In a
very distant past life I played bass guitar in the house band at Wellington’s
fabled Majestic Cabaret. One of the two resident singers there was the gorgeous
Marise McDonald. (The other was Alan Galbraith, later to become a record
producer of note and now a maker of hand-crafted “cigar box” guitars.) Marise’s
younger brother Nick was a journalist in Masterton to whom I devoted the
following tribute in 2006, when I was providing occasional commentaries on
Radio NZ’s Mediawatch. I dug it out a few days ago after Marise mentioned to me
that she hadn’t heard it. Reading it again after all this time, it occurred to me
that apart from the references to Palestinian elections and Don Brash’s speech
to the Orewa Rotary Club, it’s all still true and relevant today. In fact if
there’s going to be a revival of the newspaper industry, it could well start at
the local level.
I recently attended the funeral of a
journalist whose name would be unfamiliar to most of this programme’s
listeners. He was Nick McDonald, managing editor of a community paper called
the Wairarapa News, who died suddenly
aged only 51.
His funeral took place in the Masterton
Town Hall, and it was full. