Ransomware is a kind of online attack where criminals take control of data, usually company data, and demand payment to return it.
There are two main types of ransomware: crypto and locker.
The first encrypts data and files so that users can no longer read anything.
In theory you will get a key to unencrypt the files after you pay a ransom to the crooks. Locker ransomware is similar, but it typical locks down the computer so it can’t be used until the ransom is paid.
Travelex lock-down
After the Travelex attack, the company closed down the websites it operates in 30 countries. It said the move was designed to “contain the virus and protect data”.
That doesn’t quite sound right. After all, it emerged the criminals had been inside the company’s systems for the past six months. By the time of the attack there would little left to contain or protect.
The criminals say they have downloaded many gigabytes of sensitive customer data. This includes dates of birth, credit card information and (British) national insurance numbers.
News reports say the criminal gang asked Travelex to pay US$6 million at first, with the demand ratcheting up over time if it wasn’t paid quickly. It’s not clear if the company paid up.
New Zealand link
There is a New Zealand link. After the attack, the company’s branches, which include airport currency exchanges, were still providing services but were using manual processes.
Travelex is also the issuer of Air New Zealand’s OneSmart card. The card makes it easier to deal with money when overseas. It can be loaded with money in as many as eight different foreign currencies before a trip. Users can lock-in exchange rates to avoid fluctuations while they are overseas.
Air New Zealand says the card is not affected by the attack.
The company told the NZ Herald: “OneSmart does not use the Travelex foreign exchange services affected by the attack so
Onesmart cardholders are not impacted”.
Ransomware attacks declining
The Travelex attack happened at a time when ransomware incidents are falling fast. Last year the number of attacks dropped 20 per cent as online criminals turned to more lucrative alternatives.
In part the fall in ransomware attacks is because companies are doing a better job at protecting themselves.
The best approach to protection is to have data back-ups so everything ransomed can be recovered quickly. While this sounds simple, it’s something many companies struggle with and criminals know that. Among other matters companies tend to make back-ups without checking the data is recoverable.
Another problem is that a sophisticated ransomware attack can also take control of the back-ups rendering them as unusable as the main data store.
A ransomware attack amounts to a much bigger problem for the victim than the ransom demand. In many countries companies can face fines for not properly and promptly reporting an attack to the authorities.
At the same time, allowing data to be ransomed is often actionable under data protection legislation. At the least a company would need to prove it had taken due care with customer data, that’s hard to do after a ransom attack.
There’s another unpleasant twist to a ransomware attack. While the criminals often release keys after the ransom is paid, that doesn’t always happen. And in at least one reported case, the data was ransomed again by the same gang at a later date. Allowing that to happen is an open and shut case of negligence.
Responding to ransomware
If you are attacked by a ransomware gang, you may need professional help to recover data. Before you get to that stage you need to consider how to respond.
The NZ Police recommend you don’t pay the ransom. That’s understandable and makes sense if there’s a good chance of recovering the data.
Some security experts say that paying the ransom is the smartest course of action. It is often cheaper and, if you don’t have back-ups, quicker than other ways of recovering the data.
It may not work for everyone, but switching from Microsoft Word to a Markdown or text editor boosted my productivity.
Almost everything I’ve produced in the last 13 years was written first using Markdown.
If we want to be technical about it, Markdown is a simple, lightweight markup language.
At a pinch you can write Markdown using a plain text editor. It is better when you use an app. My favourite Markdown app is iA Writer.
Swiss Army knife
Microsoft Word is the writing equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. It aims to cater for every possible need.
Markdown and iA Writer are like one of those extra sharp Japanese cooking knives.
They do far less, but what they do, is done better with greater efficiency.
If you don’t know what life will bring you, the Swiss Army knife makes sense. But a chef would choose the latter to prepare a meal.
Simple, minimal, that is the whole point
The beauty of Markdown is there are a mere handful of commands to remember. There are few features.
That is a good thing. It means you can focus on writing words. Nothing else.
In this sense it is the closest thing to using a typewriter.
A few good commands
You can type out the commands for, say, bold text. That would be a couple of * symbols before and after the words you want in bold.
In a Markdown app you could also use Command-B (on a Mac) and the symbols are inserted for you. That’s the same code used in word processors like Microsoft Word.
This means there is almost nothing new to learn. You can be up and running with Markdown immediately.
Zero distraction
The advantage of this simple, minimal approach is you are not distracted by things that don’t matter.
There is no dithering over font choices or layout options.
Trust me, you can spend hours wondering if that editor waiting for your latest story prefers to get copy in Arial or Times Roman.
Faster
Simple means fast. A moment ago I fired up Microsoft Word on my state-of-the-art Apple M1 MacBook Air.
The app took three minutes to check for and download upgrades. Then it did something in the background before opening.
There are times when I have waited much longer to get started.
A Markdown editor is there immediately with a blank page ready to go.
Sure, there are times when I use Word. I have clients who expect to receive Word files or Google Docs. It can be easier to go there from the outset.
That said, converting Markdown to Word or Google Docs is no more than a mouse click away.
Comfortable
Markdown has another advantage. It is all about text.
If, like me, you can touch type, it means you can spend more time with your hands on the keyboard and less time mousing.
I find that over time Microsoft Word needs extra mouse activity – or touch screen action. That can give me overuse pains in my hands and arms. The more time you stay with the keyboard, the less discomfort.
It’s easy to miss this point, but if you find yourself cutting text from PDFs or web pages, pasting them into iA Writer is a cinch. Compare that with the fussiness that can happen when you past text into a word processor.
Markdown apps
Many of the posts on this site were written with iA Writer. A handful were written using Byword.
Byword is a Markdown Editor for Apple users. There is a Mac version and an iOS version that will also run on iPadOS.
iA Writer started life in the Apple camp. There’s a reason for that.
Markdown has a strong Apple lineage. One of the authors is John Gruber who runs Daring Fireball, a blog about Apple products and services.
Today there are Windows and Android versions of iA Writer.
iA Writer and Byline
For me two apps run on iOS, iPadOS, which for a long time was, in effect, the same as iOS, and they run on MacOS.
My first iOS version of iA Writer cost NZ$2.59 at the end of 2011.
It was, and remains, a bargain. That was the best $2.59 I ever spent on software. In 2016 iA charged a further NZ$5.99 for an upgraded app.
I’m not complaining. Even after buying MacOS apps, iA Writer works out at a fraction over one New Zealand dollar a year.
Phone, tablet, laptop, desktop
Because both apps store files in Apple’s iCloud, you can switch between Apple devices without missing a beat.
I can, and have, started writing on a phone, edited on a desktop, polished on a tablet and send from a laptop.
iA Writer and Byword are both solid apps. I recommend iA Writer over Byword because it has had more consistent attention from the developer over the years.
Although there is not a lot in it.
At the time of writing the most recent update of iA Writer was three months old. The most recent Byword was six months ago.
After a decade with iA Writer, it remains my main writing app on iPhone, computer and iPad.
There are a few minor niggles. iA Writer works best for my journalism and blog posts.
Once a story needs to go longer than a few thousand words it can be unwieldy. Last year I wrote around 4000 words for a book chapter using iA writer.
If that happens, I find it best to break the text into smaller chunks.
There is no question I’m more productive with Markdown than with any alternative. I get more done with less mental and physical strain.
Science fiction doesn’t do a great job of predicting the future. When it comes to telecommunications, it does worse.
At the time of writing, Netflix is streaming Blade Runner, a classic science fiction movie from 1982.
Blade Runner is interesting because the action is set in 2019. In other words, it is a view from almost 40 years ago of how we live today.
What did it get right and what did it get wrong? Some things are way off target. Early on, the hero, Rick Deckard, meets a policeman driving a flying car. We’re not even remotely near driving flying cars in 2019.
That’s a huge miss.
Bladerunner’s flying advertisements
Also early on, an advertisement floats overhead. Again, flying adverts are not an everyday feature of our lives. The nearest we get are banners floating behind light aircraft.
However, the advertising hoardings are giant screens. That is on the money. Large advertising screens are now a familiar sight in cities, although, thankfully, unlike in the film, they don’t project sound with their images.
Thanks to climate change, Los Angeles, the film’s setting, suffers constant rain. The writers were correct in predicting climate change, but we have heatwaves and storms, not constant downpours.
Travelling to the stars?
One flying advertisement encourages people to emigrate ‘off-world’. Travelling to the stars seems a tempting offer looking at the movie’s depiction of 2019 life.
But really? We still shoot rockets into the sky, but no-one has been back to the moon since 1972, let alone travelled the solar system or deeper into space.
And we know Blade Runner’s people travel beyond the solar system because later in the film one of the characters talks about seeing “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”.
Then we get to the main theme of the movie: bio-engineered replicants. These aren’t robots in the usual sense, but artificial humans. We are nowhere near this kind of technology in 2019.
As an aside, the film is based on a 1968 book called Do androids dream of electric sheep? Androids play a large part in life today, but they’re not human-like, they are mobile phones.
Where are the mobile phones?
This brings us to telecommunications. Where are the mobile phones that dominate 2019 life? Almost everybody in the real world has one.
It’s not as if mobile phones weren’t around in 1982. The first, albeit heavy and unwieldy models, were introduced in 1949. Motorola had practical commercial handsets in 1973.
And where is broadband or any other kind of digital service? In 1982, some homes had tele-text machines. And email started in the 1970s. I had a work email account in 1982. Sure, it was dial-up and extremely slow, but no-one in the film has anything remotely like internet access.
Blade Runner is entertaining and thought provoking, but as a foretaste of 2019 it doesn’t come close.
Technology journalists aren’t much better at prediction the future.
“Here’s the bad news: No one is coming to save you. No business is going to swoop in and provide sustainable funding for newsrooms. No new technology is going to transform the way journalism supports itself forever.
“No big, incredible deal is going to build a strong foundation for the news. There isn’t a single magic bullet that will work for everyone. Even producing groundbreaking journalism isn’t going to suddenly turn your fortunes around.”
Werdmuller says journalists need to recognise the internet is not a broadcast medium but a conversation. This is true.
Many journalists use social media as a broadcast medium. They see it as a way to draw in readers to their newspaper, radio or TV channel websites. Whether they post to X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Linkedin or one of the newer alternatives like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, they often simply post a link to their stories hosted on mainstream media sites. In many cases that’s the end of their interactions.
This can be just as true in 2026 as it was five or more years ago.
Yet many New Zealand journalists have learned how to engage with readers online.
This is especially true of the journalists who have pushed out of traditional media boundaries and are no longer employed by major news brands. They may produce podcasts or YouTube video. They may publish on Substack or similar services. They may run email delivered newsletters or more traditional websites.
In the earlier 2020 story I wrote about Twitter, it could apply to any modern social media channel:
“Most use it as a broadcast medium – like a RSS feed. A number have Twitter accounts, but say little of value. Perhaps 40 percent can be said to be serious Twitter journalists.”
Change Twitter to X or any other social media channel and you’ll realise the number hasn’t changed much. Less than half of the journalists visible online use social media to its full advantage.
Social media as a conversation
What has changed is many of New Zealand’s higher profile journalists now have regular active social media conversations. Go and dig around, you’ll see many of the best-known names engaging with their audiences. It can be hard doing this among the snark and antagonism.
One innovation that I previously attempted on my site was to integrate social comments. At the time my site was hosted on WordPress. Back then I used IndieWeb tools to capture tweets or other responses to my posts on stories. I’ve did this to boost the conversational aspect of my work.
Now I have switched the site to Ghost, specially Ghost Pro because it includes the ability to create and send email newsletters. Ghost does not allow the kind of plug-ins that can be used to expand WordPress functionality.
A potential conversational superpower
Instead, it has its own superpower. Ghost publishes to something called the Fediverse.
Thanks to the Fediverse, you don’t need to be “on” a social network in order to interact with people using suitable services such as Mastodon or BlueSky.
When you publish a post on a Ghost site, it can be sent out automatically so people on Mastodon and other fediverse platforms can follow it, see it in their feeds and reply to it.
What this means from the reader’s point of view is that:
They can follow your site like they would follow a person
Your posts automatically appear in their timeline
Any replies they make to these Fediverse posts automatically come back to your site.
