Booze, smoke, psychopaths and sexual harassment: when journalism was fun

I was invited to talk to the Greytown Lions Club last night about my life in the media. At the end, someone said he thought my speech deserved a wider audience and asked if I was going to publish it. I didn’t intend to but then thought: it’s a piece of social history, so why not? So here it is.

I entered journalism straight from school. That was the way back then. Not now; you need a tertiary qualification, and preferably a university degree.

Why did I become a journalist? Probably because my mother had suggested it might be a good career for me because I was reasonably good at English, and I didn’t want to go to university. My burning passion was really music, but you couldn’t build a career on music. I had to satisfy myself with playing in bands on the side, which I did for several years.

I received my introduction to journalism in the reading room of the Evening Post in Willis St, Wellington. The reading room was where every word that went into the paper – everything, including all the classified ads and racing results – was checked before publication so that any errors could be picked up and corrected.

Reading rooms are gone now – history. Reporters are expected to correct their own mistakes. But don’t ask me how they’re expected to correct their errors if they don’t realise they made them in the first place.

My job title was copy holder – the lowest of the low. I worked alongside a more senior person called a proof reader. It was mind-numbingly tedious, menial work for which I was paid $21 a week – $23 if I was rostered to work a few hours extra on Saturday afternoons for the Sports Post, which came out late on Saturday and contained all the latest sports results.

I think the Evening Post management reasoned that if you could survive a year in the reading room, you could survive anything. But it was a good introduction to newspapers because it gave me an opportunity to observe how everything worked. It was also a fascinating place in human terms because of the weird and wonderful variety of people who worked there. The Evening Post reading room was a magnificent collection of cranks, oddballs and eccentrics – some likeable, others not so much.

Over in Mercer St, at the Dominion, where I worked later, the reading room also had a culture all its own, but a very different one. At the Dom, the readers tended to be long-haired dopeheads, dropouts, student radicals and anarchists.

Looking back now, I realise that the newspaper industry of that era had a wonderful tolerance of non-conformists. In the 1960s and 70s newsrooms were populated by a wondrous assortment of drunks, philanderers, egotists, neurotics, bohemians and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Many of them had the saving grace that they were articulate, well-read, well-informed and easy to like.

People gravitated to newspapers from all sorts of backgrounds and with all manner of personal idiosyncrasies. Newsrooms were smoke-stained and noisy from the clatter of typewriters and the barking of impatient chief reporters and subeditors. Today’s newsrooms seem bland and homogeneous by comparison, full of earnest people – mostly youngish middle-class university graduates – silently tapping away at keyboards. I bet we had far more fun.

University degrees were virtually unheard of in journalism. Most of the people I worked with came from working-class backgrounds and like me, got into journalism straight from school. But all that changed after the first journalism school was set up at Wellington Polytechnic in 1967. By the 1980s it had become virtually impossible to become a journalist without first completing an academic course.

That was a retrograde step. Journalism went from being something you learned on the job to something you were taught in a classroom. It also changed in the sense that it became more heavily based on theory rather than practice. It became subject to academic capture and we saw the intrusion of an ideological approach that encouraged budding journalists to think their primary purpose was to challenge the institutions of power rather than simply to provide people with important and useful information. 

Along the way, what the late Warwick Roger liked to call the Mongrel Factor – the dogged, hard-headed, competitive and slightly disreputable spirit that motivated some of the best reporters – fell out of favour. I’d have to scratch my head very hard these days to think of any reporters who qualify for the admirable term “mongrel”.

My first reporting job at the Evening Post, after I had escaped the reading room, involved covering the Wellington Magistrates Court. On a busy morning at the No. 1 Court there would be as many as six junior Evening Post reporters sitting at the press bench under the supervision of a more experienced hand named Fran Kitching, better known now as Dame Fran Wilde.

We covered every case that came up, taking it in turns to write our stories in long hand on copy paper. Every so often a messenger would turn up and take a bundle of stories back to the office. It sometimes took days or even weeks before some of those stories were published because unless they were particularly important or newsworthy, they would be set in type and kept until there was a convenient space in the paper for them.

We covered all cases apart from very minor traffic offences. That was a much fairer arrangement than we have now, when reporters are so thin on the ground that they have to cherry pick which court stories to cover. Reporting of the courts appears to have become quite random, with only major cases such as murder trials being guaranteed coverage.

