<i>King Country News</i> editor Heather Carston steps down this week.
FORTY-ONE years is the end of an era for King Country News editor Heather Carston as she stepped down for the final time today. Looking back, there’s been a lot of changes in those years, from a line-up of old black Imperial typewriters, cuddled up with bakelite telephones, a pile of A5 brown paper and Box Brownie cameras, right down to the old-fashioned typesetting with a gigantic press in the bowels of the six-storey newspaper building of the Inverell Times in New South Wales where she started her cadetship. “I remember well when we started using computers back in the early 1980s – it was a small 10” green screen with yellow letters, very hard to read.” Community newspapers was where she started and while she’s had experience with everything from radio announcing to television programme production, magazine editing to daily features editor, her first love remains the community newspaper. “It is fitting to me that I finish my full-time career on one – and one as old and as established as the King Country News,” she said. “The importance of such papers can’t be emphasised enough. They are the community sentinels, their consciences. When all else fails to help get change made, or to acknowledge heroism, or to highlight the special or the needy, that is where your community paper shines through every time. “I particularly loved the story that will come out in the holiday issue about some rare first editions, one of which is 170 years old of a newspaper long forgotten. “Nothing else, not TV, not radio – nothing else will help people of tomorrow understand what happened today the way a community newspaper will.” Heather said she is proud of the product she leaves behind. “There’s been a lot of changes in the past two-and-a-half years. But they have all been for the better in the evolving, often difficult times we are faced with since the advent of Covid and the many consequences it has wrought on global and national levels. “At 117 years old, it is the oldest regional community newspaper in the country and I am just one of a line of editors who have taken it forward in all its forms and names across the years. “And because the people of the King Country love it as much as they do – I am sure it will be here for another century.” Heather’s plan moving forward is to continue with a career writing New Zealand-based fiction books (she has two published under a former married name), keep her hand in writing columns and a travel blog, and she and her husband will hit the road as a pair of travelling gypsies – Ken off chasing the South Island gold dream. It’s been a dream 10 years in the making. “In the meantime, I’d like to thank all those who have helped me make it the great paper it is as I leave it this week.”
KING Country News editor Heather Carston steps down this week.
