(This obituary was published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz,
August 25.)
Warwick
Roger, journalist. Born 21 August 1945, died 16 August 2018
Warwick Roger was the most influential New Zealand
journalist of his generation.
He is remembered primarily as the audacious founder of Metro, the glossy Auckland monthly that
reshaped New Zealand magazine publishing and steered indigenous journalism in a
new direction. Partly modelled on the American magazines Esquire and New Yorker,
Roger’s magazine dared to publish articles of a length never before seen here
in a mainstream publication: 10,000 words and more.
It was technically known as long-form journalism and Roger
had faith that the market was mature and sophisticated enough in 1981 to
welcome it. He also had unshakeable confidence in his own judgment, even when
many of his peers were predicting – in fact openly hoping – he would fail.
Where others would have lost their nerve, the stubborn,
combative Roger refused to be swayed by detractors. Neither was he deterred by
the reluctance of advertisers to come on board. And ultimately he proved the
doubters wrong, even if it meant, according to one former colleague, wildly
overstating Metro’s circulation
figures in the early days as he struggled to attract advertising support.
By the mid-1980s, Metro’s
golden era, the magazine had a circulation of 45,000, sometimes ran to 350
pages and was eagerly read far beyond its intended catchment of metropolitan
Auckland. Piggybacking on its success, sister title North & South was launched in 1986 and applied the same
journalistic formula to the national market, taking on the long-established Listener.
Between them, Metro
and North & South changed the
face of New Zealand magazine journalism. But they had a lot more going for them
than simply the length of their articles.
Roger was an astute spotter and nurturer of journalistic
talent. He generally avoided hiring newspaper reporters and graduates of
journalism schools, dismissing them as hacks and hackettes trained to write formulaic news stories. Roger preferred to recruit unproven writers
with a flair for a freer, less stylised and more creative form of journalism,
one that borrowed some of the techniques of fiction writing. He was a master of
the style himself, though often parodied by his critics.
Roger’s protégés, who could have wallpapered their houses with the journalism awards they
won, included Carroll du Chateau, Nicola
Legat, the late Jan Corbett, Deborah Coddington and Robyn Langwell, who was to
become his second wife (and founding editor of North & South). Roger also hired art director William Chen, who
gave Metro its bold, stylish appearance.
Roger pushed the boundaries. He wrote savage restaurant
reviews. He created the scurrilous
gossip column Felicity Ferret (partly inspired by the satirical English
magazine Private Eye), which
delighted in mocking the silvertails and high-flyers of Remuera and Parnell
while simultaneously promoting an image of an Auckland that was glamorous,
sophisticated, racy and cosmopolitan.
But most important of all, Roger courageously published big,
complex and high-risk stories – none more so than The Unfortunate Experiment in 1987, which chronicled the deliberate
non-treatment, with fatal consequences, of cervical cancer patients at National
Women’s Hospital. The article, by health activists Sandra Coney and Phillida
Bunkle, led to the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry, led by Judge
Silvia Cartwright, and a subsequent overhaul of patients’ rights.
It was a high-water mark for investigative journalism in New
Zealand. Yet it was typical of Roger’s ornery streak that in 1990, Metro
published an equally explosive exposé by Jan Corbett entitled Second Thoughts on the Unfortunate
Experiment, in which the Cartwright inquiry was branded a radical feminist
witch hunt. The second article came about after Roger was presented with
evidence that led him to suspect his magazine had been used to advance an
ideological agenda.
Roger would tell his journalists that their job was to
investigate the bad smell at the back of the cave that everyone else pretended
to ignore. Anyone in power was considered fair game, which may explain why
Roger was passed over several times for inclusion in the honours list. He was
finally made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2008.
ROGER grew up in the Auckland suburb of Greenlane, the
youngest son of a butcher. His father, whom he described as the meanest man
he’d ever known, died when Roger was only 11. His mother was left virtually
penniless and had to take in boarders.