From the point of view of defendants, it’s a lottery. Some criminals may go through the courts unnoticed by the media while others have their names splashed in the papers. You see this in the Wairarapa Times-Age, where weeks pass without a single court case being reported even though the local district court has been sitting. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, someone will be named and shamed on the front page. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for the criminals, but it’s not fair that some are publicly exposed while others escape scrutiny.

There’s also an important public interest element here. The reporting of criminal cases serves two purposes. One is that it serves the public good by alerting communities to the bad people in their midst. The other is that the fear of having their name in the paper can serve as a deterrent to criminals, especially in smaller communities where everyone knows everyone. But newsrooms have been so hollowed out that most of the time the court press bench is empty. New Zealand is hardly unique in this regard. The British journalist Nick Davies memorably wrote a few years ago that you were more likely to see a zebra in an English court than a reporter.

The Evening Post when I started there in 1968 was cosy, comfortable and complacent. It felt a bit like a government department but it was highly profitable, thanks largely to the enormous volume of advertising in its pages. I pick up Stuff papers today and see page after page without a single ad, and I wonder how the hell the company makes a profit. More often than not the most prominent ads are “house ads” promoting Stuff’s own publications, and therefore not generating any revenue.

The Evening Post, which was owned by the Blundell family, was also very conservative – so much so that it was one of the last papers in New Zealand to put news on the front page. Prior to that, page one had consisted entirely of classified ads. I think it was the Wahine disaster that finally persuaded the Post to put news on page one, but even then it struck an awkward compromise by putting news on the top half and ads on the bottom – a bizarre and possibly unique arrangement that persisted for quite some time.

Having said that, the Post was extraordinarily thorough in its saturation coverage of Greater Wellington affairs. You couldn’t fart or sneeze in Wellington without it being reported in the pages of the Post.

In 1969 I was poached to write a twice-weekly column for the Evening Post’s morning rival, the Dominion. When I say that, I don’t mean that all I did was write a column. No newspaper, least of all the lean and hungry Dom, could afford to pay a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old just to write a column, so I simultaneously worked as a general reporter.

The Dom had a very different workplace culture from that of the Post. It was edgy, stimulating and slightly anarchic. My friend the late Barrie Watts, who was then the Dom’s features editor, described the paper as being staffed by anti-social misfits and amusing psychopaths fuelled by prodigious quantities of alcohol. It was only a slight exaggeration. 

I was startled on arriving at the Dom to find I had to provide my own typewriter. The company supplied only two typewriters and they were both chained to desks, which surely tells you something about the place.

In my first week there, a notoriously irascible subeditor named Black Jack McKinnon bellowed for all the newsroom to hear: “If Mr du Freznee [I suspect he mispronounced it deliberately] hasn’t learned how to spell ‘accommodation’ by this time tomorrow, I’ll stand on him on this desk and kick his fucking arse.” Needless to say I never misspelled accommodation again.

That too tells you something about newspaper culture in those days. If you got something wrong, you could expect to be pulled up very sharply. Workplace bullying codes wouldn’t permit that sort of bracing humiliation now.

Sexual harassment too was taken as a given. I recently had a coffee with a former Evening Post reporter, a woman now quite prominent in public life (not Fran Wilde), who recalled her boss saying to her not long after she started: “There are breast men and there are leg men. I’m a leg man and I’d appreciate it if you wore a skirt rather than pants.” You can imagine how far you’d get with that sort of line today.

Newspapers can be high-pressure workplaces. You’re creating a brand-new product pretty much from scratch every day and you’re working to tight deadlines. Information has to be gathered, stories written, edited and proofread and pages laid out within very tight time frames. Tempers can get strained and volcanic rages were commonplace. Usually they were relatively harmless – phones being yanked out of their sockets, typewriters hurled on the floor, that sort of thing – but occasionally it turned a bit uglier.

I remember late one night when a Dominion reporter named Ron Malcolm, a pugnacious Scotsman and former British Army paratrooper, was at his desk writing a report of that evening’s Wellington City Council meeting. Chris Smith, the deputy chief subeditor, holding space open for Ron’s story with one eye anxiously on the clock, loudly suggested Ron pull his finger out. Ron responding by inviting Chris out to the lift foyer for a chat, then without a word decked him. Rising groggily to his feet, Chris said “That was a dumb thing to do, Ron”, whereupon Ron knocked him down again – then walked out, never to work at the Dominion again. He did, however, later turn up as a tutor on the Wellington Polytechnic journalism course.

