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New Zealand (Fairfax) newspapers on the web

Posted August 20th, 2007 by peter

In the late 90′s to late 2000 until The Nelson Mail went online, I used to spend about 3-5 hours each Sunday compiling  Nelson summarised stories that I thought would be interesting to people who did not have access to The Nelson Mail and (or was it the Nelson Evening Mail – can’t remember) or our local rag The Leader.

I had created a website, got it found in the search engines for the phrases news in Nelson New Zealand and Nelson New Zealand in Yahoo, Hotbot, Alta Vista (AV had 30% of the search engine market then, and google was only just coming on line as an alternative search engine).

Within a reasonably short period of time, over 1000 visitors a week were reading the news from the site each week, and it grew to around 2500 visitors a week before the The Mail finally went on line with Stuff around December 2000. Those readers were pretty much who I thought would be my target market – Nelsonians living abroad, in other places around New Zealand and of course people who were thinking of coming to live in Nelson from both within New Zealand and overseas. I used to get a lot of email of people all around the world asking questions about Nelson, some who even asked if I could look someone up (I did if I could find them) and email from people thanking me for the service I was providing. One regular reader from Canada coined me as "the Cyber Mayor of Nelson" 

Times have changed, and we all know we have been able to read on a daily basis brief news stories since then. And I got my Sunday evenings back !!!

Now Fairfax Media have gone the whole way online, and you can get your copy of The Nelson Mail (and others if you choose) delivered to your computer every day it is published.

I was told by a client (thanks Damien) that it was free, but I have not been able to find a free way of getting the whole paper, but then I have not spent too much time doing the research.

It is clear that notifications that the newspaper is now on-line is sent mid evening (about 7.30pm) and that is fair enough. They have had time to get their normal physical distribution done before making it available for viewing on-line. An excellent resource to see that classifed you forgot to cut out of the paper, or even get a screen shot of the front page. For most of us it is a bit hard to scan a page from the paper. To big to fit in our tiny A4 scanners, and if you have tried before, newspaper does not scan too well anyway.

I find it interesting though that here in Nelson, there has been nothing in The Nelson Mail promoting this service. Maybe they are holding back from telling the public for some reason.

So if you would like to find out more, you can register for a free trial here. If you already subscribe to The Nelson Mail, you can register – free. I have not done that yet, cause the jury is out from my perspective as to its usefulness. My generation (and earlier ones) still likes to pick things up and read them (marketeers take note) rather than read things on a screen. Any one under the age of 18, things are different (marketeers take note).

A Word of warning. Your internet speed needs to be a least broadband to use it effectively. As I sit at home right now, my xtra broadband is slower than usual, and I have found it a pain to read. (buts thats another story – stay tuned)