First issue of New Zealand Listener published

Free to all radio licence holders, the New Zealand Listener soon expanded beyond its original brief to publicise radio programmes. Today it is the country’s only national weekly current affairs and entertainment magazine.

‘To what purpose is this waste?’, asked one disgruntled reader in 1939. Fortunately he was in the minority, and the Listener was welcomed by many as a cut above the alternative, the gossipy Radio Rag.

Founding editor Oliver Duff and his successor, Monte Holcroft, established a reputation for sturdy independence. Famous for his editorials, Holcroft was called into the office of the assistant director of broadcasting in 1956 after taking a stand against the British seizure of the Suez Canal – a bold move for the official journal of the government’s New Zealand Broadcasting Service. In 1990 the Listener was sold to New Zealand Magazines, and it is now published by the Hamburg-based Bauer Media Group.

From major stories to RWH’s famous crossword, the Listener has published the serious, the trivial and everything in between. Features such as a 1939 war diary about clothes for the well-dressed soldier, Aunt Daisy’s instructions for cooking a swan, and the recent ‘Power Lists’ of influential New Zealanders have traced our changing preoccupations over the years.

From the outset the arts have been a major focus for the Listener, which has published works by leading figures such as James K. Baxter, Janet Frame and Maurice Shadbolt.

The Listener’s paid circulation peaked at 375,885 in 1982. Some feared its demise when it lost its monopoly on programme schedules in the free-market 1980s, but it adapted and survived. In 2015 it remains one of New Zealand’s top-selling magazines, with a circulation of about 51,000.