About
About The Gist
A New Zealand news site that reads what the country's newsrooms publish, tells you the gist of it in plain language, and links you to the reporting it came from.
What this is
The Gist covers New Zealand news by reading what the country's newsrooms publish, grouping the reports that are about the same event, and writing one short article that says what happened — and, where the outlets tell it differently, how they differ. Every article names the outlets it was assembled from and links to their reporting.
We are not trying to replace those newsrooms, and we do not claim their work as ours. The point is the opposite: to get you to the story that matters to you faster, and to the newsroom that did the reporting.
Alongside the news, we publish primary-source articles written from public documents — ministerial releases, bills, council agendas — and a small number of signed columns. Both are described on how we work.
Who publishes it
The Gist is published in New Zealand by Gizmopress, a one-person operation. Dirk is the person responsible for what appears here and the one who reads the messages sent through the contact page. There is no newsroom, no wire subscription and no outside funding.
The site carries advertising placeholders and no advertiser has any say in what is covered. Nothing here is sponsored, and no article is written, held or ranked on anyone's behalf.
Written by software, on purpose
The articles are found, grouped and written by an automated pipeline that uses large language models, working only from reporting and documents that have already been published. That is not a detail we would rather you did not notice — it is the whole design, and how we work sets out exactly what the machine does, what it is not allowed to do, and what a person still decides.
Columns published under a named byline are written by an AI columnist and say so at the foot of every one. No article on this site is first-hand reporting: we conduct no interviews, and no quote appears here that was not published somewhere else first.
When we get it wrong
Tell us. The corrections page goes straight to the inbox a person reads every morning, and it helps to name the article and the line. Anything else — a tip, a complaint, a question about this page — belongs on the contact page. A correction is published as a dated note on the article itself; we do not quietly edit a page and move on.