This means journalists don’t need to broadcast on social media. They can run their websites and newsletters. They don’t actually post to Mastodon or BlueSky. The beauty of this approach is that you are not limited to one social media service. Nor are you even limited to social media… material distributed to the Fediverse can turn up in other ways.
To date my experience using this tools has meant limited interaction. I still get more feedback via email than by the Fediverse. And I still remain active on BlueSky, Mastodon and Linkedin. There are frequent conversations, but they don’t yet all appear under the single Fediverse umbrella.
Building audience relationships
Ben Werdmuller’s story linked to at the top of this post from ends with:
“Until publishers encourage reporters and editors to engage with their audiences, they are going to miss out on the potential of Twitter.
Of course, the journalists who do this best will become media brands in their own right, which will worry the bean counters. But that’s another story…”
This continues to be true many years after those words were written even if Twitter has morphed into the dysfunctional X and other services have replace it..
Many of us who still work as journalists are now mini-brands. Publishers and editors hire journalists with a good brand. Freelancers like me get work on the back of having a brand.
This doesn’t come naturally to older journalists. We taught journalists to keep themselves out of the story. I’m still not 100 percent comfortable inserting myself into stories.
But that’s not how things work today and it definitely isn’t how blogging works.
Werdmuller has a different take on what amounts to the same idea. He writes:
“Instead of thinking in terms of having an audience, you need to think about building and serving a community. Instead of informing, you need to be listening. The opportunities to learn the nuances of your community and to serve it directly are unprecedented — but it takes work.”
It does take work. One of the skills journalists pick up is to be excellent at listening to sources. In the past we’ve not been so good at listening to our audiences. It took me a while, although judging by my earlier posts, I was onto this many years ago.
Some of the institutional knowledge that helped us understand audiences, like newspaper librarians who provided context and memory, has been lost along the way. But journalists can rebuild that connection directly.
The point here is there hasn’t been a clear dividing line between sources and audiences for many years now. Likewise, there is less of a division between journalists and audiences. We are, as Werdmuller puts it, communities. He is right when he says this takes work, but boy, it can be rewarding.
For years we wondered. What use would humanity find for cryptocurrency? Now we know. It is not necessarily a force for good.
There have been other technologies which emerged before there were practical applications.
When the first laser was built in 1960 it was impressive. Scientists thought it may one day find use in spectrometry or even nuclear fusion.
Others thought it could be used as a ‘death ray’ military weapon. it didn’t help that the Pentagon funded early research into laser applications.
In time engineers found thousands of applications. Today it powers fibre communications networks. They are used to measure distances with incredible accuracy. Application include medicine, office printers and cutting objects for manufacturers.
The killer app
When the first PC arrived, it looked like it had potential. It could do lots of things, but it did one thing very well: spreadsheets. VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet was the first computer ‘killer app’.
Likewise, the graphically gifted Macintosh computer had its power unleashed by PageMaker. It was a desktop publishing program and another killer app.
In May criminals attacked Waikato DHB demanding a ransom in return for unlocking computers.
It wasn’t the only ransomware attack that month, nor was it the biggest or most disruptive. Ireland’s health computer system was also shut down. The pipeline moving oil to the US East Coast was shut down.
All of these ransomware attacks, and most other online crimes, have a common denominator. The criminals want ransoms paid in cryptocurrency. That’s because Bitcoin and the other cryptos are harder to trace than conventional forms of money.
Ransomware and cryptocurrency
Ransomware is crypto’s killer app.
Cryptocurrency remains a shadowy world. It is not that everyone involved in cryptocurrency is a criminal. It’s more a case of every online criminal uses crypto.
For many everyday folk, their first interaction with cryptocurrency is when they need to buy it to pay a ransom.
This is not an argument to ban cryptocurrencies. Although it could be. And the stories about the vast amounts of energy needed to ‘mine’ these new currencies are also a concern.
Part of the attraction of crypto is that it remains unregulated. That has to stop. The exchanges that deal with cryptocurrency have to face the same accountabilities as other financial institutions. It has to be made harder to move unaccounted funds from crypto into traditional banks.
There is more to stifling ransomware than regulating Bitcoin and its peers. Yet the ransomware epidemic now threatens online commerce. In cases like attacks on hospitals, it is potentially a literal ‘killer app’. Regulating cryptocurrency will save lives and jobs.
Originally published May 2020. The challenge of sustaining local technology journalism in New Zealand has only intensified since then, with further media consolidation and newsroom cuts.
The story didn’t get a run in any reputable New Zealand media.
Contrast this with the extensive coverage Microsoft got the following day when it announced it was opening a New Zealand cloud region.
The Microsoft story was everywhere. It popped up at Stuff, RNZ and Reseller News among others. There were overseas runs at TechCrunch, CRN and Computerworld. The Stuff version was almost straight PR copy.
The prime minister even talked about it on TV.
Big run
The point here isn’t about New Zealand media giving the overseas company a bigger run than the local company. Although that could be a story in its own right – see Comparing the stories below.
What the contrast between two stories show is how much damage the lack of local technology news coverage does to New Zealand’s home grown technology sector.
No-one here has the resources to file a story that is, by local standards, somewhat significant.
No one is watching, does anyone care?
We no longer have a native technology press. It’s a situation which, presumably, will be worse if Stuff no longer operates as a separate entity. 2026 update: thankfully this did not happen.
The vacuum means local technology companies struggle to build awareness through traditional media channels.
Last month Bauer Media closed its New Zealand operation shutting off Peter Griffin’s excellent regular features in the Listener. The Listener has since been sold and continues publishing.
This web site is also sporadic. At the time of writing, my stories here are posted between paying journalism jobs. That means they can’t always be timely.
Filling the vacuum are many overseas sites. Whatever their merits, they are not going to zoom in on the activities of a local cloud provider.
Comparing the stories
There’s no question the arrival of a New Zealand Microsoft cloud region is the bigger news story. Microsoft is the world’s second largest cloud operator. It has many customers here and there is a pent-up demand for a world-scale cloud operator to open shop in New Zealand.
In contrast, the Catalyst story, is not much more than a feature update.
There are interesting angles to the Catalyst story. The cost of its Object Storage is on a par with costs for world scale cloud operators. It costs three cents a month to store a gigabyte.
The ‘everything stored in New Zealand’ angle is important. But it’s also an important part of Microsoft’s story. And, no doubt, Microsoft could make the same claim about only using renewable energy.
Uphill battle for local technology news
What this illustrates is a company like Catalyst struggles to be heard above the noise.
It must be galling for people at Catalyst and other New Zealand technology companies. They something innovative like introducing low cost cloud storage only to wake the following day and see a rival’s news splashed around the place.
Longer term it is a worry. Wikipedia says:
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and perception.
Tech companies need that observation and perception. New Zealand’s tech sector no longer has either.
This isn’t just bad for technology companies—it’s bad for New Zealand. Without local technology journalism, we lose accountability, context and the ability to understand how technology shapes our economy and society. The companies doing innovative work deserve to have their stories told,and New Zealand readers deserve to hear them.
**More on journalism and media: **
This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and modern reporting:
Originally written December 2010, updated September 2025, with additional context added January 2026.
In Costly Mistakes for the American Journalism Review, former newspaper reporter turned industry analyst John Morton argues that many of the steps US publishers took to counter falling advertising revenues in the run-up to the recession only made things worse. His analysis is sharp and remains a must-read for anyone following the newspaper industry.
High margins, short horizons
Morton points out that corporate publishers demanded margins of 20 percent or more from their papers. This was unsustainable. The pursuit of these returns meant cutting the very things that made newspapers valuable—experienced staff, institutional knowledge, deep local coverage.
Family-owned papers had traditionally worked on closer to 10 percent margins, still a healthy return that brought owners influence and prestige along with profit. Owning a paper was lucrative, but the greater rewards were power and status.
Corporations, however, chased higher returns. To keep margins fat, they cut investment and hollowed out editorial quality. By the time the internet arrived, publishers assumed they could leverage their media assets into digital businesses and keep the money flowing.
While huge numbers of readers visited newspaper websites, few stayed long or read deeply. Publishers struggled to understand that digital and print required different approaches, not just digital versions of print strategies.
Writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld said publishers needed to grow their online market share rather than erecting barriers. He argued that paywalls and fights with aggregators risked driving audiences away, further shrinking relevance.
Paying for loyalty
Paywalls may strengthen ties with a small core of loyal readers, but at the cost of scale. The risk is that newspapers swap mass reach for narrow influence, losing their role as central public forums.
The industry’s obsession with margins in print and its missteps online meant publishers missed opportunities to adapt. By prioritising short-term profit over long-term sustainability, newspapers undermined both their business model and their place in society.
What could have worked differently
Looking back from 2026, some alternative paths become clear:
Build reader relationships early: Publishers who invested in email newsletters, membership models and direct reader engagement in the early 2000s—before social media dominated—built sustainable audiences. Those who learned to use journalism tools to build communities fared better than those who treated websites as digital print editions.
Preserve institutional knowledge: Cutting newspaper librarians and experienced staff seemed like smart cost-cutting. It proved disastrous. New reporters couldn’t learn from veterans and investigative capacity evaporated.
Avoid the subscription trap alone:Subscription models worked for elite publications but created a second digital divide. A mix of approaches—freemium, micropayments, memberships—might have served democracy better.
None of these guaranteed survival, but they offered better odds than chasing unsustainable margins while hollowing out the product.
The loss of control wasn’t just about business model failures. As newspapers struggled, tech platforms like Google and Facebook became the primary distributors of news, treating journalism as content to drive engagement rather than as a public service.
This shift fundamentally changed who controls what news people see and how they see it. Meanwhile, local journalism withered in many markets, and ad-blocking further undermined remaining revenue streams.
More on journalism and media:This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, industry decline and missed opportunities:
Originally published July 2018. Updated January 2026 with observations on how subscription fatigue and a proliferation of paid services have reshaped the economics of paying for content.
The subscription explosion
When this post was first written in 2018, the subscription economy was already growing. By 2026, it has exploded—and the problem of limited consumer budgets has only intensified.
The average person now juggles subscriptions to streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+), music services (Spotify, Apple Music), cloud storage (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox), productivity tools (Microsoft 365, Adobe) and increasingly, news and journalism services (Substack, Patreon, individual publication subscriptions).
The core insight from 2018 remains true: people allocate a fixed budget to subscriptions, creating fierce competition among publishers, app makers and content creators.
Ben Brooks gets close to the heart of the problem with pay walls when he writes Subscription Hell. It’s hard to make money from pay walls.
The few online sites that do well from pay walls are those like New Zealand’s National Business Review or The Economist. Both serve well-heeled audiences with unique, quality content readers can’t get elsewhere.
Brooks makes two interesting points.
First, differentiation. Brooks is thinking about podcasting, but it applies to all online media. In essence he says there are thousands of undifferentiated podcasts chasing the same audience.
…but will they pay?
The implication is that no-one will pay to listen to one of the podcasts when there are dozens of free alternatives. You could say the same about most online media. This, in part, does not apply to pay wall successes like the NBR and The Economist.
Their audiences don’t have obvious alternatives.
The other point is subtle. Brooks makes the connection between people paying for apps and buying pay wall subscriptions.
On the surface these are two quite distinct markets. And yet, recently I was thinking about exactly this concept from the opposite point of view. I have a number of subscriptions to pay each month. Some are for apps or online services. Others are for, it’s a horrible word to use, but let’s go with it: content.
Pay wall, subscription software: two aspects of the same thing
When budgeting, the two are aspects of the same thing. I allow myself so many dollars a month for subscriptions. It’s a single pool of money to cover digital services like cloud storage, online music, movie downloads, pay walls and apps. What isn’t spent on apps is available for media. What isn’t spent on media can be spent on apps.
A decade ago the budget was zero. By 2018 it had grown. While it still wasn’t a huge amount of money, it was about the same as I spent on coffee. In 2026 it is well past that level. I don’t plan to let it grow higher.
