SHAKE-UPS & SHOCK WAVES
No one used the term “disrupters” in the early 1970s. But if they had, it would surely have been applied to a bunch of audacious young entrepreneurs from Wellington who took the gamble of launching a new national newspaper.
In business parlance, a disrupter is a new player who upsets conventional ways of doing things. Amazon, Netflix and TradeMe were classic disrupters – and so, although on an infinitely smaller scale, were the founders of the National Business Review.
Like the pirate radio station Radio Hauraki, launched four years before, NBR was driven by the perception that complacent established players were not meeting the needs of the market. But whereas Radio Hauraki pushed back against a stodgy state broadcasting monopoly, NBR sought to exploit a gap in news and commentary about business and political affairs.
The Wellington-based company directors who controlled the business sector had little to fear from the media.
The paper’s story is told in a book published to coincide with ’s 50th anniversary. Written by Wellington lawyer Hugh Rennie QC, who chaired the paper’s board during a heady and recalls what now seems an almost other-worldly era when the New Zealand economy was one of the most sheltered in the world, business was stifled by sclerotic state regulation and journalists chafed with frustration in their attempts to expose rogue companies protected by restrictive defamation laws.