He went to Auckland Grammar School, studied to become a
primary school teacher and spent two years teaching before deciding that what
he really wanted was to be a journalist like the Auckland Star columnist Noel Holmes, whom he greatly admired. He
joined the Waikato Times in 1968,
only a few weeks after the late Michael King, who was to become a long-standing
friend. That was also the year when he married his first wife Anne Batt, with
whom he had two children.
By the early 1970s Roger was working in Wellington at the Sunday Times under the editorship of the
late Frank Haden, who implanted in him the radical idea that a reporter should
do more than simply regurgitate quotes and recite sterile facts.
It was at the Sunday
Times, and later its sister paper The
Dominion, that Roger began to refine a style inspired by the so-called New
Journalism of the time as practised by the American writers Truman Capote, Hunter S
Thompson and Tom Wolfe – writing that combined reportage with literary
techniques borrowed from fiction.
The late Jack Kelleher, then editor of The Dominion, was a sympathetic boss who gave him the time and
space he needed to research and write long, in-depth stories that sometimes ran
over two or three days. Perhaps the most memorable was Roger’s detailed
reconstruction of a shocking 1975 crime in which an irascible but harmless
70-year-old drunk was beaten to death by two street kids in Wellington’s Hopper
St.
It was ground-breaking journalism, but it aroused a mix of envy and
hostility from many of his colleagues who regarded Roger as pampered, elitist
and self-indulgent. Not that hostility ever bothered him; in fact he seemed to
thrive on it. He and kindred spirit Spiro Zavos, who was to become a lifelong
friend, formed a tight, defiant team of two in the Dominion’s newsroom.
Roger was to encounter the same antipathy from colleagues at
the Auckland Star when he moved back
to his home town. Even the Star’s
editor, Keith Aitken, a newspaperman of the old school, objected to the space
that was lavished on Roger’s Saturday feature stories. For his part, Roger
seethed with resentment at the changes made to his copy by sub-editors.
Rather than go on chafing with frustration at the
constraints imposed on him by people unsympathetic to his ideals, Roger put his
money where his mouth was. He launched Metro
in partnership with investor Bruce Palmer and from day one, imposed his own
uncompromising personality on the publication.
Never a man to make things easy for himself, Roger made an
art form of getting offside with people. Even those closest to him admitted he
had a cranky, vindictive streak. He pursued vendettas with a vengeance and was
acutely sensitive to criticism. Intimidating letters from lawyers were treated
with contempt.
The low point of his editorship came when Metro was sued by Sunday Star-Times gossip columnist Toni McRae in 1994 over a snide
reference to her in the Felicity Ferret column. Broadcaster Brian Edwards, one
of several to give evidence against Metro,
later reportedly said of the trial that never had so many scores been settled
in such a short time.
The court awarded McRae damages of $373,000, almost an
unprecedented sum. The amount was later reduced to $100,000 plus costs, but
Roger took the defeat badly. He stood down as editor later that year,
having evidently lost much of his enthusiasm for the job.
Roger reverted to simply writing for Metro under the title of editor-at-large. Two years later he
assumed the same role at North &
South, where Langwell was editor. The two had married in 1986, two years
after Roger hired Langwell to write for Metro.
They had two children.
His move to North
& South came in the same year that Roger was diagnosed with Parkinson’s
disease, the neurological disorder that progressively robbed him of his power
of movement. He resisted the illness with the same stubbornness he had
exhibited as a journalist, continuing to write, run, swim and play cricket even
as he gradually lost control of his limbs. He eventually gave up full-time
writing in 2004.
His determination to continue swimming almost led to his
death in 2012, when his daughter found him face-down in the water at Cheltenham
Beach, close to his Devonport home. He was resuscitated at the scene and
eventually recovered, but lost all memory of the time leading up to the
incident. He died aged 72.
FOOTNOTE: I wrote this obituary at the Dominion Post's request in 2012, when it seemed possible Warwick would not survive his near-drowning. It probably says something about him that it took six years to be published.