I’m not alone. Two decades ago, in the mid-2000s, the budget for digital subscriptions was essentially zero for most people. By 2018 it had grown to a modest amount. By 2026, the typical household subscription spending has ballooned—one estimate suggests US households now spend over $200 monthly on subscriptions, with many unaware how much they’re actually paying.
The issue is, consciously or not, people only budget so much money for subscriptions. We have a limited pool of funds. So does everyone else. The world has a limited pool of funds for subscriptions.
On a world scale it is huge and the pool is still growing. Even so, there is not enough to go around for everyone who would like to earn money selling pay wall subscriptions or apps.
Too many sellers, too few buyers.
And there’s the problem. It’s not hopeless. Micropayment services and reader-supported platforms have evolved since 2018. Substack, Patreon, Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee offer ways for readers to directly support creators. I use New Zealand-based Press Patron and can recommend it.
Some publications experiment with bundled subscriptions or tiered pricing to capture different budget levels. But fundamentally, the challenge remains: too many sellers competing for limited buyer budgets. The newspapers that missed their opportunities to build early subscription habits now face even fiercer competition than they did in 2018.
Yet it’s difficult. The market for content pay walls or subscription software is not infinite.
Subscription fatigue sets in
In 2026, we’re seeing subscription fatigue. People are overwhelmed by the number of recurring charges hitting their accounts. Many have begun rotating subscriptions—subscribing for a month, binge-watching or reading, then canceling until they need it again.
This presents new challenges for publishers and creators who need predictable recurring revenue. The answer isn’t obvious, but journalists who use their core skills to build genuine communities tend to retain subscribers better than those treating it purely as a transaction.
More on journalism and media:This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and the subscription economy:
Originally published March 2017. The core argument about journalism serving readers rather than industry remains as relevant today, even as the business model challenges have intensified.
At The Register Shaun Nichols writes:
“The tech press has dared to lean away from its core mission of making technology companies more profitable, says tech advocacy house ITIF.”
Long story short, it says the media moved from a positive attitude towards the industry to confrontation.
This, according to the ITIF, is because being tough on the industry makes it easier for tech media to turn a profit.
It goes on to talk about the media being ‘biased’ and distorts the public view of technology.
Yes, it’s all stuff and nonsense. There’s a lot to unpack, but here are a couple of ideas to think about.
Advertising
In the past publishers made money selling advertising to technology companies. They were a great sales conduit. It worked.
The technology industry was the tech media’s most important customer. Rivers of gold poured in.
While there are publishers who publish nice stories in return for advertising dollars, that was never a great business model. Reader are not fooled. They don’t stick around for blatant propaganda.
The advertising money didn’t buy favourable coverage, at least in the better publications. It did foster a favourable attitude towards the industry. The coverage reflected this.
The partnership also meant journalists and publishers spent time in the company of tech industry people. That too is good for creating a positive attitude.
One conclusion of the ITIF report is more advertising would repair media relations.
Readers and journalists
In the old model, advertisers paid for journalism, but journalists serve readers. Few understood this then. They still don’t.
As Nichols says, we’re not industry cheerleaders. We don’t earn cheerleader, public relations or marketing-type salaries.
Our job is to inform readers. If there is more cynicism in technology media (see the next point) then that is what readers want.
Modern reporting tools mean we know what stories rate from the minute they go online. Guess what? Readers are less likely to click on happy-slappy, isn’t everything wonderful darling stories.
In other words, journalists and publishers respond to reader demands.
Don’t shoot the messenger if they now have a darker view of the tech industry. Get your own house in order.
It’s all nonsense anyway
To argue tech media is meaner than it ways, say, thirty years ago is bonkers. The big newspapers and media sites are full of thin press release rewrites. It is common for blatant propaganda to appear as factual news. This is the opposite of what old-school journalism fundamentals taught us.
Take, for the sake of argument, Computerworld New Zealand. Thirty years ago, even a decade ago, it was breaking news stories. It was quoted in Parliament. Today, it runs nothing that didn’t start life in a public relations office.
That’s not to say all the tech media is soft. It isn’t. But the ratio of soft stories to more hard hitting news is off the scale. You have to wonder if the ITIF is paying attention.
More on journalism and media:This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and modern reporting:
Originally published September 2008. At the time online media was expected to replace newspapers but not necessarily do the full job. Updated January 2026 after eighteen years when the story proved correct: online left a gaping hole.
The prediction: Online would leave a gap
In 2008, an article in the Australian newspaper: The winter of journalism’s content argued that online publishing, which was widely expected to supplant newspapers and magazines, would only go so far in replacing them and leave a gaping hole.
This worried me then. It should worry us more now.
When advertisers abandoned print media
The 2008 argument was straightforward: Advertisers were abandoning print media for online, attracted by cost-effectiveness and perceived targetability.
Yet those online advertisers preferred placing messages next to “niche interest stories”—car ads next to driving features, travel ads next to vacation content—not next to investigations of government corruption or corporate malfeasance.
Even if publishers could fund hard news, advertisers wouldn’t want it. The perverse incentive was clear: publish less accountability journalism, more marketable fluff.
However, traditionally it was those difficult, hard news stories sold printed newspapers and dragged in readers in the first place. The hard news delivered readers to the publication where they could consume the advertising.
Eighteen years later: The gap is real
By 2026, the forecast proved accurate—though not uniformly. The landscape fragmented:
**Where investigative journalism survived:
**
Elite national outlets: The New York Times and Guardian continue to invest in investigations, funded by digital subscriptions. They hire investigative teams and break major stories.
In January 2026, this list originally included the Washington Post, but that’s now questionable following recent cuts and that move illustrates the continuing vulnerability of traditional hard journalism.
Nonprofit models:ProPublica, founded in 2007, proved investigations could be foundation-funded. Local nonprofit newsrooms emerged in dozens of US cities.
We don’t see anything comparable in New Zealand where the pool of available money is not big enough to sustain even a nonprofit publication.
Specialist outlets: Sites focusing on specific niches (healthcare, environment, national security) found niche audiences willing to pay.
Where it died:
Local newspapers: The papers that held city councils, school boards and local businesses accountable have largely disappeared. Local journalism collapsed, and with it, local accountability.
Regional coverage: Mid-sized papers that once investigated identifiable regions in countries like New Zealand or the UH, US state governments, large corporations and regional issues cut investigative teams first when ad revenue collapsed.
**Specialist niches: **Coverage of courts, local government, education and civic institutions evaporated in many markets.
The gap wasn’t filled—it was papered over with press releases, wire service copy and user-generated content.
The economics that did the damage
The 2008 prediction about advertising economics proved devastatingly accurate:
Print advertising collapsed: Between 2008 and 2026, newspaper print advertising revenue fell by approximately 90 percent. Digital advertising revenue grew, but never came close to replacing what was lost.
**Online advertising favours fluff: **The algorithm-driven ad market rewards engagement and scale, not importance. Publishers learned that listicles, celebrity news and viral content generated far more ad revenue per dollar invested than months-long investigations.
The “adjacent ad” problem persisted: Advertisers still don’t want their brands next to stories about corruption, crime or corporate wrongdoing. This “brand safety” concern systematically draws money away from accountability journalism.
Investigative teams spending months on complex stories
Court reporters attending every trial
Government reporters tracking legislation - there is still some coverage, but reduced and shallower than in the past
Local government watchdogs at every city council meeting
The volume of online content exploded. The volume of accountability journalism contracted.
Alternative models that emerged
The gap wasn’t filled, but some models showed promise:
**1. Nonprofit newsrooms:
**
In the US, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego and dozens of others proved foundation funding could sustain investigations. But this model:
Relies on philanthropic priorities (not public priorities)
Doesn’t scale to every community. There is no equivalent in New Zealand
Creates dependence on wealthy funders
2. Membership models:
Sites like The Guardian’s voluntary contributions and De Correspondent’s member-funded journalism showed readers would support quality work. But subscription fatigue limited how many outlets could pursue this. The Guardian’s needy begging is so tiresome it turns readers off what could be a useful site.
3. Hybrid models:
Public radio expanded into digital, combining listener support, foundation grants and some advertising. Both the UK’s BBC and New Zealand’s RNZ run credible online news operations. In the US, universities launched investigative centres. Some success, but not comprehensive and nothing of the sort in New Zealand.
4. Individual journalist brands:
Substack, Ghost and similar online services, let individual reporters build subscriber bases. Independent journalists broke stories—but without institutional support for legal, research and editing. In New Zealand Bernard Hickey maintains a lively news focused site with a model that sees his most important stories made available to non subscribers.
But despite all these efforts, none replaced the comprehensive accountability coverage newspapers once provided.
The democratic deficit
Here’s what society lost:
Local corruption or incompetence goes uncovered: Without reporters at city council meetings, local officials face less scrutiny. Small-scale corruption and poor governance that affects citizens' daily lives—zoning decisions, contract awards, police conduct—happens in darkness.
Corporate power unchecked: Complex investigations of corporate behaviour—wage theft, environmental violations, financial fraud—require resources few outlets can deploy. Companies know this and act accordingly. Also there is an asymmetry when it comes to access to the law, news organisations can rarely afford to defend litigation even when they are clearly in the right.
Government opacity increases: Without specialist reporters who know the territory, government press releases become “news.” Official narratives face less challenge. One phrase that comes up whenever officials are questioned on such statements is “just use the press release”.
Civic knowledge declines: Citizens can’t effectively participate in democracy if they don’t know what’s happening in their communities. The information divide became a democratic participation divide.
As foreseen in 2008: “this vicious economic cycle is nothing compared to what can happen in a society that no longer has a practical mechanism for scrutinising governments and out-of-control corporations.”
By 2026, many communities have no such mechanism.
Could it have been different?
Looking back, newspapers missed opportunities. Some alternative paths:
Earlier investment in reader relationships: Publishers who built direct subscriber relationships in the early 2000s—before social media dominated—preserved more of their audience and funding for accountability work.
Collaborative models: Had newspapers pooled resources for investigations rather than competing, they might have maintained more capacity. Some collaborations have emerged, but too late.
Public funding: Other democracies subsidise journalism more directly. The US and New Zealand largely didn’t. Whether that would have worked remains debatable, but private markets clearly failed to fund adequate accountability journalism.
Different priorities: Publishers chasing unsustainable profit margins cut investigations first. Had they prioritised accountability over quarterly returns, things could have been different.
None of these guaranteed success. But what actually happened—allowing market forces alone to determine what journalism survives—left democracy worse off.
The 2026 reality
The 2008 blog post was on the money: online media didn’t fill the gap newspapers left.
We have more content than ever. We have less accountability journalism than we need.
We have viral videos and hot takes. We have fewer reporters at government meetings.
We have elite national outlets continuing to do good work. We have local information deserts.
The gaping hole remains. It’s affecting how democracy functions. Eighteen years proved the concern valid. The question now is whether we’ll do anything about it.
There’s not much scope for optimism.
**More on journalism and media:
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This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, democratic accountability and the information gap:
Originally published November 2019, when subscription paywalls were becoming widespread. Updated January 2026 after the predicted divide became reality.
Seven years later: The divide deepened
The 2019 warning proved accurate—and then some. By 2026, the subscription divide has become entrenched:
The information haves: Subscribe to multiple news sources (NYT, local papers, specialist publications), access quality analysis, fact-checked reporting and investigative journalism. They understand complex issues through expert coverage.
The information have-nots: Rely on free sources—social media, ad-supported clickbait and increasingly, misinformation and propaganda. Quality journalism sits behind paywalls they can’t afford, especially when subscription fatigue means even middle-class readers pick only one or two news subscriptions.
The result: Knowledge gaps correlate with wealth. Those who can afford comprehensive news coverage make better-informed decisions about health, finance, politics and daily life. Those who can’t are more vulnerable to manipulation.
Google and Facebook control almost all the world’s online advertising revenue. To get around this, news organisations and other online media use paywalls and subscriptions.
It makes perfect sense when there’s precious little advertising revenue to pay wages and other bills. Producing media costs money. Publishers learned that calling them subscriptions rather than paywalls helped, but the fundamental problem remained.
He writes: “The digital divide is about to get worse with the rise of subscription-based news media because of the failure of advertising to provide revenues for a sustainable business model.”
It’s another reason to not like Facebook. Another reason to fear Google.
