After 131 year, NZPA has filed its last story. The agency had 26 subscribing newspapers, large and small, when it got going in 1879-80 - first as the United Press Association and then as NZPA in 1942.
That number doubled quickly, rose to 71 in 1907 and peaked at 74 by the end of World War 1.
Many smaller newspapers failed over the years and during the past two or three decades the extinction of most city evening newspapers and small-town dailies has reflected falling circulation in a television and internet age.
NZPA had just 26 member newspapers when it became a casualty itself.
At its founding NZPA began an association with the government-owed Post and Telegraph (P&T) that lasted about 100 years, the Post Office carrying the agency's news on its new and expanding telegraph network.
When this reporter first began at NZPA in 1958 the small news staff worked out of a cubby-hole office on the first floor of Wellington's General Post Office, a building now a hotel site.
Up the corridor a huge number of telegraph staff sat at banks of desks, gluing gummed tape to forms that became telegrams.
Copy from newspapers became essentially long telegrams, delivered to NZPA, edited and returned to the telegraph officers - via old-fashioned pneumatic tubes - for reformatting and transmission over the P&T's wires to all newspapers.
Race results from some country tracks still came via Morse code direct from the course, taken down in copper-plate handwriting by white-haired operators.
Outside the main centres telegraph offices throughout New Zealand kept business hours and if NZPA wanted news at night from smaller towns, a telegraph reopening had to be arranged.
The telephone was rarely used. Anyway it wasn't much use. As recently as the mid-1970s when the P&T fell under the state-owned enterprise umbrella, lines were always clogged.
A call, say, to the New Zealand Herald in Auckland, would invariably be answered by a harried toll operator: "I'm sorry, there's a 45-minute delay on calls to Auckland tonight." Pleas that this was an urgent news call met a stony silence.
With the owners' approval, NZPA began to strike out on its own and grow in the 1970s, leasing its own circuits and using its own operators for news transmission. Control of its own destiny at last.
The association had long had its own staff reporting in the Press Gallery in Parliament Buildings, but began to expand news coverage dramatically in the mid-1980s, establishing reporting, sports and finance desks to produce its own copy to supplement news from member newspapers.
An increasing flow of news landed from a growing staff overseas. NZPA maintained a Sydney office from 1888 until the mid-1950s, then in Melbourne (1956-63) and then back to Sydney as its sister news agency Australian Associated Press moved from the one city to the other.
Alan Mitchell, an expat New Zealander, became NZPA's first correspondent in London in 1942, reporting the deeds of New Zealand airmen and sailors based there during the war. He had such a good working relationship with wartime High Commissioner Bill Jordan that Jordan leaped into action to have a wing commander, who wouldn't permit Mitchell on his base, sacked.
Mitchell remained in the London office, working out of the Reuters premises, the British news agency of which NZPA became a partner in 1946, until 1965 when NZPA made its first appointment of a Wellington-based journalist to the Commonwealth's capital.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the heyday of NZPA's overseas correspondents, NZPA had two staffers in London, and one in Sydney (later two), Asia (Singapore first, then Hong Kong) and Washington DC.
Strong NZPA teams covered Olympic and Commonwealth Games on many occasions, providing the bulk of coverage that appeared in New Zealand newspapers. And of course rugby and cricket teams were accompanied by NZPA staffers.
In the 1990s and early 2000s as the money screws tightened the correspondents were gradually called home and NZPA-owned houses in London and Sydney sold. At the closedown one lone correspondent remained - in Sydney, mainly covering sport.
David Barber, the only NZPA journalist to have been based in all four posts, filed reports from about 40 countries during his stints overseas.
Down the years all those correspondents reported thousands of wide-ranging stories from sports and politics to general news stories with a uniquely New Zealand perspective and flavour, many of which were not, and still are not, covered by foreign news agencies.
For example, the late Mike Robson (later the boss of INL newspapers - now Fairfax) covered from London, Brussels and elsewhere the story of Britain's entry into the European Common Market, its effect on New Zealand's trade access and the many ministerial visits to Europe to protect New Zealand interests.
Phillip Melchior filed day-after-day spell-binding copy from Lancaster Castle during the 1980 Mr Asia murder trial in England.
More than anything, the transformation of communications in recent decades changed the face of reporting.
This reporter carried a first-generation "laptop" down the mile-long corridors of Los Angeles Airport in 1979. It weighed 13kg but it did hook up to a telephone and transmit, if it worked.
Alan Graham, covering the New Zealand cricket tour of Pakistan in 1976, wrote and carried on foot in stifling heat, humidity and dust his pre-play, lunch, tea and stumps reports four times a day to a post office 2km from the ground.
At one venue telex was provided but Graham arrived at the press box to find the machine in pieces, from one of which a wire disappeared down the side of the building, across a car park, into a desert and finally into the jungle.
Amazingly the elderly operator had it all back together by the start of play - and it worked, the dial-up to Wellington through the jungle signalling ZEAPRESS, NZPA's answer-back.
Sports writer Ron Palenski overcame many filing difficulties.
His toughest: Saarijarvi in central Finland where he covered John Walker, running and being beaten in 1976 by then unknown Englishman Steve Ovett. His hotel had a telex with an attached tape perforator but no-one knew how to work it.
The management permitted Palenski to try. He typed his story on paper (yes, reporters used those old-fangled typewriters in those days) then sat down at the telex keyboard to input the copy and cut a paper tape.
He hadn't reckoned on the Finnish keyboard, vastly different in configuration from the normal English layout. It was a slow and laborious process to produce a tape before feeding it into the telex for a call to Wellington, an operation he repeated over the four days of the assignment.
"Thank God for Reuters," he remembers. Wherever Reuters had offices NZPA was able to deliver copy for transmission to New Zealand.
Now it's all over.
No longer will the attribution "NZPA" appear at the end of newspaper and website stories.
