The Press Association of New Zealand, a cooperative of 41 newspapers, runs a highly efficient teleprinter network through which news is transmitted simultaneously to 37 of its members. Each member supplies to the cooperative all local news of national interest for retransmission to other members. Hence the association need employ a staff of only 25, including three full-time overseas correspondents.
Telegraph news was first transmitted in Canterbury more than a hundred years ago. In 1859 James Edward FitzGerald, who was Canterbury Agent in London, sent out 20 miles of wire, batteries, insulators, and 250 iron poles for a line to connect Lyttelton with Christchurch. The equipment was set up by George Holmes and Co., of Melbourne, for £1,405; and the line was opened on 1 July 1862. In 1865 the Central Government built an electric telegraph in the South Island. FitzGerald, who owned the Christchurch Press, arranged for his brother Gerard to use the telegraph to transmit the general telegraphic news. In the autumn of that year G. FitzGerald and Co. began operations from Campbelltown, Bluff Harbour, under the name of the New Zealand General Telegraphic Agency. The agency's first news telegram was a summary of news prepared in Melbourne; it arrived in Christchurch on 21 May 1865. The Lyttelton Times and Canterbury Standard joined the Press in receiving the agency's telegrams, with the object of cutting costs and avoiding expensive competition. Five years later Julius Vogel, Colonial Treasurer and Postmaster-General in the Fox Ministry, introduced a free news-wire system for a short time. The Government soon saw a chance of making money from press traffic.
“Greville's Telegram Company, Reuter's Agents” filled a gap until it was taken over by the Press Telegraph Agency, run by a Captain Holt, and a Wellington journalist, Florence M'Carthy. (FitzGerald and Co. were by then defunct.) Greville and his partner, C. O. Montrose, had a contemporary – an association of 13 papers organised by the Otago Daily Times, working before October 1870 and supplying foreign and interprovincial news to its members. Holt and M'Carthy gained a reputation for being “perfunctory and inadequate” and in June 1878 the Otago Daily Times brought most of the papers together with a jointly owned agency called the Press Association. This was formed in December with 27 members.
The new association would allow only one morning and evening paper in each centre to subscribe; this left many rivals unserved. Open warfare broke out when the association bought for £1,000 the exclusive lease of a Government wire to transmit news telegrams to members. The rival group, calling themselves the Press Agency, organised under the chairmanship of T. W. Leys, editor of the Auckland Star. After a bitter campaign, in which charges of bribery and corruption were alleged by the Press Agency and repeated in Parliament (they were never proved), the Government capitulated and leased a second wire. Each group tried to outdo the other. Competition was not only intense but expensive to the two groups; the Post Office noted officially that messages duplicated “by two competing press associations for supplying intelligence to newspapers were amongst the chief producers of public dissatisfaction”.
In December 1879 the rival groups combined as the United Press Association. This name remained until 1942 when it was changed to the New Zealand Press Association Ltd., to stress its national scope and character. The association still maintains its original, strictly non-political organisation.
In 1879 there were only 3,543 miles of pole line over which to send telegrams; transmission was manual. (The first telephone exchange was opened in 1881.) The association (with a staff comprising a manager, assistant, and eight paid correspondents) sent 3 million words, costing £6,190, to 48 members. There were 40 words in an average message. The association, which has a staff of 25, now distributes to its members about 17 million words of news annually, divided almost equally between overseas and New Zealand news. Distribution by leased teleprinter network, printing the news directly into newspaper offices, began in 1950. The network has since been duplicated to provide more capacity. For overseas news, the association has worked with the main Australian newspapers and agencies since 1887. Transmission from Australia to New Zealand was entirely by cable until 1954, and for the next 10 years mainly by radio. A great technical advance came in December 1963 with the leasing of facilities on the new Commonwealth Pacific submarine cable. News now pours into the Press Association's Wellington headquarters on reliable circuits which are not subject to sunspot activity or other interference as were the previous radio links. For news photographs as well as for the printed word, the new cable is a great advance in communications. Illustrations of faraway events can be received by New Zealand newspapers with astonishing clarity within two or three hours of their happening.
Before 1887 news was obtained from Reuters, which re-entered the field in 1916. The association has since 1947 been a partner in Reuters and the Reuter Trust. It also has traditional arrangements with the Associated Press of America and with United Press International, the two major American news agencies, and with other news sources.
by Reginald Brian O'Neill (1932–65), Journalist, Christchurch.