Newspapers are not the only examples. Subscriptions, not advertising, pays for Video and sports streaming services. Pay-per-view is not new, but there is now more of it.
Here in New Zealand, the National Business Review hides all stories behind a paywall. The NZHerald keeps its best stories for paying subscribers. They are not alone.
A second digital divide
As an upshot, low income people who manage to jump the first digital divide and get online, come up against a second divide. Subscription costs often shut them out from the best online content.
By 2026, the economics became stark: A comprehensive news diet requires multiple subscriptions.
Local news ($10-15 a month), national coverage ($15-20 a month), specialist reporting ($10-20 a month), international news ($15-25 a month). That’s $50-80 monthly just for news—competing with Netflix, Spotify and essential software subscriptions.
Free media has stepped in to fill the gap left by newspapers. Some free sites are good. RNZ runs an excellent free news site.
Some free media is darker. People with a hidden agenda and money to spend can publish plausible looking news. Although plausibility isn’t essential here. Manipulators have free run to bombard readers with lies and misleading information.
Propaganda
Look up an international story on Google News. You’ll find links to certain sites that are openly or not so openly propaganda sites. There are Russian and Chinese examples. In some cases intelligence agencies pay the bills.
Other free news services might push extremist ideologies or misinformation. Lies are common. By 2026, AI-generated content made this worse—plausible-looking “news” sites pumping out convincing misinformation at scale, all free to access.
People who buy subscriptions end up better informed. They can make better choices. They may even live better, healthier, even happier lives than the poor souls on the wrong side of the second digital divide.
Meanwhile, local journalism collapsed in many areas. Communities without affordable local news sources became information deserts, filled by partisan blogs, social media rumours and national outlets that couldn’t cover local issues adequately.
Democracy requires informed citizens
This creates a genuine crisis for democratic societies. Informed citizenship requires access to quality information. When that access depends on wealth, democracy suffers.
Some publishers recognised this. The Guardian built a voluntary contribution model—free to read, supported by those who can pay. Some local papers offered low-income subscription rates. Major investigations often appeared outside paywalls as a public service.
But these were exceptions. Most publishers, struggling to survive, had no choice but to maximize subscription revenue. The business model challenge that drove publications toward subscriptions created unintended social consequences.
**The alternatives weren’t better: **Ad-supported models had failed, surveillance capitalism exploited readers, and direct government funding of journalism raised its own concerns. There were no easy answers.
**More on journalism and media:
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This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, access to information and the subscription economy:
Originally published September 2020. Updated January 2026 as subscription fatigue has reached crisis levels and spending continues to climb.
Six years later: Subscription overload is real
The 2020 warning about subscription spending spiralling out of control proved prophetic. By 2026, the average household’s digital subscription spending has ballooned even further:
More services: In 2020, Disney+ was new. By 2026, add Paramount+, multiple sports streaming services, Substack newsletters, podcast subscriptions and countless niche platforms. The streaming wars fragmented content across more services than ever.
Higher prices: Individual subscription prices crept up well in advance of inflation. Netflix, Disney+ and others have raised prices multiple times. What seemed like “$10 per month” bargains in 2020 are now $15-20+ per service.
News subscriptions multiplied:Publishers embraced paywalls aggressively. Reading multiple news sources now requires juggling multiple subscriptions, creating a second digital divide between information haves and have-nots.
The fundamental problem from 2020—people can’t track what they’re spending—has only worsened as services multiply and compete for limited consumer budgets.
Where does the money go?
We spend a lot on digital subscriptions. Far more than people think.
You can buy streamed television entertainment, sports coverage and music. When these options bore you, there are services that deliver computer games over the net.
Newspapers and magazine publishers now sell digital subscriptions. Many learned that framing matters—language makes a difference to conversion rates.
Then there are online storage services. These includes those that specialise in looking after your photographs.
You can pay monthly for small business accounting, for security or productivity applications. Xero, Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop are popular examples.
Little and often
Subscriptions tend to be monthly or annual. Although there are those who charge for three or six months at a time.
Each monthly payment might be small in itself. But they soon add up to a hefty recurring commitment.
Estimates of how much people spend depend on what you include. Should you, say, include your mobile phone and broadband bills when you tot up your total spend?
Few people can tell you how much they spend on subscriptions. A US consulting firm asked Americans to guess their monthly spend: They underestimated by a huge margin. The average spend was three times people’s first guess.
It would not be that different if you asked New Zealanders.
When ignorance is not bliss
Not knowing your spend should be a wake up call. It would make a budgeting expert flinch. When you’ve no idea how much money is dribbling away, it’s hard to make rational spending decisions.
The amount people spend on subscriptions climbs each year. In part that’s because there’s more to buy. A year ago Netflix, Neon, Lightbox and Amazon Prime were the main New Zealand streaming video options. This year Disney joined the party. And there is a revamped Apple TV along with a fleet of niche alternatives.
Another reason spending climbs is we connect more and more devices to the Internet. One way or another these devices need feeding.
Weird subscription economics
There’s a lot of weird economics in digital services. On one level it all makes sense. On another it might not.
The price of individual digital services is usually low. When software companies switched to selling online subscriptions, it looked like a bargain.
Lower headline prices seduced customers. Take Microsoft Office. The annual NZ$120 subscription looks a bargain compared with five times as much for a packaged version. Knowing that you’d always be up-to-date and compatible with others helps ease fears about long-term costs.
Software purchased the traditional way can go on working for years. There are people with ten-year-old versions of Word. If you keep software that long, subscriptions are expensive compared with buying outright.
Software updates
After all, it’s not as if, say, Microsoft Word has changed much in ten years. This goes for a lot of subscription software.
Xero is newer than Word. There is no pre-subscription era to look back at.
In the early years, Xero developed fast. It grew up with its customers.
As far as what ordinary customers see, the product is now stable. There may be updates, but its core functionality for small business owners has not budged in a while.
Sometimes the upgrades to subscription software are the digital equivalent of a lick of paint and a rub down. Things look new and fresh, but nothing important has changed.
Renting music
Music subscriptions obey a different set of economic rules. Many fans have hundreds, even thousands of dollars invested in vinyl, CDs and digital downloads.
My non-streaming digital music collection has more than 40 days of listening material. That’s 40 times 24 hours. I can go the best part of a year without hearing the same track twice.
Paying NZ$20 a month on top of this, when a lot of what is served up is sitting on my computer, doesn’t make sense. In effect, people in this position are paying an algorithm to find new songs. Which is great if you thirst for new songs. Otherwise, it’s an indulgence.
News subscriptions: A special case
Journalism subscriptions present unique challenges. Unlike entertainment, where you might subscribe to watch specific shows, news is continuous and urgent. Missing a key story because it’s behind a paywall you don’t subscribe to creates real information gaps.
Publishers learned that calling them “subscriptions” rather than “paywalls” helps, but it doesn’t solve the core problem: comprehensive news coverage requires multiple subscriptions. Local news, national news, international coverage, specialist business reporting—each potentially sits behind a different paywall.
This puts news in competition with entertainment. When budgets are limited, Netflix often wins over newspaper subscriptions. Publishers hoped quality journalism would be valued enough to compete. For some audiences it is; for many it isn’t.
The result? Fewer people paying for news even as journalism costs haven’t fallen. The subscription model works for elite publications serving affluent audiences. Everyone else struggles.
Tracking your subscription spend
As we’ve seen, one worrying aspect of digital subscriptions is that it is hard to keep track of them all.
It is even harder to know if you get value from each of the services in your portfolio.
Take, my Amazon Prime subscription. It is ‘free’ (that’s free as in marketing language, not free as a in free beer) as part of my broadband plan. In the last year we may have watched five or six hours of Prime material. If we paid for the subscription, the cost per show would be prohibitive.
It’s clear this would not be a good service to purchase when the broadband ‘free’ offer expires.
Not knowing is part of the business model
The point earlier about people not knowing how much they spend on subscriptions is more than an anecdote.
Allowing people to forget about subscriptions but carry on paying the small monthly fee is part of the business model. It’s like gyms. They collect a sizeable slice of their revenue from people who rarely show up to use the equipment. Publishers adopted similar models, hoping readers would forget to cancel after reading specific stories.
One reason people sign up for a streaming service is to watch an original series or two. Think of those who joined to watch Game of Thrones.
The service providers know that once customers have sucked dry the handful of programmes they signed for, their subscription can tick over for months before they realise they are no longer getting value.
Audit your subscription spending
It’s a good idea to audit your spending on digital services. There’s a chance there will be at least one active subscription that you don’t get value from. There will be annual and monthly payments, perhaps others.
One nasty trap many fall into is the free trial period. Often you are asked for credit card details when you sign on. It may take a few cycles before you realise what happened. This is extra hard when the trial is for an additional service from a provider you already buy something else from as the charge can be buried with something else in your bank statements.
Work through your card or bank statements. You’ll need to look at the last 12 months to capture all annual subscriptions. If you can, pull the data into a spreadsheet and count up the subscription total. Look for double-ups and services that seemed like a good idea at the time, but are no longer used. Cancel the repayments now. You’ll forget later.
Watch for extras. These can be hidden. Streaming services may charge more for 4K content or for not including advertising. You may pay for more cloud storage than you need or for options that don’t get used.
If this all sounds confusing, and it is, remind yourself this is not an accident. Keeping you confused about subscriptions is worth billions to service providers.
Vast sums are at stake when millions of customers forget to cancel at the end of popular series. This business model fundamentally shapes how digital media operates—subscriptions replaced advertising, but brought their own problems.
More on journalism and media:
_This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, subscription economics and sustainable publishing:
_
Originally published November 2014. Updated January 2026 with a decade of further decline, consolidation and the rise of independent journalism sites.
A decade on there are even fewer voices
When this was first written in 2014, New Zealand technology journalism was in its “twilight years.” By 2026, it would be generous to call it even that. The situation has deteriorated further:
IDG’s titles: Computerworld NZ and **Reseller News **are now run from Australia. There is local input, Reseller News has a New Zealand editor, but both titles include much Australian content. TechDay continues but with reduced scope and it is still primarily a marketing operation, not journalism in the sense we grew up with.
Many of the journalists named in 2014 have moved on to other roles or overseas publications. The mainstream newspapers have cut back even further.
What technology coverage exists is often outsourced, aggregated or, in the worst cases, AI-generated filler.
There is bright spot with independent journalists using platforms like Substack, Ghost and personal websites to partially fill the void. But these voices serve niche audiences rather than providing the broad industry coverage New Zealand once had. And none of them other than this site are technology focused.
You can count the number of full-time technology journalists writing for New Zealand audiences on your fingers. Experienced local journalists are as likely to turn up on overseas publications as on local titles.
Readers are more familiar with international technology media; even if it doesn’t always serve our needs.
It means we no longer tell the best stories about local technology companies. We don’t report the ways New Zealanders deal with technology. A lot gets missed.
We’ve stopped telling our stories because no-one wants to pay for that kind of writing.
Specialist tech publishers
Three specialist publishers dominate:
Techday publishes two monthly print magazines: IT Brief and The Channel. It operates as an umbrella website featuring eight virtual publication brands covering subject niches.
Techday lists three staff journalists are listed on its website. The last time I asked none of them worked full-time. This may have changed. Update: Techday Publisher Sean Mitchell tells me his journalists are all employed full-time.
IDG is US-owned and Australian managed. It publishes a print edition of CIO magazine three times a year. If you want a subscription you have to apply to Australia. That speaks volumes. IDG also operates Computerworld, NZ Reseller News and PC World as online-only publications.
IDG employs two full-time journalists. James Henderson is the editor of Computerworld NZ while Divina Paredes is CIO editor. Randal Jackson writes stories as the group’s Wellington-based freelance. Reseller News and PC World don’t have local editorial staff. Update: James Henderson is the editor of both Computerworld NZ and Reseller News.
**iStart **publishes a print and electronic magazine three times a year. The business is Auckland based with New Zealand and Australian print editions and websites. Auckland-based Clare Coulson is the editor.
Part-time technology journalism
Between them the three specialist publishers employ three full-time and four part-time journalists. Update: six full-time and one part-time. That’s still fewer than one journalist per masthead. They rarely break hard news stories. News pages are mostly filled with rewritten press releases and PR-fed material.
