Zealand. (2025). About RNZ. rnz.co.nz
5. New Zealand Media Council. (2025). About the Council and statement of principles. mediacouncil.org.nz
6. Broadcasting Standards Authority. (2025). Codebook of broadcasting standards in New Zealand. bsa.govt.nz
7. NZ On Air. (2025). Strong Public Media and the Public Interest Journalism Fund. nzonair.govt.nz
8. Te Mangai Paho. (2025). Funding for Maori broadcasting and te reo Maori media. tmp.govt.nz
9. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. (2025). Media Reform: Modernising regulation and content funding arrangements for New Zealand. Manatu Taonga, mch.govt.nz
10. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. (2024). Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. Manatu Taonga, mch.govt.nz
11. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. (2014). Newspapers: Growth and expansion, 1860 to 1900. Manatu Taonga, teara.govt.nz
12. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. (1966). Radio Broadcasting Company of New Zealand Ltd, 1925 to 1931. teara.govt.nz
13. Manatu Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage. (1960). New Zealand's first official TV broadcast. NZ History, nzhistory.govt.nz
14. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). The New Zealand Herald. Wikipedia
15. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Mass media in New Zealand. Wikipedia
16. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Whakaata Maori. Wikipedia
17. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). New Zealand Press Association. Wikipedia
18. New Zealand Herald. (2020). Stuff sold for 1 dollar to chief executive Sinead Boucher by Nine Entertainment. nzherald.co.nz
19. 1News. (2020). MediaWorks sells its TV operations to Discovery Inc. 1news.co.nz
20. Radio New Zealand. (2024). Cuts and closures in New Zealand's news media industry: What you need to know. rnz.co.nz
21. New Zealand Herald. (2021). Government earmarks 55 million dollars to support public interest journalism with new media fund. nzherald.co.nz
22. New Zealand Herald. (2024). News deserts emerging in New Zealand, says think-tank discussion paper. nzherald.co.nz
23. The Spinoff. (2024). Ten stories that defined New Zealand's media in 2024. thespinoff.co.nz
24. Treadwell, G. and Myllylahti, M. (2026). Trust in News in Aotearoa New Zealand. Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy, Auckland University of Technology
25. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2025). Digital News Report 2025. University of Oxford
26. 1News. (2026). Govt to axe Broadcasting Standards Authority, self-regulation signalled. 1news.co.nz