About Us

About the paper

Hawkes Bay Today is the regional daily newspaper for Hawkes Bay. Our circulation area ranges from Mahia in north to Dannevirke in the South and to the central ranges in the west. We are also the youngest newspaper in New Zealand, launched on May 3, 1999.

Hawkes Bay Today is a major employer with 200 employees and a substantial sponsor of regionwide events Our commitment is to the Bay and byword is "Readers First". Our strength is, first and foremost, local news.

Hawkes Bay Today is an integral part of its large and varied community providing quality news, opinion and entertainment that reflects the passions and interests of the region, five afternoons a week and on Saturday mornings in the Hawkes Bay Weekend edition.

Our feature reading includes health and fitness on Mondays, the weekly TV guide and free classifieds on Tuesdays, comprehensive region-wide arts coverage and the Motor liftout on Wednesdays. Our entertainment guide On in the Bay, plus heartland rural news on Thursdays, real estate on Fridays and our 48 Hours magazine in Hawkes Bay Weekend.

Hawkes Bay Today also publishes the daily Dannevirke News wrap, and weekly community newspapers the Leader (Hastings), the Courier (Napier) the Village Press (Havelock North) and the Taradale Observer.

History

Hawkes Bay Today was launched on May 3, 1999, a merger of the dailies the Herald-Tribune in Hastings and Napier's Daily Telegraph. The seeds of the Hawkes Bay Herald-Tribune, the result of a merger in 1937, were in Hawkes Bay's first newspaper, a Saturday morning weekly named the Hawkes Bay Herald and Ahuriri Advocate, which first rolled off the presses in Napier on September 24, 1857. For many of the 141 years between its first publication and the first run of Hawkes Bay Today, the newspaper game in Hawkes Bay featured rival entities, each of which mainly served the separate markets of Napier and Hastings.

The Herald and Advocate went twice-weekly in 1861, and was challenged by the Hawkes Bay Times which emerged in the same year, but it was not until 10 years later that Hawkes Bay finally had its own dailies. The arrival of the first daily, the Daily Telegraph, forced the Herald to also become part of the daily life in the flourishing province.

The Times folded in 1874, its plant being used for the first paper in Hastings, the Maori publication Te Wananga (1874-1878), but the Daily Telegraph, became the real survivor of the industry.

Its Tennyson Street buildings were destroyed along with 25 others shops and businesses in the great Napier fire a week before Christmas in 1886, and again in the Hawkes Bay Earthquake in February, 1931.

Other papers came and went in Hawkes Bay. The Star lasted just two years (1879-81), as did the Hastings Star and District Advertiser, while the Evening News and Hawkes Bay Advertiser, in Napier, hung-in for 12 years from 1885 to 1897. The Hastings Standard first appeared in 1896, and in 1910, with a new printing plant, was relaunched as a provincial morning daily, the Hawkes Bay Tribune.

A market with three locally-based dailies was sustained for 21 years until the quake, which badly damaged the plant and buildings of all three. While the Daily Telegraph and the Tribune quickly re-established themselves, the Herald entered the Tribune stable, with the ultimate merging of the titles six years after the disaster. A new morning daily, the Hawkes Bay Mail, appeared in 1938 but lasted only three years.

The first link between the Daily Telegraph and the Hawkes Bay Herald-Tribune was the companies' merger in 1982 to establish Hawkes Bay News Co Ltd. Two years later the company became part of New Zealand News, a Brierley Investments subsidiary which had become one of the big three in the New Zealand publishing industry, with titles including the Auckland Star and the Christchurch Star, but a plan at that time to publish the two Hawkes Bay papers from the Herald-Tribune plant in Hastings was abandoned amid protest from Napier residents and Daily Telegraph staff.

Both papers were part of a nationwide newspaper first in 1985 when they ran full-colour for the first time, and in 1988 amid a dispersal of New Zealand News publishing assets, the Hawkes Bay paper operations were bought by Wilson and Horton, publishers of the New Zealand Herald.

By that stage, assets included the Bay's only other daily, Dannevirke's Evening News, now circulated in its area as the Dannevirke News with Hawkes Bay Today, and the Waipukurau- based weekly, the CHB Mail, established in 1980 from a merger involving the Central Hawkes Bay Press, a Monday-Friday daily.

The Saturday evening Hawkes Bay Today was discontinued in October 2002 to create a weekend edition published on Saturday mornings, just as was the case with the Herald and Advocate in 1858.

In 2005 the local news content of the Dannevirke News was merged with Hawkes Bay Today. Copies of Hawkes Bay Today circulating in the Dannevirke area now carry a minimum of four local pages of news and advertising wrapped around the main section of the paper.