By GAVIN ELLIS, Knightly Views
Newspaper editorials are disappearing, crushed under an avalanche of opinion from the well-informed, the ill-informed, the misinformed, and the malicious.

It is a slow death, with the institutional voice of the newspaper being heard less often and with less authority.

It is not solely a New Zealand problem. Last year in the United States, the Virginia Press Association scrapped its editorial award after receiving only one entry in 2023. That was the year America’s major newspaper chains such as Gannett began cutting back on editorials.

In New Zealand, most of our regional newspapers only run an editorial a couple of days a week at best and, often as not, the same editorial is shared by all newspapers in each group. Stuff’s metropolitan titles The Post and The Press and the Waikato Times follow the same pattern as the group’s regional tiles. Only the New Zealand Herald and Otago Daily Times continue to carry a daily editorial.

For reasons that frankly elude me, the Weekend Herald (the week’s largest circulation paper) has decided that its editorial column should almost always be devoted to sporting issues. There is nothing that warrants their elevation to the leader column. They belong on the sports pages. And they stand in stark contrast to the Sunday Star-Times’ wide-ranging and well-argued editorials, which are accorded a prominent position on page 3 and are signed by the editor Tracy Watkins.

Perhaps there is an inevitability about the slow death of editorials or leader columns. There are two principal causes.

Where once they stood out as the authoritative opinion of a newspaper in a sea of reportage unembellished by journalists’ own views, today facts face a losing battle with comment. Columnists and commentators now appear to outnumber reporters. And those reporters sometimes lose sight of the importance of facts above their own views.

Online the battle was lost almost before it began. Comment and opinion dominated from the start, and -- in an increasingly polarised society -- there is no tolerance of opinion from outside the silo. That makes life very difficult for an editorial writer who, irrespective of where the final verdict may lie, still engages in at least a mental assessment of on-the-one-hand-yet-on-the-other.

The second cause is that the denuding of newsrooms has meant that fulltime editorial writers are almost certainly an extinct species and the scant resources available to undertake the myriad of newsroom tasks has meant some things have had to go. Regional newspapers experienced that first and one of the casualties was the daily editorial when editors, who had previously written it, found themselves with too many other tasks to perform.

In all of this, editors have taken solace from the fact that editorials have not performed well in reader surveys. As a fellow former editor put it: “You know, readers never attached the same importance to them as we did.”

I think he is probably right. Perhaps the eyes of the average reader did glaze over as we thundered out. So why give them what they don’t want?

Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian wrote, in his book Breaking News, about confronting that dilemma. This is what he said:

“Editorials usually scored extremely poorly == less than 10 per cent of readers were apparently interested in what ‘the paper’ thought about the great issues of the day. But they were (we thought) essential to defining the paper’s values and in asserting our influence on the corridors of power. Sometimes a sentence or two might be read out on the radio in the morning, signalling ‘The Guardian view’. We would, in defiance of our readers’ apparent indifference, carry on publishing editorials.”

‘Defining the paper’s values’ and ‘asserting influence’ are, indeed, two of the purposes of an editorial. The former helps readers to understand the principles that underscore what it publishes and how it deals with that content. To quote my former colleague John Roughan (an outstanding leader writer on the New Zealand Herald for more than three decades): “It is what its editors, and writers of its editorials, think its readers would expect of it”.

The latter is fundamental to the newspaper’s duty to speak truth to power. While ‘less than 10 per cent’ may read editorials, it is the composition of that percentage that is all-important as it contains many of those people whom the paper holds accountable.

I have always believed the editorial serves another purpose as a considered view against which members of the public can measure their own opinions. In other words, it has a function as a contributor to public discourse. If there is any arrogance in the assumption that an editorial can hold power to account, the role as a contributor to discussion, not something to overpower it, may be a humbler but no less important assumption.

A considered view on matters of note may be, in fact, more important today than when I was involved in the process two decades ago. Provided it is the product of good information analysed and interpreted with intelligence, the editorial can serve as a reliable foundation on which argument may be based. Too often today public discourse belongs more in the jousting lists than at the feet of the philosopher. And too often it is argument for its own sake.

I fondly recall the leader writing conferences at the Herald, which I participated in first as a leader writer and then as editor. They were invariably well-mannered but the debates I oversaw as editor were robust. Importantly, there was the capacity in those meetings for the best argument to prevail. If that meant the editorial did not take the same line as a news story on the same subject, so be it. We see less of that deviation today.

Only on a small number of topics would I not be moved from the position I held. One was New Zealand becoming a republic. I opposed such a move (for reasons I won’t canvass here) while some of our leader writers supported a change. It was an example of the editor’s prerogative prevailing, but the exercise of that prerogative was rare. And John Roughan was given a column in which he was free to express his personal views (which he did every weekend for many years). Overall, in our editorial stance, we aimed for a consensus.

Consensus is an increasingly rare commodity. For that reason, I view the death of the editorial with more than sadness. I see it as counterproductive. As a society, we must harness whatever means we can to draw people back toward a shared view. Editorials can and should play a part in that process and be promoted by media for that reason.

Yes, I acknowledge that lack of resources has been an increasing burden. Today’s editors doubtless cannot even comprehend the scene when I was on ‘mahogany row’ in the early 1980s as one of four leader writers (although some also had ancillary duties). However, there is no shortage of opinion writers whose brief could be changed to reflect something other than their own point of view.

On my bookshelf is a yellowed Penguin paperback by a former editor of The Times, Wickham Steed. Titled simply The Press it contains a passage that sums up the role that a newspaper discharges through its editorial column. It reads like a very sound argument for editors to do their utmost to preserve that column.

A bouquet to the New Zealand Herald for its ‘On the Up’ campaign which sees positive stories running each day. Some of them -- like the story of a teenager triumphing over the partial amputation of her leg -- are, indeed, uplifting. 

It does beg the question, however, over why we need a finite campaign for these stories to be produced. They should be a regular part of our daily news diet. ‘On the Up’ shows they’re out there if reporters look for them.

Dr Gavin Ellisholds a PhD in political studies.He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. He is also a committee member of the Asia Pacific Media Network. This article was first published by Gavin's Knightly Views column at https://knightlyviews.com