I relate this story not because I approve of Ron’s behaviour – far from it – but as an illustration of the rumbustious journalism culture of that era.

Drinking was central to that culture. There was always a substantial core of Evening Post journalists who hit the pub every afternoon – or in the Dom’s case, at night in a short lull before the final rush to get the paper out and just before the pubs closed. Many of my workmates were high-functioning alcoholics. Every city had its own journalists’ pub – so much so that the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper always carried advertisements advising what pub to visit if you were from out of town and wanted to find local newspaper people. In Wellington it was the Britannia in Willis Street, which was conveniently located almost next to the Evening Post and just a short walk from the Dominion. Journalists from both papers drank at the "Brit" but rarely mingled – partly because they kept different hours, but also due to the fact that the two papers were competitors with quite different workplace cultures and a certain degree of mutual animosity.

That animosity persisted after both papers came under the ownership of the same company in the late 1970s, and even when the two titles were merged to become the Dominion Post in 2002.

I’m ashamed to admit that for much of my time as a news reporter at the Dom, I was clueless. Even when I was appointed as the paper’s industrial reporter, which involved covering the paralysing union disputes that in those days were on the front page virtually every day, I was often pathetically ignorant of what I was writing about and relied on sheer blind instinct. It didn’t help that most of the union officials I dealt with were deeply suspicious of the Tory press. But I was fortunate in being able to establish good relationships with a few key people such as Jim Knox of the Federation of Labour and Pincher Martin of the Seamen’s Union.

In 1972 I moved to Melbourne and got a job with the Melbourne Herald. That was, as they say these days, a whole different level. The Herald was an afternoon paper with a circulation of half a million – more than ten times that of the Dominion. It shared a fortress-like building on Flinders St with its morning stablemate, the Sun News-Pictorial – circulation 650,000. It was a golden era of newspapers. The Herald printed eight editions a day, the first coming out about 11am and the final at 5 o’clock. The final edition often looked entirely different from the first because the paper was constantly being remade through the day as fresh stories broke.

I would have a story on the front page of the first edition and watch with mounting dismay as it gradually receded further and further inside the paper as the day progressed and more important news broke. Sometimes my story might disappear entirely.

You could go for weeks without getting anything published at all, which was unheard of on a New Zealand paper. I remember one of my colleagues shouting the public bar at the Duke of Wellington Hotel, where the Herald journos drank, because he’d had a story published after a drought of three months.

Most Herald reporters routinely got bylines – in other words, had their names published on their stories – but strangely, it happened to me only once. My byline was on a front-page story in the first edition but mysteriously disappeared in later editions, although the story remained in place. The vanishing byline was no mystery to a colleague of mine named Sam Leone, because a similar thing had happened to him. Sam explained to me that we both had foreign-looking names and the Herald apparently preferred to showcase reporters with familiar-sounding Anglo-Saxon names – an astonishing attitude in a city with a big migrant population.

Despite that, I loved my time at the Herald. It was like a giant living organism. The newsroom had a fleet of black Holdens and the police reporters - there were six of them with their own room at police headquarters - were driven around by their own dedicated chauffeur in a big black Chev Impala. The company even had its own resident doctor.

The Herald and the Sun merged many years ago, becoming the Herald-Sun. It’s still the biggest-selling paper in Australia but it’s a pale shadow of what it was.  My wife and I walked past the Herald building on a recent visit to Melbourne and there’s very little trace remaining of its glory days. A great institution, brought down by disruptive technology that choked off the flow of advertising revenue and led to ruinous and self-destructive internet rivalry.

My next gig was with the National Business Review back in Wellington. The interesting thing about NBR is that it was a weekly paper launched by former Victoria University students whose previous journalism experience, such as it was, was with the student newspaper Salient. With one exception (the managing editor, Reg Birchfield) they had no background in the newspaper industry, but they saw a gap in the market and their audacious gamble paid off.  Somehow, more than 50 years later, NBR has survived despite all the turbulence in the newspaper industry, although it’s now under different ownership and published online only.

