How this site came to be

A journalist came to our place to do a story on an art gallery hidden in plain sight on Waiheke. Over dinner, conversation turned to the pending closing of Newshub. Why, we asked, is no one discussing funding the news through the ISP bills? It seemed obvious enough. 95% of Kiwis now use the internet on phone, laptop or desktop, and adding a license fee would be no more difficult than the current GST that is on every monthly or prepaid bill. Seems no one asked.

So I followed up with a summary of the idea, sent it to the journalist but also to her former tutor at AUT, Greg Treadwell, who I know and greatly respect. Greg introduced me to the Better Public Media Trust and that conversation was most productive. I agreed to set up a quick web site that would change as a forum to discuss the ideas caused the content to evolve. The advantage of a web site over a forum is knowing you are looking at the current state of the conversation, rather than having to find the present status buried in threads.

While I have written the occasional Op-Ed for the local paper, Gulf News, and on a few occasions in the Herald and others, mostly I am just one of the people who relies on news to make sense of the world and its people. I read the various NZ outlets, then go on to read the BBC and Guardian, followed by the NY Times, then Fox News to get a taste for how far news has become views. If I really want to get dizzy, I read Fox and Huffington Post back-to-back on the same story.

A constitutional scholar by training, I value freedom of the press, and mourn when it is lost in clickbait and the bias that now seems to overlay in shades of blue, red, green and other colours of partisanship.

I will maintain this site as long as it is useful, but will be happy to turn over ownership of the domain name (newsfund.nz is a pretty good name for twenty bucks) when an organisation arises to take over protection of what I am calling the 4^th Estate.

Claude Lewenz