“I’m sure it won’t be the magazine I’d make, that things will be done in ways I wouldn’t do them, but that’s also true of many of the versions of Metro that came before me.”
Metro magazine’s outgoing editor Henry Oliver.
Metro publisher Still Group – owned by Japanese-New Zealand businessman Hideaki Fukutake – confirmed the changes.
“I hope to get the finances back into a position where we can afford full-time staff,” Still projects director Sam Johnson told the Herald today. “For now, we are engaging guest editors.”
He said a new general manager, Julia Barnes, would be “taking time to reset Metro as a magazine for more of Auckland”.
The magazine was first published in 1981 – the year that the South African rugby team toured a riven New Zealand – under its famous and longest-serving editor, Warwick Roger.
Its pages have showcased generations of New Zealand’s finest journalists and writers and, in an era before the internet and well before social media, the musings of the most famous gossip columnist of all, Felicity Ferret.
Johnson said production for the summer and autumn issues was well under way, “featuring many of our long-time contributors alongside new voices and creative leadership”.
Metro magazine’s latest edition, released today.
And in a publisher’s note in the latest spring issue, the company said: “We thank and warmly farewell the Metro full-time staff whose last issue this is; their legacy remains, and they leave with the high regard of the publisher and shareholder.
“Metro continues as a print-first publication with our pre-Christmas issue already under way. We’ll keep covering what’s happening in Tāmaki Makaurau -the beautiful and the messy, the consequential and the fun – in pieces that are light and serious, long form and pictorial.”
In his editorial, Oliver said his length of service was “by my count, second only (but a distant one) to that of founding editor Warwick Roger – an honour (or what this magazine might have once called a ‘dubious achievement’)“.
“I mention only to highlight my hope that I will not keep it. From the next issue onwards, Metro will inevitably be a new and different version of itself, just as it has always been during its reinventions (sometimes by chance, sometimes by the times, sometimes by personnel, sometimes by force) over the years. Any publication that lasts 40+ years has to die and be reborn; to shed skin and start again; to find new ways to speak to and about the city; and (I’m afraid it must be said) to work financially in a rapidly changing industry and a struggling economy.”
Founder of Metro magazine, and its pioneering editor, Warwick Roger. Photo / supplied
Metro previously faced an uncertain future when it was one of various titles that closed temporarily in 2020, after German publisher and then owner Bauer Media suddenly shut up shop in New Zealand at the start of the Covid pandemic.
The magazine was eventually rescued by entrepreneur Simon Chesterman, who – in turn – sold it to Fukutake’s Still Group in 2023.
“Metro has made a significant cultural offering to Auckland and New Zealand since 1981, which makes it special and enduring,” Fukutake said in a statement, shortly after the acquisition was confirmed.
“I respect the work of the team and look forward to seeing the magazine grow its cultural reach in Auckland and around New Zealand.”
Johnson – who famously founded the Student Volunteer Army after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake – told the Herald today: “As noted in the publisher’s note, we wish the departing team members well. The business model now has a stronger focus on building and serving the Auckland community, including our subscribers, our advertisers and the hospitality sector.
“Metro will be content you don’t want to scroll through on your phone — focused on print, designed to be read slowly or gifted to someone else.”
In a statement last month, Barnes confirmed the magazine was “making changes to protect [its] long-term sustainability”, but did not go into detail.
“With our next issue in production, any public comment right now would be premature as the situation is still evolving,” she said last month. “Print magazines are tough, but we’re committed to Metro’s future.”
One of Metro’s greatest pieces of journalism was published in June 1987 and exposed the practices of doctors at New Zealand’s leading women’s hospital.
“The article by Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle led to a Commission of Inquiry, headed by Dame Silvia Cartwright, that helped strengthen patients’ rights and saw the establishment of a national cervical screening programme,“ reported Metro.
When doctors are wrong it can be catastrophic, as Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle showed in their 1987 Metro magazine article An Unfortunate Experiment. Photo / File
Coney told TVNZ in 2023: “We had a whisper from a friend who was at the Auckland medical school about a study that was going to come out that showed that women had not been properly treated with abnormal smears. We knew it was serious right from the beginning – it was just putting together how it had happened.
“One of our big worries was that no one would want to publish it, that they would be scared to put it out there.”
With the good came some bad – Metro was sued in 1994 by newspaper columnist Toni McRae after a reference to her in one of the Felicity Ferret columns. McRae was awarded damages of $375,000, later reduced to $100,000.
In his farewell editorial today, Oliver talked of his joy of producing Metro as a print magazine.
“… I hope not just that Metro will live long into the future, but that there’s still room in the world for things made without algorithms or metrics, for the opportunity for people to pick something up and maybe find something they didn’t know they wanted.
“I hope there’s still room in the world for physical media, for pages to turn, for words and images to collide and together become more than the sum of their parts.”
He said he knew the wind was blowing in the opposite direction and that it was getting stronger. “Still, I hope there’s shelter somewhere. If I’ve got anything, I’ve still got hope.
“Bye x”.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.