The Founder Says Goodbye

Setting up the original plant, much of it home-made, gathering the photographs, and producing that first issue of "Gisborne Photo News" was a daunting task, and occupied nearly all the first half of 1954. The final chore before the magazine was "put to bed," as they say in the newspaper game, was to write a brief but hopeful note introducing the venture to its prospective readers.

"Photo News" was a completely new concept in magazine publishing, an attempt to distil the essence of community life and times in a publication which was essentially photographic. The first tryout was in a small North Canterbury town, Rangiora, in 1953, where it lost money and was abandoned. The enterprise was then transferred to Gisborne, a much larger town, and tried again, using the rear part of an old brick house in Aberdeen Road as a factory. That first issue sold only 900 copies, but with each succeeding month the number increased, ultimately reaching over 8000.

Now the time has come to write a note of a different kind, bidding farewell to the little magazine which for the past 21 years has been so much a part of the Gisborne scene. It is the last of a chain of similar magazines which grew from that shaky start, which we published in New Plymouth, Wanganui, Nelson, Tauranga, Whangarei, Rotorua and Palmerston North, and which other people at various times, imitating our success, published in Auckland, Hamilton, Napier, Lower Hutt, Blenheim, the West Coast, Christchurch, Timaru, Dunedin and Invercargill.

The concept of "Photo News" was unique and, like anything new, it had to put up with all the discouragement that experts could bring to it. But success came in spite of experts, simply because the magazine soon forged a bond with its readers so strong that when its early existence was threatened by import restrictions, a number of them actually started a public petition to save its life.

That kind of affection makes it hard now to sever the ties which have been our life-blood for so many years. A whole generation has grown up in Gisborne never knowing the city without its "Photo News". There are families with all 256 of them, and with this one, 257. They overflow into attics and garages, and are dusted off at intervals for nostalgic re-reading. This is the legacy we leave – a shelf-ful of magazines, which have their value.

That, and a thriving colour printing business in Derby Street, developed to replace the magazines, and now nationally well-known.

King Canute couldn't stop the tide, and we haven't been able to fend off the inexorable rise in costs which has now engulfed "Photo News". We can but say, on behalf of Logan Publishing Company, thank you to all our readers, for the exceptional loyalty you have shown to the magazine over the years. I am personally saddened that we cannot continue to justify that loyalty.

Yours sincerely, Bob Logan.

Christchurch, 2/10/75.

Postscript – If there is an inscription to be carved on our headstone, perhaps it should include a couple of modest items for the history books, since one of the most interesting things about "Photo News" was that it was an innovator. It was, for example, the first regular publication in New Zealand to use the photo-litho offset printing process, and helped pioneer many of the developments in that field which are now commonplace in the industry. And it was among the first, if not the very first, to introduce four-colour covers on production run New Zealand magazines.