In the pink
Hanmer Springs’ unlikely paper and its unlikelier editor
The note read, “You were warned. I’m going to break both your f...ing legs”. Richard Tapper, the long-standing editor of the even longer-standing Hanmer Springs community newspaper The Pinkie, went immediately to the police Such a threat against the media could not be tolerated.
But a few days later, Tapper cracked the case himself. At a bowls tournament in the village, he bumped into one of his best advertisers. “Did you get my message?” she asked. Tapper thought, “Oh shit.”
“I took a photo of her running in one of the marathons we have here,” he explained. “And she said, ‘If you publish that photo I'll break both your f…ing legs.’ And it's been a standing joke ever since.”
Tapper never ran the picture, but Hanmer is a small town, so when the woman inevitably popped up in the background of a photo for another story (about local kids vaping), she made good on her ‘threat’.
You can almost see the headline: ‘Joke threat prompts police complaint’. It’s the sort of thing that might run in The Pinkie, but if it does, Tapper, 76, won’t write it.
After 17 years, poor health is forcing him to step down.
His farewell editorial ran on March 12. “I have enjoyed the seventeen years of producing The Pinkie,” it read. “And I step away with some reluctance.”
The Pinkie is one of the oldest publications of its kind: A hyper-local New Zealand community newspaper, published continuously for nearly a century.
The first edition appeared in 1930. A single sheet of news, printed on pink paper – The Pinkie. By the 1970s it had grown to cover both sides of the pink sheet, but was still more of a newsletter. (From the September 29, 1972, edition: The Waiau Rugby Football Club invites Hanmer players, friends and supporters to their annual ball on Oct 14 at Waiau Hall. Good supper & band. Tickets $8, Double.)
Tapper came to it by chance. Born and raised in Hanmer Springs, he spent most of his adult life elsewhere, travelling with a peripatetic zeal. He has been to 108 countries. “I’m cheating,” he said. “I went to the Soviet Union and I can now count that as six countries.”
He got his start in journalism at the Christchurch Star in 1964 but quickly sold out to advertising.
“I went from making £6 a week to £12 a week.”
Soon after he was in Sydney, “chasing a woman” (Tapper admitted to an indeterminate number of ex-wives), where he got into business with Llewellyn Thomas, son of Dylan. Not as famous as his poet father, but nearly as eloquent and just as fond of a drink.
Tapper remembered them being called to a lunchtime meeting with the egg marketing board.
“We'd already had a few wines,” he said. “The chairman of the board put his hand down on the table and said, ‘Give us a slogan young man’ ... Llewellyn opened one eye and said, ‘Second best lay in town’. We didn't get that job.”
India, then Spain. He ran a restaurant in Mallorca for years. His last job before returning home in 2000 was as a deckhand on a sport fishing boat on Lord Howe Island.
Before The Pinkie, his only other foray back into journalism had been in Vietnam at the height of the war. He was working for US network ABC but said they didn’t run anything he filed because it was too antiwar. He was banished to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, where he made more of a mark. “I was back about four or five years ago and I had a look at the foreign correspondents club. My bullet holes are still in the ceiling.”
Sorry?
“Yeah, it was a bit of a wild west town in those days. The foreign correspondents club was along the riverfront. You could sit there and watch the sun go down … We had nothing much to do but shoot the sunset.”
When he bought The Pinkie from the Hanmer Spring Business Association it was a four-page publication. It’s now five times that. It survived Covid, rival start-ups and the bête noir of all 21st century media – big tech.
“We were going along very nicely and then along came Facebook,” Tapper said. “A lot of advertisers went over because it was free. So I had to do something.
“Up until then we used to sell it for $2 a copy. So I made it free and then started the website.”
For a free weekly based in a North Canterbury village (population 1140), The Pinkie has a formidable online presence. Every issue goes live on its sleek website on a Monday and is emailed to about 700 subscribers, many of them out-of-towners with holiday homes in Hanmer.
The only official distribution point for hard copies is the local supermarket, but The Press had no trouble finding the latest edition at nearby cafés and restaurants.
Perhaps half of its pages are filled with advertising, although Tapper is firm that The Pinkie’s new owner must continue his policy of letting local charities and clubs run ads for free.
“The only [way] to succeed with a small publication like this is to be local and to be fiercely local,” he said.
“And especially to look after the local organisations and make sure that they have a voice … Our philosophy has always been if they don't charge for it, we don't charge them.”
Then there is the report from the primary school, the quiz and the recipe of the week (Tapper will continue to provide the latter two). And, hopefully, ongoing robust coverage of local issues, like Hanmer’s recent spate of power cuts. (Pinkie headline, March 5, ‘Power Outages Have Become Ludicrous’).
“I have had an editorial policy of writing what I think,” Tapper said. “Without going too far overboard.”
Tapper’s final issue of The Pinkie ran on March 26. Reece Gardner is the new editor.