That sounds like criticism. On one level it is, but it also reflects commercial reality. There’s little advertising revenue, and ad-blocking has made the situation worse. What advertisers the publishers can scrape up are looking for a shortcut to sales leads, not hard-hitting exposés.
You will find longer features in most titles. Sometimes there’s even analysis although there’s little of the deeper material that characterised the technology press in the past.
Again that’s commercial reality: journalists are under pressure to pump out a lot of content fast. There’s not much time for reflection.
This also explains why the IDG sites are full of overseas filler material. It keeps the pipeline full at no extra cost to the publisher. The stories seem to be picked at random. No thought is given to whether a story serves readers.
This can get extreme. Last week Ian Apperley noted there wasn’t a single local story among the 100 most recent news items on the Computerworld NZ feed.
Technology journalism in mainstream media
The same pressure to pump out volume applies to tech journalists working in New Zealand’s mainstream media. Both Stuff and the NZ Herald fill their online pipelines with low-cost, low-value overseas filler material.
In the past the newspapers did great work keeping industry insiders, users and the public informed about events and trends. Now they publish shorter, less analytical news although there are some notable exceptions, particularly when covering telecommunications.
One reason you don’t see as much local technology news is there are no longer any full-time technology journalists working on mainstream newspapers and magazines.
Chris Keall who at one time edited NZ PC World is the most notable specialist journalist in terms of output. He is NBR technology editor. Keall is also the paper’s head of digital, so he spends less time at the tech coal face. Keall manages to write roughly a story a day and at times gets behind more complex issues.
At the Dominion Post Tom Pullar-Strecker was a technology specialist but now has a general business journalism role. Being based in Wellington he sometimes gets insight into issues such as telecommunications policy. These days he writes roughly one tech story a week.
NZ Herald
The NZ Herald gives technology assignments to a number of journalists. The best know is Chris Barton, who writes features and commentary covering technology and telecommunications topics. Barton goes deep, but his work only appears occasionally.
The Herald also runs a weekly blog by tech veteran Juha Saarinen. Saarinen is one of the locally based technology journalists who appears to earn most of his income from working for overseas publishers. Unlike most of us, he has a firmer technology background. He mainly writes for IT News, an Australian online publication.
Rob O’Neill is another virtual ex-pat New Zealand journalist. He writes for ZDNet and is listed as part of the ZDNet Australia team. O’Neill writes local and international stories, maybe two local items a week.
Wellington-based Owen Williams has only recently moved to working full-time as a journalist. He is now on the team for US-based The Next Web.
On a personal note
This round-up wouldn’t be complete without mentioning my work.
I’m a freelance journalist. I write a regular technology column for NZ Business magazine — it mainly appears in print. In the last year have also written features for iStart, NBR and for Management magazine, which is now part of NZ Business. I also turn up on TV3 Firstline and the NZ Tech Podcast talking about technology.
My highest profile freelance work would be on the business feature pull-outs that appear in the NZ Herald about ten times a year. Although I get to write about tech from a business point of view, the stories range across most business areas.
There are also overseas jobs. In the last year I have written for ZDNet’s PC Magazine and for Computer Weekly out of the UK. Both publishers commissioned stories that are specifically about New Zealand themes.
Local technology journalism is undergunned
Most experienced New Zealand technology writers, myself included, are not writing full-time for New Zealand audiences about local themes. Some are writing for overseas publishers, others split writing duties with other editorial responsibilities.
Those who are writing full-time spend their lives in a haze churning out short items dictated largely by the flow of press releases and PR-initiated pitches.
Too often an exclusive is nothing more than first dibs on a press release. You’re not doing your job when you post 20 smartphone shots of someone’s new data centre or are the first New Zealand site to publish alleged leaked photos of a yet to be launched product.
Getting eyeballs is everything. Local publishers fight with Google over the slim pickings available from online advertisements. They also compete internationally. New Zealanders probably read more overseas written tech news than locally written stories.
I’m not judgemental about the problems they face or the way local publishers tackle the problems, I’m on the receiving end of the same economic forces.
I’m not judgemental about the problems they face or the way local publishers tackle the problems, I’m on the receiving end of the same economic forces. The subscription economy hasn’t solved the problem and paywalls remain controversial.
Who pays the piper?
The market doesn’t serve the readers. It doesn’t serve the local tech industry. Leaders of New Zealand tech companies need to be aware of what is going on in their industry, not what someone’s promotional output says. They need intelligence, not propaganda.
The current approach doesn’t serve the public good.
There’s also a problem when a big news story breaks that has technology woven into its fabric. Remember the fuss in the run-up to the 2014 election over stolen emails? Perhaps the planned $1.5 billion reboot of the IRD computer system. How about the business of the Edward Snowden leaks?
In some cases journalists who don’t have tech expertise or the contacts needed to make sense of what is happening are sent to deal with these stories.
That’s a pity. There’s a bigger pity. Hundreds of real, hard news stories, things that the public needs to know about go unreported because they are not part of a public relations campaign. Or worse, public relations managers block the news from getting out.
And much of what passes as news is actually PR campaigns dressed up as research.
Oxygen
Let’s put aside the worthy goal of keeping the public informed and get to a different commercial reality. New Zealand’s homegrown technology sector doesn’t get the media oxygen it needs to breathe. Individual journalists have learned they must build their own platforms and audiences, but this creates a fragmented landscape rather than comprehensive industry coverage.
Because overseas news feeds dominate the agenda in New Zealand, people buying here are more likely to hear about an overseas supplier than a local one. Investors will put their money overseas, skilled workers will look for jobs overseas. This is already causing problems.
The lack of balanced, impartial and thoughtful New Zealand technology journalism creates the impression there’s not much going on here.
Blogs take up some of the slack. So does Mauricio Freitas’ Geekzone website and projects like the New Zealand Tech Podcast.
Technology needs a local voice. It has to be an honest voice. That means turning over rocks some people would prefer stayed untouched.
What comes next?
Technology journalism won’t disappear entirely, but it has fundamentally changed. The model of specialised technology publications employing teams of journalists to cover a local market comprehensively is dead—at least in a market the size of New Zealand.
What survives are:
**Independent voices: **Journalists like myself who maintain their own platforms and patch together income from multiple sources.
Niche coverage: Specialist reporters focusing on telecommunications, cybersecurity or other specific sectors.
Occasional depth: Mainstream journalists who dive into technology topics when major stories break
Community efforts: Podcasts, newsletters and news services like Geekzone that are built by enthusiasts.
The question isn’t whether this is better or worse than 2014—it’s simply what exists. The business model challenges that drove the decline haven’t been solved; they’ve forced adaptation.
For New Zealand’s technology sector, this means companies must work harder to tell their stories. For readers, it means seeking out multiple sources rather than relying on a single comprehensive publication. For journalists, it means building direct relationships with audiences rather than depending on institutional employers.
**More on journalism and media:
**
_This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and the state of technology journalism: _
Originally published March 2013, when “paywall” was the standard industry term. Updated January 2026 after publishers learned this lesson the hard way.
Thirteen years later: Language won
The 2013 story proved correct. Publishers largely abandoned “paywall” language in their marketing and reader communications. By 2026, successful publishers talk about “subscriptions,” “memberships” or “reader support.”
**What changed: **The New York Times, Washington Post and other successful subscription operations carefully avoid “paywall” in their messaging. They offer “digital access,” “unlimited articles” or “membership benefits”—positive language emphasising what you get, not what gets in your way.
Why it mattered: Language directly impacts conversion rates. A/B testing confirmed what seemed obvious in 2013: “Subscribe for unlimited access” converts better than “Get past our paywall.” The difference can be 20-30% in signup rates.
The economics: This wasn’t just marketing spin. Subscription economics are fundamentally different from paywall economics. Subscriptions imply ongoing value and relationship; paywalls suggest barriers to overcome. Publishers learned that framing matters as much as pricing.
The holdouts who still talk about “our paywall” tend to be struggling publications. Language reveals mindset.
Don’t call it a paywall
Karen Fratti thinks publishers need to stop using the word ‘paywall’ to describe ways online sites charge readers. She prefers we talk about subscriptions.
Fratti writes:
…let’s stop talking about putting up walls to keep people out. The paywall has only led to griping from consumers who’ve reached their monthly article limit, and unique ways to get around them. We’re wordsmiths, we know words matter, and ‘paywall’ is another relic of the old media-new media debate. Knock it off.
Fratti also talks about paywalls being “a quick fix to make balance sheets look better.” This casual approach to reader relationships partly explains why so many publishers failed in the digital transition.
“Paywall” has dark imagery
I agree with Fratti on this, rightly or wrongly paywall makes me think of the watch towers and armed guard that patrolled central Berlin during the Cold War.
The paywall is the new media’s equivalent of Cold War thinking. And it is about exclusion at a time publishers need to think about inclusion.
This proved prophetic—publishers who embraced inclusive language like “supporting quality journalism” or “join our community” built more sustainable subscriber bases than those focused on barriers. By 2026, we see the full spectrum: from The Guardian’s voluntary contribution model (no “wall” at all but still annoying pop-ups) to hard paywalls with confrontational language. Guess which approach built more loyal readers?
According to Wiktionary (don’t judge me on my research, you should try googling “etymology behind the paywall”), the origin is composed of “pay + wall, by analogy with firewall”. A logical enough conclusion, especially back when paywalls were a simple “pay or leave” concept, but it’s unacceptable now that such a term still evokes the emotion of being a fourteen-year-old with a fake ID in front of a smug, grinning bouncer.
The blog concludes:
Do us a favour: next time you’re reading news online, when you hit the article limit, don’t think about whether you would pay to get past the “paywall”. Instead ask whether the articles are good enough for it to be worth your time to subscribe.
Publishers spent a lot of time and energy attempting to finesse the digital transition, including, at one point, hoping the iPad would be their savior, though that optimism proved misplaced.
How language shaped subscription success
The shift from “paywall” to “subscription” reflected deeper strategic thinking:
Successful approaches: - The Guardian at its best: “Support journalism” (voluntary contributions) - New York Times: “All access subscription” (unlimited value) - Local papers: “Community membership” (belonging + support)
Failing approaches: - “You’ve hit your article limit” (confrontational) - you’ll see this kind of message at The Guardian despite the news being theoretically free. “Subscribe to read” (transactional) - “Unlock premium content” (still barrier-focused)
The digital subscription economy became fiercely competitive. Publishers competing with Netflix, Spotify and dozens of other monthly charges couldn’t afford negative framing. Every word matters when you’re asking for recurring payments. [New Zealand publishers](billbennett.micro.blog/2026/02/2… who learned this lesson early—like the NBR—built sustainable models. Those who didn’t struggled as subscription fatigue set in.
More on journalism and media:
_This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, subscription economics and sustainable publishing: _
Originally published January 2012, when newspaper paywalls were still experimental. Updated January 2026 after fourteen years of subscription model evolution.
Fourteen years later: What we learned
The arguments made in 2012, see later down this post, proved largely correct. Newspaper paywalls did become widespread, but publishers learned painful lessons about pricing, flexibility and reader expectations. By 2026, subscription models have matured but challenges remain:
What succeeded: Major international publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post built substantial digital subscriber bases through bundled offerings, flexible pricing and quality journalism. The Times passed 10 million digital subscribers—proving the model can work at scale.
In New Zealand the NZ Herald’s paywall is regarded as a major success and the NBR continues to serve its small, yet lucrative niche, exclusively from behind a paywall.
The Herald succeeded by maintaining market dominance and offering essential local news readers couldn’t get elsewhere, while the NBR’s focused business audience mirrors the specialist financial publishers that made paywalls work from the beginning.
Meanwhile, Stuff abandoned its earlier paywall experiment before rebooting with The Post. Newer outlets like Newsroom and The Spinoff have explored voluntary contribution models—proving there’s no single formula for New Zealand’s small, fragmented market.
What failed: Regional newspapers that simply slapped paywalls on existing content without improving quality or user experience. Many discovered that readers resist poor value propositions, regardless of price.
