Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette

Alexandra’s first newspaper was the Otago Central Leader, which ran for a short time in the early 1880s. However, the town’s first long-term effort was the Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, a weekly newspaper which began publication in 1896. The first few years of the Herald have unfortunately not survived and the exact date of the first issue is unclear. It was probably published in the latter part of May 1896, as the Tuapeka Times from nearby Lawrence reported on 30 May 1896 that it had received the first issue of the Herald, which it described as being ‘creditably brought out’. The Herald was established by Henry Symes, the Town Clerk and later Mayor of Alexandra, with plant that had been used to produce the Teviot Herald and Roxburgh District Gazette.

J D Buchanan became editor of the Herald in 1898 and in the following year he took over ownership of the paper. Buchanan had previously been involved with the Mount Ida Chronicle and the Dunstan Times and after his arrival at the Alexandra Herald the Otago Witness noted it was now ‘a smartly got-up paper of eight pages, and claims to contain more columns of interesting reading matter than any other newspaper upon the goldfields’.

In the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century Alexandra developed rapidly, based on dredging for gold in nearby rivers. Under Buchanan and later, T H Cahill, the Herald shared in the increasing prosperity of the district.

In 1939 the Herald was purchased by Harold Stevens, owner of the rival Dunstan Times which was published in Clyde. The Herald was merged with the Dunstan Times and the Queenstown-based Lake County Mail to form the Central Otago News in 1948, a bi-weekly publication which circulated widely throughout Central Otago. The Stevens family continued to have a close association with the newspaper for many years, in particular Geoff Stevens as managing director and Syd Stevens as editor.

As of 2015, the News is still being published. It is part of the Allied Press group, publisher of the Otago Daily Times, and is circulated weekly to over 21,500 homes in the Central Otago area.