Adman/journalist/author (and former NBR ed) Ian F Grant is about to publish Lasting Inpressions: The Story of New Zealand Newspapers, a hard-cover history of New Zealand dailies between 1840 and 1920.
The 676-page book will be launched by Gordon McLauchlan on Wednesday 17 October. It will retail for $69.50.
This is the first comprehensive history of New Zealand newspapers since Dr Guy Scholefield’s Newspapers in New Zealand in 1958.
Lasting Impressions, published in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library, has been written as a social history that places newspapers and their vital importance in New Zealand’s development as a nation in the context of life in the communities they prospered or failed in.
“There are also sections on the burgeoning weeklies phenomenon, the distinctive goldfields’ press and the numerous Maori newspapers.”
There are detailed descriptions of the beginnings of the newspaper business in New Zealand, the papers that spread throughout the country close behind the first settlers, the daily press’s leap of faith, the proliferation of provincial papers, early twentieth century challenges, and the difficulties faced by World War One newspapers.
For the first time in a newspaper history there are also sections on the burgeoning weeklies phenomenon, the distinctive goldfields’ press and the numerous Maori newspapers.
The book shows how newspapers, at a time when it was the only medium of news and information, were vital to economic development, contributed to social cohesion in new communities, campaigned for self-government, were the principal ‘boosters’ of struggling townships, and helped settlers identify as New Zealanders as early as the 1870s.
Ian F Grant, a newspaper editor in the 1970s, creative director of large advertising agencies and a marketing director and consultant, worked on the book while the Alexander Turnbull Library’s first adjunct scholar and resident at the Stout Centre, Victoria University of Wellington.
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