The coverage of the flu in the New Zealand Herald, which is published in Auckland and is one of the country’s popular dailies, might be best described as feast or famine. As one of the first countries to identify case of H1N1 outside of North America, the story quickly made headlines. The Herald ran six front-page stories in the first four days. The early articles all focused internally, dealing mainly with the H1N1 scare created by a group of New Zealand students who had just returned home from a trip to Mexico.

After April 30, however, the coverage vanished.