A private buyer related by family to Dunedin’s Allied Press has snapped up APN New Zealand’s Christchurch and Oamaru newspaper businesses.
Mainland Media – which has bought the Christchurch Star and Oamaru Mail – is privately owned by Pier Smulders and his wife, Charlotte, who is a member of the Smith family which owns the publisher of the Otago Daily Times and other titles including Hurunui News, Ashburton Courier, and CTV in Canterbury.
Chairman of Mainland is Nick Smith, a director of Allied Press and brother of JulianSmith, its principal shareholder.
The deal brings close some of the oldest newspaper titles in New Zealand. The Star in Canterbury was established in 1868, and the Oamaru Mail in 1879. The Otago Daily Times was founded in 1861 by Julius (later Sir Julius) Vogel, and is claimed to be the newspaper with the country’s longest history of daily publication.
APN New Zealand has reported that all staff at both businesses will transfer to Mainland Media or its subsidiary Oamaru Media, with managing director Pier Smulders
Charlotte Smulders has already emphasised the importance of the acquisition, given her background as a member of a long established media family. "There are very few privately owned media groups remaining in New Zealand which is a real shame,” she told APN NZ. “My family has retained ownership and passion for the industry for over 150 years and now my husband and I get to make our own mark."
The Star’s history has been traced back Lyttelton Times, presses for which arrived on one of the first ships which brought emigrants from England to Canterbury in 1850.
APN New Zealand chief executive Martin Simons said the newspapers were being sold to a successful publisher. "The decision to sell was based on our determination to concentrate our efforts on the North Island where most of our businesses are located and where most of New Zealand's growth would occur in the next decade," he says.
Mainland Media also owns and publishes the Bay Harbour News, NorWest News, Selwyn View, Pegasus Bay News, and Southern View newspapers, as well as magazines including Best Motorbuys, BuySell & Exchange, SeeBeSeen, Forward50 (formerly called Older & Bolder) and national weekly Weekend Gardener.
In January, Mainland upped the circulation of its Mainland Press circulation to 75,000 copies a week, making it Christchurch’s largest free newspaper, following integration of its newsroom with CTV.
• Allied Press was created by the 1975 merger of the Otago Daily Times and the Evening Star companies, launched in the gold rush years.
Julian Smith is a great-great-grandson of George Bell, who merged the Star and the Evening Independent in 1869. He had been managing director of Dunedin based produce and markets group John M. Fraser and Co – which had come in as a ‘white knight’ shareholder – and organised the 1986 management buyout and privatisation of Otago Press and Produce which created today’s Allied Press business.