What changed: Publishers learned that language matters—“subscriptions” sell better than “paywalls." They also discovered the importance of flexible options: day passes, article bundles and tiered subscriptions address the commitment barrier identified in 2012.
The core insight remains true: online and print are fundamentally different products requiring different pricing models.
We knew early on that paywalls work well for specialist financial publishers. In 2012 it was not clear if they could work for more general news publications. We now know that they can, but it is not straightforward. More publishers have failed to successfully impose formal paywalls or subscriptions than those that have succeeded.
Readers happily paid for their print newspapers. Some still do. New Zealand’s still existing printed daily newspapers cost around NZ$2.
So you might think NZ$2 a day for the online paper is reasonable.
Here are reasons why it isn’t:
Print newspapers are made and distributed. The cost of running a print plant and running trucks is higher than the cost of moving pixels around. Newspaper sellers take a cut of the cover price. Any on-line sales would be direct. The potential cost savings are huge. Readers expect publishers to pass on some of the cost savings.
Readers who buy print newspapers generally read a number of stories. They could conceivably read the paper cover to cover then do the crosswords and Sudoku puzzles. Nobody reads like this online. As a rule online readers skip from publication to publication grazing on material. This behavior makes justifying subscription costs difficult, as readers may only want occasional access.
Print newspapers don’t have realistic free competitors. Broadcast radio and TV news is free, but it doesn’t directly compete with printed papers in the way, say, Radio New Zealand’s web site is just a click away from Stuff.co.nz. This competition makes it challenging to earn subscription revenue from journalism.
For all these reasons, newspaper publishers are asking considerably less from on-line readers than print readers pay.
And rightly so. Instead they sell subscriptions. The Australian charges A$3 a week for an online subscription. You can’t buy one day’s on-line paper, nor can readers make a small payment to reach a single paywalled story. In fact, while the price is advertised as dollars per week, customers have to buy a whole month’s access at a time.
For all these reasons, newspaper publishers charge inline readers considerably less than the print cover price suggests.
Modern publishers offer various approaches:
The New York Times charges around US$5 per week for basic digital access, with options for day passes and bundled print+digital
The Guardian uses a voluntary contribution model, requesting support without hard paywalls. The continual needy pop-ups are profoundly annoying to casual readers.
Substack newsletters let individual journalists charge $5-15 per month directly to readers
Yet the 2012 problem persists: most models still require monthly commitments. Publishers have experimented with micropayments and day passes, but implementation remains inconsistent. The subscription economy challenge means every news subscription competes with Netflix, Spotify, You Tube and dozens of other services.
Asking readers to pay in advance for a whole month at a time still seems wrong. Sure, many readers already subscribe to a daily newspaper delivery, but many others don’t. They buy a print paper as and when they feel a need. There needs to be an on-line equivalent requiring less commitment.
Subscription overload
The challenge has intensified since 2012. Subscription fatigue is real—readers juggle multiple subscriptions across entertainment, software and news.
The “just $3 a week” pitch that seemed reasonable in 2012 now competes with 20 other similar requests. This creates a second digital divide—between those who can afford multiple news subscriptions and those who can’t.
Public-interest journalism becomes gated behind paywalls, raising questions about informed citizenship and democracy. Some publishers have recognized this. Major investigations are often made free. Breaking news typically sits outside paywalls. But the tension between business sustainability and public service remains unresolved.
Publishers need to think carefully about their terminology. As argued elsewhere on this site, the language of ‘subscriptions, not paywalls’ matters when framing the value proposition.”
**More on journalism and media: **
_This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and subscription economics:
_
This was written in 2010 when paywalls were new, today they are everywhere, yet these principles still hold true in 2025.
It is still early days for newspaper paywalls. They don’t always work, yet the experience so far says successful paywalls have four things in common.
Paywalls work for business newspapers like New Zealand’s The National Business Review (NBR), The Australian Financial Review, The Economist and The Financial Times.
Commentators often say paywalls and subscriptions work for niche titles providing specialist coverage and editorial quality.
This is true. For example, I work for CommsDay, which is a successful specialist niche title covering the telecommunications market. CommsDay doesn’t use a paywall – it is a daily PDF newsletter.
However there is more to getting readers to pay for editorial than occupying a specialist niche.
The must haves for successful paywalls
I’ve identified three other must haves:
Editorial quality. The above titles are editorially excellent and professional. They are recognised as being the best in their field.
A well-heeled audience. People who buy online subscriptions are richer than average readers. Less well off readers do not tend to pay for online publications. Business people often have personal or company-wide budgets for buying media. Your chances of getting someone to pay for editorial is boosted if the purchase can go on the firm’s credit card. Double that if the subscription fee can be a tax deduction.
Quick. Paywalls work best when readers need information fast. They have to find it more convenient to whip out the credit card and pay for a subscription than walk to the local shop and buy a print copy of the same publication, spend 30 minutes Googling for information or faff about trying to circumvent the paywall. Urgency is your friend.
Rupert Murdoch once called the iPad a saviour of newspapers. The reality was smaller savings, fewer readers and little relief for publishers.
This post was originally published in April 2010, days after the first iPad launched. Updated January 2026 with fifteen years of hindsight on how the tablet revolution reshaped—but didn’t save—news media.
Rupert Murdoch described Apple’s iPad as a “potential saviour of newspapers” not long after the tablet computer first appeared. At the time, his optimism was misplaced. Both the numbers and the economics showed otherwise.
Small savings, big costs remain
Moving to the iPad saves publishers money on paper, printing, wrapping and distribution. Yet Apple’s 30 percent cut of subscription revenue is roughly the same as the margin taken by newsagents and other retailers. Editorial costs don’t go away, so the overall savings are relatively small.
More importantly, fewer readers are willing to pay for digital subscriptions than for printed copies. Evidence in 2010 suggested only five percent of readers would pay. Even if that number had climbed to 25 percent, copy sales revenue would still fall.
Fewer readers means less advertising
Print newspapers also enjoy a secondary audience. A copy bought in a shop is often passed from reader to reader. Digital editions make sharing harder because of copy protection. That reduces the number of readers per subscription and in turn makes advertising less valuable.
True, digital readers are more identifiable, which improves targeting. But advertisers ultimately want reach: fewer readers meant less ad revenue overall.
Analysts warn of limits
Ovum, a technology analyst firm, reached the same conclusion. In a May 2010 report, principal analyst Adrian Drury wrote: “Apple’s much-hyped tablet device alone will fail to secure the future of news and magazine publishing.”
He argued that while the iPad offered publishers new distribution channels, it was still just one device. Sales volumes would take time to build, while the challenge of finding a sustainable business model for publishing was immediate. Ovum also predicted the iPad media market would quickly become congested.
A turning point, not a saviour
Apple forecast it would sell 13.2 million iPads by the end of 2011. That compares with 25 million iPhones shipped in 2009 alone. While the iPad and later tablets reshaped media, they were never the cure for declining newspaper fortunes Murdoch and others hoped for.
Fifteen years later: What actually happened
The prediction proved accurate. The iPad didn’t save newspapers, though tablets have reshaped how people consume news.
By 2026, newspaper print circulation has collapsed to a fraction of 2010 levels. The iPad’s failure wasn’t about the device—it was about the business model. Publishers eventually learned that how they frame digital subscriptions matters more than the delivery mechanism.
What actually saved some news organisations wasn’t a technology but direct reader relationships. Email newsletters, podcasts and reader-supported journalism have all succeeded where app-based distribution failed. Journalists who learned to use their core skills in new ways thrived, even as their erstwhile employers struggled.
The iPad became ubiquitous—Apple sold over 500 million iPads in the fifteen years since Murdoch’s prediction. But news apps didn’t become the dominant way people consume journalism. Instead, social media, web browsers and direct subscriptions won out.
Meanwhile, the cost-cutting that seemed attractive about digital distribution—no printing, paper or physical distribution costs—accelerated newsroom layoffs. The savings went to shareholders, not journalism. As predicted, newspapers missed crucial opportunities to adapt their business models when they had the chance.
**More on journalism and media: **
This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and modern reporting:
This is a story I wrote in March 2010 about search engines replacing real people. Updated January 2026, with AI promising to replace even more human expertise. The question matters more than ever: what do we lose when algorithms replace institutional knowledge?
From librarians to Google to AI: What we keep losing
When this was written in 2010, search engines had just replaced newspaper libraries. By 2026, AI promises to replace search engines. But each replacement loses something valuable.
2010: Librarians knew context, could suggest angles, remembered the unofficial story behind the official one. Google found keywords but missed nuance.
2026: AI chatbots generate answers but can’t tell you “actually, you should talk to the person who was there” or “the official version isn’t the whole story.” They hallucinate facts, confidently wrong.
What newspapers lost wasn’t just a filing system—it was institutional memory embodied in people. This loss contributed to journalism’s decline in ways publishers didn’t anticipate.
Newspapers 50 years ago
When I started as a journalist in the late 1970s, newspapers and magazines were still put together using hot metal type. In theory union demarcation meant journalists never got close to the compositor machines in the bowels of the newspaper building, but there were a few times when I did.
At times I catch a faint metallic smell that reminds me of those days.
I also remember the clack of typewriters, telephones with bells, the noisy newsroom clash of egos, the mumbling from the subs desk and the late night questions from the proof-readers. I’ve never been a smoker, but years spent working in newsrooms probably did as much damage to my lungs. Almost every desk had an sh-tray.
And all the pub lunches I ate while waiting for contacts to spill the beans and deliver an exclusive punished my liver.
Those were the days
Of course I miss the shabby, rumpled glamour of the old days. Journalism was fun then. It can still be fun. Although it’s now a different kind of fun. The craft fundamentals remain, but the institutional support structure disappeared.
Working as an independent journalist in 2026 means you’re not just a reporter—you’re also your own librarian, fact-checker, editor, publisher and subscription manager. The tools changed, but without the institutional knowledge those librarians provided, something irreplaceable was lost.
Print could be glorious
Seeing your story on the home page of a newspaper web site is nothing compared to walking through town where all the newsstands show your latest story. There is thrill when you pass people in cafes or on the bus reading the news you wrote the day before.
Another romance I feel newspapers lost when moving to modern digital systems were their extensive clipping and photo libraries. They employed knowledgable librarians and the other custodians of arcane information who just knew how to find relevant material fast.
The story behind the story
Often, while you were in the newspaper library checking up on old stories, the librarian was often able to chime in with a valuable snippet of extra background information. You might have the clippings, but they’d have the memory of what happened at the time—the story behind the story.
Google did for them.
Sometimes Google can do a fine job of finding old information, but even at its best, it is not as comprehensive. Most of all, I miss chatting with an intelligent human being then seeing a Manilla folder of clips and photos arrive on my desk an hour or so later along with a memo reminding me to go and chat with someone involved with the original story.
Computers will never replace that.
What publishers lost by cutting librarians
Newspaper libraries and their keepers were among the first casualties of cost-cutting. Publishers saw them as expensive overhead—paying salaries for people to manage old clippings when “everything’s online now.”
This proved shortsighted in multiple ways:
Lost institutional memory: New reporters couldn’t learn from experienced librarians who remembered decades of local stories, relationships and context.
Lost verification: A good librarian would say “that doesn’t sound right” when you got facts wrong. Google just returns what you search for.
Lost discovery: Librarians suggested connections you hadn’t thought of. “While you’re looking at that 1995 story, you should also see what happened in 1987.” Algorithms optimize for what you already know you want.
Lost local knowledge: As local journalism collapsed, there was no one left who remembered 30 years of civic history—who ran for mayor before, which projects failed, why certain streets were named what they were.
This wasn’t just nostalgia. It was investigative capacity. Modern journalists spend hours googling what a librarian could have told them in five minutes—if librarians still existed.
AI doesn’t solve what Google couldn’t
In 2026, AI tools promise to replace both Google and human expertise. ChatGPT, Claude and others can summarise old news, suggest story angles, even draft articles.
But they can’t tell you:
“The official record says X, but everyone in town knows Y”
“You should talk to the former mayor—she’s still around and has files”
“That company’s press release contradicts what they said five years ago”
“Be careful—that source has an agenda you should know about”
AI has no smell for when something doesn’t add up. No memory of watching this play out before. No sense of “this reminds me of 1993 when…”
The skills good librarians possessed—informed pattern recognition across decades, institutional knowledge, human judgment—can’t be replicated by algorithms trained on text.
Publishers thought they were cutting costs by eliminating librarians. They were actually eliminating competitive advantage.
**More on journalism and media:
**
This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism craft, institutional knowledge and the newsroom changes that shaped modern media:
On the fifth anniversary of Windows 10, we look back at what it was supposed to be and what it ultimately became. Almost nothing turned out as planned, and that’s OK.
I celebrated the occasion by upgrading a small data centre’s worth of Windows 10 devices to the new build and monitoring for glitches. This year, the process was refreshingly uneventful and almost shockingly fast. On newer PCs, almost everything happened in the background, and the wait after the final reboot was typically five minutes or less.
Five minutes seems incredible. There were early iterations of Windows 10 where you might need to set aside the best part of the day for an upgrade.
That was for the essential pre-upgrade back-up along with an hour or so for the upgrade itself. On top of that was time needed to familiarise yourself with the new reality.
Often things would go missing. In some cases key features would be dropped or change beyond recognition.
One lesson at that time was to never automate or customise Windows 10 because you’d never know if an update would break everything.
There were also times when an automatic upgrade might happen without warning and you’d wake up in unfamiliar territory.
It’s not clear to me how long it took Microsoft to get Windows 10 to the point where upgrading stopped being a risky venture.
Microsoft’s cunning plan
Ed Bott:
Back in 2015, Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 was expansive. It would run on a dizzying assortment of devices: smartphones running Windows Mobile, small tablets like the 8-inch Dell Venue 8 Pro 5000 series, PCs in traditional and shape-shifting configurations, Xbox consoles, the gargantuan conference-room-sized Surface Hub, and the HoloLens virtual reality headset.
In 2020, that vision has been scaled back. Windows 10 Mobile is officially defunct, and small Windows 10 tablets have completely disappeared from the market. Of all those chips scattered across the craps table, only the 2-in-1 Windows device category appears to have paid off.
There was a time when Windows Mobile, or Windows Phone as it was called, beat the pants off Android and gave iOS a run for its money. Windows Phone 7 was great. It integrated neatly with everything else Windows and Office. For a while the Windows desktop and mobile combination was the most productive option.
Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t resist tinkering with great, making life more complicated. Let’s face it, too complicated.
Windows Phone 8 may have had better features, but it was already on the path to clumsy and cluttered. From that point things kept getting worse.
Of course the real killer was that mighty Microsoft, once the world’s largest company and still among the biggest, couldn’t assemble a credible suite of phone apps.
Microsoft would have done better spending more of its capital seeding phone app developers than on other failed investments. Or maybe it was always a lost cause. It doesn’t matter because a reinvented Microsoft went on to greater things with Azure and enterprise products and services.
There are times when 2-in-1 Windows devices sparkle and shine, but for the most part non-Surface Windows PC hardware feels almost held back by Microsoft.
HP, Dell and others give every appearance of being capable of making great hardware. Yet they never quite reach the lofty heights. Ever so often something special appears, but you have to move fast and buy it at the time because the good stuff never gains traction.
Likewise Microsoft’s own-brand Surface products don’t always hit the target. There have been missed. Yet on the whole the Surface experience is fine even if product reliability isn’t up to scratch. And if you want to spend that much money, Apple can look relatively inexpensive by comparison.
On conspiracy theories
More Bott:
And then there were the dark scenarios that Microsoft skeptics spun out around the time of Windows 10’s debut.
The free upgrade offer was a trap, they insisted. After Microsoft had lured in a few hundred million suckers with that offer, they were going to start charging for subscriptions. Five years later, that still hasn’t happened. If Microsoft is running some sort of hustle here, it’s a very long con.
There’s more conspiracy coverage in the original story. As Bott says, it is all nonsense. The conspiracy theories looked daft at the time. They showed a lack of understanding about Microsoft’s direction and where Windows 10 fits in the big picture.
Windows 10 did the job it needed to do
As Bott puts it:
Despite the occasional twists and turns that Windows 10 has taken in the past five years, it has accomplished its two overarching goals.
First, it erased the memory of Windows 8 and its confusing interface. For the overwhelming majority of Microsoft’s customers who decided to skip Windows 8 and stick with Windows 7, the transition was reasonably smooth. Even the naming decision, to skip Windows 9 and go straight to 10 was, in hindsight, pretty smart.
Second, it offered an upgrade path to customers who were still deploying Windows 7 in businesses. That alternative became extremely important when we zoomed past the official end-of-support date for Windows 7 in January 2020.
It’s taken Microsoft eight years to recover from Windows 8. In some ways it still hasn’t fully recovered. It may never recover. Windows 8 was the point where Microsoft no longer dominated.
Yes, things happened elsewhere. There was a switch from PCs to phones. But the key point is that when Microsoft faced the first serious competition to its dominance, it released a terrible operating system. Or at least the wrong operating system to meet the challenge.
Windows 10 didn’t halt Microsoft’s OS decline
If anything Windows 8 accelerated Microsoft’s OS decline.
Stockholm syndrome means that many Windows fans couldn’t see how awful Windows 8 was. Switching from 7 to 8 was a horrible experience. People who could put off those upgrades and stayed with 7. Today about 20 percent of all OS users still have Windows 7, an operating system that is well past its sell by date. Microsoft no longer supports 7.
Other users switched to Apple, Linux or even ChromeOS. And there was a huge switch away from computers to phones.
Before Windows 8 Microsoft’s OS market share was around 90 percent. Today it is about 35 percent and comes in behind Android. Apple is about 8.5 percent.
Windows 10 offers a credible path for Windows 7 users. The fact that so many users, especially enterprise users, have stuck with 7 tells you how bad things were for Microsoft.
To a degree Microsoft has lost interest in Windows. It no longer makes rivers of gold from the operating system. At least not directly. It remains important as a gateway for business users to move to the company’s Azure cloud services. But the days when Windows called the shots are over.
To a degree none of this would have been much of an issue before half the world started working from home on their laptops. For most people video conferencing was something of a nice-to-have after thought until now.
Suddenly we all notice the poor picture quality. What makes this worse is we now have much more bandwidth, so the internet connection is no longer the limiting factor. We also tend to have much higher resolution screens, so camera flaws are more noticeable.
Opportunity for better webcams
There is a huge opportunity for the first laptop maker to get this right. Apple is the most likely candidate here. It’s noticeable how much better the front facing camera is on a iPad Pro when compared with, say, the MacBook Air.
The 2020 12.9-inch iPad Pro has a seven megapixel front facing camera with all the trimmings. It handles 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second. In contrast, the 2020 MacBook Air camera is only 720p.
No doubt there is room for improvement now the laptop camera specification matters in ways it didn’t.
The most curious thing about Stern’s video story is that Apple put a better camera on MacBooks ten years ago. Of course they weren’t as thin then.
Of course there is a trade off between thin and camera performance. Laptop lids are thinner than phones or iPads. Apple’s obsession with thin meant laptop keyboard problems until recently. Now it has to rethink where cameras fit in this.
During the lockdown sales of devices like large screens and printers took off, but there was little interest in standalone webcams. People assume the laptop ones are going to do the job.
This post from 2020 looks at criticism of the iPad. It took another four years for the noise to subside and it still hasn’t entirely gone away.
Last week was the iPad’s tenth birthday. An elite group of Apple fans celebrated the date with a barrage of criticisms centred on the iPadOS operating system.
For many people and some tasks Apple’s tablet is the best computer ever made. It is more mobile than any laptop and, despite the high-powered whinging, for the most part is easy to use.
Yet a surprising number of high-profile Apple fans took to their blogs and news outlets to criticise the iPad.
In The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 at Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes of his disappointment:
“…Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential.”
Gruber has a lot to say on the subject. His blog post runs to 1100 words.
He isn’t the only high profile Apple commentator to criticise the iPad. His piece is here because it was the trigger for others to join the pile-on. If anything Ben Thompson’s Stratechery post is more critical.
Apple geeks dislike iPadOS
The nub of Gruber’s point is the iPad’s operating system. He explains here:
“Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s multitasking model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.”
The words, especially the last two sentences, are damning. Gruber may have focused on multitasking because his blog’s audience tends towards geeks and computing professional. For them multitasking is a big deal.
Of course iPads are not computers for the geek elite.
Until the last couple of years they were simple, lightweight, handy devices best suited to media consumption and basic tasks like dealing with email or writing.
That’s changed with the iPad Pro, they are now far better tools for media creation. In many cases they are now the best tool for media creation.
Multitasking
Multitasking is a nice thing to have on an iPad. It is not essential. It’s unlikely even half the people who own iPads ever use multitasking.
Moreover, iPads enjoyed their best sales in their early days long before anyone gave much thought to multitasking. It is something Apple has bolted on in recent times.
And that brings us to an oddity. It was the geeky, elite iPad users who constantly complained the iPad couldn’t do multitasking. When Apple delivered, they decided this was not the multitasking they had been calling for.
Few everyday users would choose or not choose an iPad because of multitasking. For that matter, few everyday users go for full multitasking on their laptops and desktops. It’ i a subject that matters most to a small segment of users who might be better off with other devices anyway.
Doing more than one thing at a time
That said, iPad multitasking is handy.
iPad multitasking is still relatively new. Apple added a basic form of multitasking in 2017. Then last year multitasking was bumped up to become more powerful and usable. This 2019 multitasking is what upset Gruber and the other Apple commentators.
That was in September. We’ve barely had time to come to terms with the new features.
If, like many iPad users, you often switch between a more conventional computer and Apple’s tablet, four months is not a lot of time to learn all the nuances of a major operating system update. It’s only a couple of days since I found a hitherto undiscovered multitasking feature. That is already paying off in terms of increased productivity.
There are some complexities to the multitasking user interface in some circumstances. But there are simpler ways to work with the functionality.
Where iPadOS scores
Some computing tasks still work better on a laptop or desktop computer. Few of them affect me in my daily work as a journalist. Many, many other iPad users have similar usage patterns. In my experience, I get through most of my work faster and with fewer roadblocks on an iPad compared to any laptop or desktop computer.
There is a clear productivity advantage.
The list of tasks iPad does not do well has now dwindled to the point where I could keep my MacBook in the cupboard and do most of my writing, website managing and other tasks with my iPad Pro.
For my needs, the iPad Pro is the productive choice.
Shortfalls
Where there are shortfalls, it is often because of poorly designed apps that have yet to adapt to the hardware. This is also true for touch-screen Microsoft Windows. There are iPadOS apps that are not as complete as their desktop equivalents, but a lot of desktop applications are bloated, over-featured and unnecessarily complex.
Gruber’s criticism is damning, but it’s not all negative. He finishes writing:
“> I like my iPad very much, and use it almost every day. But if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it.
“The iPad at 10 is, to me, a grave disappointment. Not because it’s “bad”, because it’s not bad — it’s great even — but because great though it is in so many ways, overall it has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one.
“> To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognise they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.”
In simple terms Gruber’s criticism boils down to the iPad not being a Mac. He takes us back to the computers versus tablet debate that went underground for a few years before coming back. In the Windows world this is answered by laptops that are also tablets.
Apple’s iPad is great. It is not perfect. There are questions to ask. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, sales have dropped away. Something needs fixing for sales to recover. It is unlikely that something is the “profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface”. After all, that update only happened four months ago, long after the sales decline started.
You don’t have to look hard to find similar stories elsewhere. A number appeared after Apple launched the MacBook Pro in late October.
Other Apple users used social media to wonder out loud about jumping to Windows or to announce an actual move.
And Windows users are thinking of moving to Mac.
On one level moving is easy
This level of fluidity is unprecedented. In many respects it has never been easier to move from Mac to Windows or Windows to Mac.
Y
et switching from one to the other or for that matter to Linux or a Chromebook can be trouble. It can be so much trouble that you need powerful reasons to move.
A missing HDMI port is not enough reason.2 At least not on its own.
If you’re a disgruntled MacBook Pro user you’d have to be crazy to spend up to NZ$6000 on a Surface Book because of a missing port. In comparison dongle costs are nothing.
Wrenching…
Wrench number one is that most long-term computer users have invested in one or more expensive apps that don’t necessarily make a good journey to the alternative operating system.
This is less of a problem now that many apps are cloud-based or purchased as a subscription. It’s not going to worry anyone who uses, say, Xero.
If, say, you move from a Mac to a Windows machine, and use Microsoft Office then you can kill the MacOS account and download the applications to your new Windows computer in a matter of minutes.
Cloud
You can keep your iCloud account active long after moving to Windows. Likewise, Microsoft OneDrive works well on Macs.
More specialist applications and games can be more troublesome.
There aren’t many third-party hardware devices still limited to only Apple or Windows. Printers, back-up drives, routers and so on can make the switch in minutes.
If you like a big screen or typing on a mechanical keyboard your old devices will all work with your new computer. Although you may need to buy a dongle to connect them to the ports on the new machine.
Phones
You may run into unforeseen compatibility problems between devices like phones or tablets.
iPhones and iPads play nice with Windows PCs and Macs, but the experience is much better when you are all Apple.
Likewise, the flow between your Android phone and your Windows laptop will be different if you switch to a Mac. Maybe not worse; different.
There will be minor niggles.
Standardisation and convergence mean from a hardware and software point of view moving from
Windows to Mac or Mac to Windows isn’t a big deal.
Brain
However, moving your brain from one way of thinking to another is harder.
This isn’t so much of a problem for casual users who don’t dive too deep into their operating system. There will be frustrating mysteries in their new system, but there already are in the old one.
More sophisticated users can struggle. All of us who work many hours each day with computers develop habits, learn shortcuts and productivity hacks to get more done in less time. These rarely translate from one operating system to another.
You’d be surprised how many you have accumulated over the years.
Peak productivity
It can take hours to get used to the basics of a new operating system, it can take months to get to peak productivity.
This is why moving can be trouble.
Within hours of firing up a new computer with a different OS you’ll take delight in features that were missing from your old one.
Not long after you’ll start to wonder why simple things that were so easy with your old computer are suddenly hard — or even seem impossible.
You have to build this learning curve into your planning before moving.
If you are unhappy with what you have, if your frustrations have reached boiling point or if you like the look of that fancy new computer then by all means move to another operating system.
While changing may be rewarding in the long-term, in the short-term it could be harder than you expect.
Apple introduced its butterfly laptop keyboard design for the 2015 12-inch MacBook. It is shallower than previous keyboards. The 2016 Apple MacBook Pro keyboard uses the same design.
The key action is less positive than on older Apple laptops like the MacBook Air or earlier MacBook Pros.
Put aside for one moment the Touch Bar that appears on most 2016 MacBook Pro models. What remains of the keyboard looks like those on Apple’s recent MacBooks.
The Force Touch trackpad on the 15-inch MacBook Pro is huge. Because of its size, the MacBook Pro keyboard sits further up the body, closer to the screen. This doesn’t make any difference to typing in practice.
Flush versus recessed keys
Although it has the same underlying design, it is not identical. On the 12-inch MacBook the keys are flush with the body. The new MacBook Pros have keys recessed a millimetre or so below the body.
Apple has improved the butterfly key action. There is more click and greater travel when you hit a key. You hit them harder.
The keys sound louder when you type. This audio feedback helps but I can’t articulate or measure how that works. In practice I found it all adds up to make typing and touch typing easier than on the 12-inch MacBooks.
MacBook Pro keyboard for touch typists
When I first used the 12-inch MacBook keyboard it took a while to adjust my touch typing technique. That’s not unusual, this happens every time I use a different machine or keyboard.
After a few hours I was typing with ease. I made a few more errors than before, but there was no performance hit. At that stage I decided the butterfly keyboard was an acceptable change.
Then I returned to the old MacBook Air keyboard. It was like swapping smart new shoes for comfortable slippers.
Although I didn’t get through my work faster, it felt right. There’s a more pleasing bounce to the keys that feels right or maybe it’s a matter of familiarity.
Comfy
There is less of a comfy slippers effect moving back and forth between the 2016 MacBook Pro and the Air. It could be down to what some describe as muscle memory.
My error rate is still higher on the new keyboard, but not as high as it was on the 12-inch MacBooks. Unlike then, this time I’m certain that it will soon be back to normal.
The new keyboard is not without flaws. The up and down arrow keys are too small and close-packed. They are hard to use. There’s a good chance you’ll hit the wrong one by accident. Yet with the trackpad, there is less need for arrow keys.
Flat, less travel keyboards seem to be a feature of 2016 premium laptops.
Surface Book comparison
Microsoft echoes some aspects of the butterfly keyboard in its Surface Book. The MacBook Pro and Surface Book have a different fundamental design. They come from different philosophies of what modern laptops should be. Yet in many ways they are head to head rivals.
Both are flat, both keyboards have a hard feel. If anything the Surface Book keyboard has a better layout and spacing. In practice the typing experience is similar.
Some other reviewers are unhappy about the missing esc key. It always turns up on the Touch Bar when you need it, but having a conventional esc key would be better.
You might argue that a MacBook Pro is not the device for someone who spends a lot of time typing so all this is academic. That view is nonsense. A keyboard is why you buy a computer instead of a tablet. It is not an essential component it is the essential component.
There is always a payoff between portability and function with laptop keyboards. Apple has balanced the two well here. You may find better keyboard experiences elsewhere. Yet the MacBook Pro keyboard goes well beyond being an acceptable compromise given the size and weight. It’s a worthy keyboard for a Pro laptop.
The MacBook Pro and Surface Book have a different fundamental design. They come from different philosophies of what modern laptops should be. Yet in many ways they are head to head rivals. I’ll explore this idea in more depth elsewhere.
Stick the words computer-, net-, web-, online- or digital- directly in front of other words when describing something and you won’t scare the population half to death:
Computer-gaming
Net-gaming
Web-gaming
Online-gaming
Digital-gaming.
None of these are remotely frightening. They barely raise an eyebrow.
This is just as true when whatever being discussed has negative, or less than positive implications. You know these things aren’t necessarily good. They can be scary, but they’re not going to terrify anyone:
Computer-surveillance
Net-neutrality
Web-porn
Online-privacy
Digital-disruption
But when cyber is used as a prefix it is almost always viewed as something bad:
Cyber-bullying`
Cyber-crime
Cyber-sex
Cyber-war
Cyber-terrorism
Although it was big in the 1990s, the term cyberpunk is out of fashion. There may be pockets of geekdom where it is still celebrated, but as far as everyone else is concerned, it is faintly threatening.
Take me to cyber space
Even the innocent and increasingly anachronistic, cyberspace now sometimes carries faintly negative connotations. At least in some circles.
This is because we’ve become used to newspapers and TV reports using cyber as their favoured technology-bogeyman word.
That’s not always a bad thing. It’s a form of shorthand that flags what’s coming next.
Getting the attention of the great unwashed then warning them to take appropriate care with passwords, privacy and security can often be difficult.
Danger Will Robinson
So telling them in advance the story is scary at least gets a warning message across.
Likewise, those dreary, cliched clip art images of burglars in striped shirts and balaclavas sitting at computer terminals is another useful form of shorthand.
Sure it is crass and unimaginative. Yet people get the message that something’s afoot even if they switch off to the main story being told. And who can blame them for switching off? Often the stories are dull or incomprehensible to everyday folk.
“It started with the iPad Air. On that machine I got quite good at thumb typing in portrait mode. It’s nothing like touch typing but still pretty great to sit on an airplane and thumb my way through an outline or a pile of email.”
Like Sparks, I started with light thumb-typing on my iPad 2. Nothing more than tweets and simple return email one-liners. When the lighter, slightly smaller iPad Air arrived I graduated to thumb-typing for longer stretches.
Using a real keyboard with an iPad
For anything more than a paragraph, I needed a physical keyboard. At least I thought so. Either I’d attach one of the many sample keyboards people had sent me to the iPad Air or I’d use the MacBook keyboard.
Sparks goes on:
“Speaking of airplanes, I recently took a flight where I was seated right between the window and a big guy that made pulling down the tray and using my iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard cover impossible.
“I had four hours on that plane and was determined not to thrown in the towel. So I placed the iPad on my lap and started typing. I then went into one of those hypnotic work-states that I often feel on airplanes and before I knew it the pilot announced we were about to land.”
This echoes my first serious glass typing session. I was on a plane. While crammed in economy I tapped out an entire feature on the iPad Air screen keyboard. Like Sparks I hit the writing zone and tapped into a familiar well of productivity but in an unfamiliar setting.
Phoning it in
Something similar happened with an iPhone 6 Plus. Although it worked at a pinch, the iPad is a far better writing device, even in a cramped space.
Unlike Sparks who found himself writing on screen with the larger iPad Pro, my typing-on-glass-while-flying epiphany was thumb-typing on an iPad Air held in the portrait position.
I’ve used the 12.9-inch iPad Pro in the way Sparks describes. It works for me. At a pinch I can also do the same on the 9.7-inch iPad if I lay it flat in the landscape orientation and use the larger size keyboard.
Trains and boats and planes
Yet, I’ve become so adept at portrait orientation thumb-typing, it’s now my preferred way of working on an iPad. I find it is perfect for planes. I’ve done the same on railway journeys, the Birkenhead-to-Auckland ferry and, less successful, while riding in an airport bus.
It works for me in airport lounges, cafes and even when I’m sitting in an office reception before a meeting or in a quiet room at a conference. Sometimes I’ll write this way sitting at home on the sofa.
When I was recently in bed with ’flu, I managed to type a long-form newspaper feature this way.
I wouldn’t say it trumps writing on the MacBook Air using a full typewriter keyboard, but it isn’t far behind. By the way, I’m writing this blog post using the thumb and portrait mode technique on my 9.7-inch iPad Pro. The iPad keyboards are gathering dust.
Natural born killer technique
Writing this way on the iPad or iPad Pro now feels natural. At first thumb-typing was slow. Now I’m almost as fast as on a real keyboard. I’m a long-time touch typist, so my speeds there are good.
Achieving something close on a glass keyboard surprised me.
Typing on the iPad screen is more, not less, accurate. The iPad’s built-in spell checker almost never comes into play. I’ve no idea why I mistype less characters on the glass screen, but it’s real.
Another observation. As a touch typist, I don’t look at the typewriter keys when writing. My focus is on the screen. When thumb typing on glass, I do look at the keyboard. The distance from the on-screen keyboard to the text is only a few millimetres, so I can check my output as I go.
Application independent
iPad thumb-typing works well with all writing apps. I wrote this blog post using Byword, currently my favourite writing tool. I could equally have chosen Microsoft Word. Pages or iA Writer. They all work just fine.
In his post, Sparks says he still has pain points:
“Text selection is still far easier for me using a keyboard. Also, typing on glass at least once a day my finger accidentally hits the keyboard switch button which brings my work to a screeching halt. On that note if I were in charge, I’d make the keyboard selection button something where you had to press and hold to switch between keyboards.”
From manual typewriter to glass keyboard
I don’t have either of Sparks’ problems. I almost never use text selection during writing. I learnt to type on manual, paper-based typewriters. That means I’m disciplined about not constantly moving blocks of text.
My technique is to write, almost as a stream of consciousness. Years of experience mean I can structure a story in my head before starting. I write, then walk away for a breather before returning to edit the words. This, by the way, is a good technique. Unless you are pressed for time, do something else before self-editing.
I’ve not had Sparks’ problems hitting the wrong keys on the iPad screen keyboard. This surprises me, the individual keys on a 9.7-inch iPad screen in portrait mode are tiny, just a few millimeters square. And yet I rarely mistype.
There are no pain points for me. I’m more than ready to give up attaching a keyboard to the smaller iPad Pro. It’s reached the point where I can now attend a press conference or interview armed with nothing but an iPad and come away with clean copy.
For me, the iPad screen keyboard is a productivity boost. The story you’re reading now is around a thousand words long. I wrote the first draft on my iPad in relative comfort in about 45 minutes. I doubt I could do better on the MacBook with a full keyboard.
