New Zealand Colonist and Port Nicholson Advertiser

The New Zealand Colonist and Port Nicholson Advertiser illustrates the factionalism and divergent interests of the early Wellington colonial community. The newspaper was published to counter the New Zealand Company's New Zealand Gazette.

The Gazette had been established in August 1839 by Samuel Revans who was a staunch friend and advocate of the Company. The Gazette's editorial policy was extremely pro-Company. Revans believed that serving the interests of the Company would also serve the interests of the settlement and the settlers. To this end he deliberately censored anti-Company opinions. His championing of the Company became increasingly unpopular as the settlers' and the Company's views and interests diverged.

The Gazette's factional and increasingly anti-settler position eventually led to a group of fifty local merchants and landowners establishing a rival paper, the New Zealand Colonist. It started in August 1842 and was published bi-weekly.

As the Colonist was intended to be opposition for the Gazette it took a strongly anti-Gazette and pro-settler editorial position. However the Colonist struggled financially from the beginning and its position was made more difficult by lack of support from the Company, which was one of the main sources of revenue in the fledgling colony.

The Colonist stopped publication exactly a year after it began, mainly due to poor sales combined with a ruinous fire in its Lambton Quay office. Patrick Day (The Making of the New Zealand Press, 1990) says that "the failure of the small settlement to support a second newspaper against the established Gazette deprived Wellington of an able and largely disinterested voice."

Revans soon fell out with the Company and, growing bored with the venture, closed the New Zealand Gazette in September 1844.