Responding to sudden, shocking change requires a double lens. Read more from the Lockdown letters here. My granddaughter has been making a newspaper. The Daily Chirp. It’s very small, as befits a newspaper designed for birds, but it contains news (a worrying rise in Tweet-19), “Adds” for birdseed medicine (Fight the Tweet-19 virus!), and a … Read more
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: First ever deployment of new Metservice warning, NZ First Foundation donor identities revealed, and economic fallout from virus spreads. Increasingly serious weather has been hammering the West Coast and Fiordland, causing major problems for several towns. A state of emergency has been declared in Fiordland, reports Stuff. Metservice … Read more
I know the humanity of New Zealanders is far greater than the zero empathy of a cartoonist and his bosses at a newspaper I will never bother reading again. But it still hurts, writes Christine Ammunson. There’s one thing about going home to Sāmoa you can’t get away from and that’s the beautiful babies. They … Read more
Social media users are hammering a newspaper cartoon making a joke about the Samoan measles epidemic. The infuriated include some of the cartoonist’s own colleagues. An Otago Daily Times cartoonist who saw humour in the deadly Samoan measles epidemic has found himself at odds with both colleagues and his editors. The Garrick Tremain cartoon ran … Read more
Dunedin journalist Helen Speirs investigates a controversy swirling around Robbie Burns. Robert “Robbie” Burns, Scotland’s national poet, feted worldwide, author of “Auld Lang Syne”, commemorated in Dunedin with a handsome statue overlooking the Octagon, one of the immortals of literature – and, now, accused as a “sex pest”, a rapist, “Weinsteinian”. Scottish poet Liz Lochhead has unleashed a storm … Read more
Why the strange fixation with broadcasters using te reo? Probably because it raises questions about the legitimacy of the country they imagine themselves to live in, writes Danyl Mclauchlan. I have this theory about Māori Language Week and the outrage it routinely provokes from a mostly older, mostly Pakeha subset of the population; outrage that … Read more
Last week, the Otago Daily Times published a conspiratorial and objectively terrible opinion piece claiming APRA’s ‘gender-affirmative action regime’ is a mediocrity-encouraging membership drive. Dunedin musician, pop music scholar and APRA member Millie Lovelock responds. It’s a losing battle, arguing with idiots. Unfortunately, being an idiot is currently very much en vogue in Dunedin, especially … Read more
The Otago Daily Times has called time on the great online giveaway. The big New Zealand publishers will be watching closely, writes Tim Murphy, former editor-in-chief of the NZ Herald. Its masthead describes it as the “Independent Voice of the South”. Others, affectionately, call it the Oddity. Now the Otago Daily Times lives up to … Read more