By 1976 I was back at the Evening Post, editing the TV page and writing daily television reviews. Somehow I ended up on the panel of a Friday night TV show called The Media, which was memorably spoofed as The Tedia on David McPhail's satirical show A Week Of It. The one story I’ll relate about The Media, and it’s at my own expense, concerns the show that we made in the week that Fawlty Towers made its debut in New Zealand. As the TV critic on the show, it fell to me to review John Cleese’s brilliant new comedy and I gave it the thumbs down. Worse still, I compared it unfavourably with an American comedy series that had also made its debut that week. Suffice it to say that Fawlty Towers still enjoys a worldwide cult-following while the Tony Randall Show –the one I glowingly reviewed on national TV that night in 1976 – sank without trace. So much for my judgment.

I then spent four years writing for the Listener. Again, it was then in its glory days, with a circulation approaching 400,000 – by far the largest magazine circulation, per head of population, in the world. But I wouldn’t delude myself that this was entirely due to the quality of the content. In fact the Listener at that time was state-owned and benefited from having sole rights to publish the full week’s TV and radio programmes, which guaranteed a massive readership. The Listener did, however, have a great team of writers, including such names as Tom Scott, Helen Paske, Phil Gifford, Denis Welch, Karen Jackman, Gordon Campbell and Pamela Stirling.

The magazine was ridiculously profitable and there was little pressure to produce. We had the luxury of almost unlimited time in which to write our stories, though some of us took more advantage of it than others. The late Stephen Stratford, a subeditor on the magazine, once wrote that “months passed – indeed, entire seasons – between stories by Vernon Wright [one of my fellow writers] and Karl du Fresne”. I have to admit it was basically true, though I did produce stories for the Listener that I’m quite proud of. 

After that, my career took a radical lurch. I went to the Nelson Evening Mail as news editor and never enjoyed a job more. I relished being back in an environment where I was subjected to the discipline of tight daily deadlines. It was a great team and a happy workplace. We worked hard, but we were out of the office by early to mid-afternoon. By then I had three kids with one more to come and the civilised working hours were an opportunity to establish some sort of regular family life. But then I ruined it all by being awarded a journalism fellowship to the UK for three months and as a result of that, being invited to rejoin the Dominion as its news editor – which I ill-advisedly did.

From there I progressed to the editorship of the Dominion in 1989. All I’ll say about that is that I stand before you as the embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that you rise to your level of incompetence. I never quite understood what this meant until it happened to me. Basically the Peter Principle means that you ascend through an organisational hierarchy because you’re good at what you do, until you reach a point where you realise you’ve gone one step too far. I’m not going to say I was a failure as a daily newspaper editor; merely that I didn’t enjoy the job, didn’t feel temperamentally cut out for it and therefore wasn't convinced I was suited to the role. I had gone from an editorial function that suited me to a managerial one that didn’t. So I quit after two years, much to the astonishment of many of my newspaper colleagues and fellow editors. Some regarded rising to the editorship of a metropolitan daily paper as a career pinnacle. Why would you turn your back on it? But I didn’t see it that way and I never wasted a millisecond wondering whether I’d done the wrong thing by resigning. For me it was a liberating act.

My last 10 years as a full-time newspaper journalist were spent as an assistant editor back in familiar territory at the Evening Post, mostly writing editorials, feature articles and columns under the editorship of my friend Sue Carty, whose own career was subsequently cut short by multiple sclerosis (which now, thankfully, seems to be in remission). When I accepted a voluntary redundancy deal in 2002 I was able to reflect that I’d come a long way in the 34 years since I’d started in the Post’s reading room. By my calculation it was about 30 metres.

In the past 20-odd years I’ve had an active freelance career. I found myself working for the Listener again under the editorship of my old colleague Pamela Stirling, though this time I wrote as a freelance contributor rather than an employee. I’ve been a columnist and a blogger and I’ve written books on subjects as diverse as wine, music and freedom of the press. I’ve had a lot of fun, and earned useful pocket money, compiling daily quizzes that were published throughout the country. I’ve enjoyed being my own boss and I’ve managed to make a relatively comfortable living at a time when journalism has been in a very fragile state.

I could easily detain you for the rest of the night talking about the wretched state of journalism in 2025 and why it’s sunk so low, but that would be too much of a downer. Some of my earlier remarks might give you a clue as to where I think we started going wrong, but that’s possibly a subject for another time. Thank you for listening patiently.