I very much doubt it, given recent developments . . . Fairfax setting up subbing hubs, the unstoppable flood of instant news coming to us via the Web, our mobiles, PDAs and radio, and the long-term trend of falling circulations and rising costs.

The truth is, for its size, New Zealand has too much of many things out in the provinces – rugby teams, international ports, list MPs. Not to mention “celebrity” mayors.

Beyond the five metro dailies I can see a time within the next decade when our smaller dailies are reborn as weekly newspapers.  It makes more economic sense for our newspaper owners, and advertisers, to concentrate resources on the bigger dailies and increasing their circulation footprint.

Ten years ago, while a senior journalist on the Evening Post, I suggested to the then management there was value in having universal travel and feature pages across their titles.  “Not on our watch,” was the response.

Since then, of course, the homogenisation of Fairfax news has gathered momentum: just look at BusinessDay, shared feature stories, television pages, pooling sports journalists, central subbing hubs.

The traditionalists will rant and rave but that will not stem the tide of change.  New Zealand’s community papers – beyond the excellent Mountain Scene in Queenstown and a few other notable exceptions – are more snooze papers than news papers.  Hopefully that will change as the daily titles don weekly cloaks.

Compare our weekly newspaper scene to the United Kingdom, with its extremely strong weeklies.  There it’s often the weeklies that beat their daily rivals to breaking strong local news and sports stories.

My journalism career began in the last days of hot metal on the Otago Daily Times in the late 1970s; later I swapped typewriters for computers, paste up for digital outputting; I worked on Fleet Street’s first colour newspaper and helped to launch the world’s first free daily newspaper.  If I’ve learnt one thing during that time it’s that there’s always a new way of delivering news.