Extra! Extra!: How The People Made the News by journalist and historian David Hastings, takes us into the trenches of Auckland’s early newspaper wars, revealing a ruthless dimension of Auckland’s early media and business history.

Auckland’s newspaper wars in the nineteenth century were life or death struggles, with the odds heavily in favour of death. More than 30 attempts were made to start papers between the late 1840s and the mid 1880s and nearly all of them failed.

Some lasted just one or two issues and some for several years but only four made an indelible mark: the New Zealander, the Southern Cross, the New Zealand Herald and the Auckland Evening Star. The first two exhausted themselves in a war which lasted for 20 years. The other two survive into the 21st century; the Herald still comes out daily and the ghost of the Star– which folded in the 1990s – lives on in the masthead of the Sunday Star-Times.

“The longevity of these two papers masks the precariousness of their original position and their struggles to survive in a barren field crowded with competitors,” says author David Hastings.

“The combination of lean economic pickings and numerous rivals made the newspaper wars of nineteenth century Auckland especially ruthless. In the battles they fought no trick was too dirty and no insult was too scurrilous if they thought it would win them an advantage. As in all dirty wars, there were double crossings and some turncoats went from one side to the other and back again.”

Hastings has used this New Zealand story to explore big themes of how the media is shaped by social change through the study of forces and pressures at work in a microcosm.

“I wanted to do a study on the nineteenth-century newspapers to see if the perspective of someone who has actually worked in the industry would have anything to add to theoretical ideas about what has made newspapers what they are.” he says.

Based on diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs of people who worked in Auckland’s colonial newspapers as well as the papers themselves, Extra! Extra! is the story of how those wars played out and the people who fought the battles. But the central characters are the papers themselves which identified themselves with their communities and were forced to change and adapt as social standards changed.