Either Victoria University is lying about its World Ranking, or its managers can't calculate percentages.

The QS World University Rankings 2025 say, "This year’s ranking is the largest ever, featuring over 1,500 universities". Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, sits at number 244, putting it within only the top 20% of those rankings. What does Victoria say about this matter? "Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University is in the top 1% of the world’s universities for 15 subjects". What is the truth? Victoria has found a handful of subjects where it ranks in the top 150 of the QS subject ranking list. To express that number as a percentage works as follows: 150 / 1,500 = 10%. Yes, top 10%, not top 1%, for those subjects. Victoria is either not telling the truth or it can't calculate percentages. My understanding of what Victoria has done is it to divide 150 by 18,000 (not 1,500). Why? Because in 2024 it stated, "The latest QS World Rankings place the University in the top 245 of the world’s 18,000 universities". But QS did not rank 18,000 "world" universities (that number is made up and bogus). It ranked 1,500. Given the aim of Universities is a search for the truth, Victoria should top these PR, marketing & communications games that are designed to hide the truth. Looks to me like its trying to attract more students for financial gain by misleading them as to its world ranking.

Turning around NZ for a few million $ by buying the NZ Herald is the Best Deal Ever. Calling on all Investors to fire the going-nowhere, lost Herald Board.

A private investor with $10 million has bought 10% of NZ Media and Entertainment, which owns the Herald. Anyone who reads that paper knows its boring, failing and is serving no purpose. Other investors should buy more stock and overthrow the old guard. Introducing refreshing ideas into our domestic scene has become a requirement. The reasons a potential investor should consider doing so are set out below. The article is based on the original version that the National Business Review commissioned me to write a few years ago. Since this Blog has many more readers since then, and I've put effort into revising the article to make it more relevant to what's going on these days, here it is again:

"There once was a time when the owners of big newspapers were amongst the wealthiest, most powerful, folks in town. They could swing elections. Australia had the likes of the Packers, Fairfaxes and Murdochs. New Zealand had the Hortons at the Herald. Votes hinged on the opinions in their papers. We know what happened next. The Internet was invented and destroyed the papers. Now people don’t read them much. Social media rules. Owners lost influence. Except that's not true. Newspaper circulation has been steadily declining around the world for the past 60 years. The internet has had no bigger impact on their distribution numbers than inventions like wireless radio, broadcast television and cable TV.

What the internet did do was collapse newspaper profits. It had little impact on readership of their news content. But how? The web wiped out the revenues the papers got from their classified advertisements. Between 1994 and 2010 the average annual decline in the New York Times readership was only ½% per year. But over that period it lost 90% of classified revenues. In this country, as well as overseas, those ads went to online platforms like Trade Me. The explanation for such a phenomenon isn’t obvious. Why haven’t people dropped reading the old names in news, just like they dropped them for their classifieds?

What seems to be happening is that people still choose to read news and opinion from old-time sources and brand names they know. In NZ, the National Business Review runs the by-line “The Authority Since 1970” on its front page. By contrast, when it comes to exchanging goods & services, buying and selling, the main thing that counts to people is being part of a big market, where loads of others list their products and trade. Which is what Trade Me offers. That is, whilst the newspapers lost nearly all of their classifieds to online platforms that were geared up to process large numbers of deals with traders, the extent to which we still value the “old names” in the news business has remained largely intact.

This argument isn’t original. It was made by an acquaintance of mine who writes about the media industry and used to invite Rupert Murdoch to his classes as a guest speaker in the US. It raises a remarkable question. If you’ve ever been upset by media bias in this country and would like to change that state of affairs, why don’t you simply buy a major news outlet? Since they’re going cheap. Not long ago, to buy the Herald, which is viewed by nearly 2 million Kiwis, would've cost you a billion dollars. How do we know? That’s what Trade Me, which took all of its classified advertising business, was valued at when bought by Apex Partners. Due to losing such revenues, the Herald's now worth just a tiny sum. Another case in point is Stuff, which was sold by Nine Entertainment for $1 (plus its on-going liabilities, of course). Yet it’s viewed by between 1 and 2 million Kiwis.

Should you care about these matters and have money to spare, help buy the NZ Herald. It is going for a song. Install decent staff & you can reverse its decline. The new trick to making money out of it is to connect its 2 million viewers together to allow them to exchange ideas & information, not directly try to sell them news content, something the Herald's Board is clueless about. Should you aim to achieve better outcomes in NZ by influencing beliefs, to respect the truth and educate people, then it could be your best investment ever".