CathNews New Zealand and Pacific publishes news about and of interest to the Catholic Church. It’s primary focus is New Zealand and the South Pacific.

CathNews is published at twice-weekly and is delivered to you free either by email newsletter, Twitter, Facebook and RSS.

www.cathnews.co.nz

CathNews was designed by John Murphy and developed by Michael Homer of the New Zealand Marist Internet Ministry. It is published by Church Resources Ltd and complied by Denis O’Hagan and John Murphy.

As well as signing up yourself, we’d love any help you can give by recommending it to a friend or colleague

We are also looking for people to provide news that is of interest to the church in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. You don’t have to write anything, there is an opportunity to do so if you wish.

• If you happen to come across something on the web which is interesting, [news, opinion or features] send the link  to denis@cathnews.co.nz
• Send original news regarding the church or society in your region or nation to denis@cathnews.co.nz
• Provide a short opinion piece on a matter of interest to denis@cathnews.co.nz
• Provide copies of your newsletters or bulletins to denis@cathnews.co.nz
• Tell denis@cathnews.co.nz about websites that may be a source of useful information   

Further Information

CathNews New Zealand and Pacific aims to be a trusted and up-to-date observer, reporter and commenter of news in the South Pacific, New Zealand and from around the world. It looks to engage people interested in issues that impact the Church as well as issues that are impacted by the Church.

CathNews looks to

• share news of the Church elsewhere which is relevant or is potentially of interest locally
• enable content to be sensitive to the local Church
• give voice to the issues the Church is facing

What makes CathNews New Zealand and CathNews Pacific a little different is it is published twice-weekly on the Web and is delivered free to subscribers by email, on Facebook, Twitter and by a RSS feed.Currently no other Catholic publications in New Zealand or in the South Pacific

• delivers its content in these ways
• publishes as frequently, and
• covers the “hard” news that CathNews does.

The concept of CathNews is not a new one, CathNews Australia has been around for some years and for the past couple of years John Murphy has been working with the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) and as part of a team has been responsible for a range of Asian versions of CathNews.

CathNews New Zealand and Pacific has a good working relationship with UCAN, and mid way through 2010, Denis O’Hagan was a guest of UCAN and joined other CathNews and UCAN editors in Bangkok at their week-long annual in-service training, which is also designed to help build up commaradre between the editors.

In 2009 – 2010 years working with UCAN, Google Analytics indicated that across the UCAN suite of News sites, traffic trebled to reach 150,000 visitors a month and 240,000 page views. UCAN’s premier site, www.ucanews.com jumped 60,000 places among sites whose traffic is compared. There are few Catholic sites with higher ratings, Zenit, Catholic News Service (USA) and the Irish Jesuit site, Sacred Space.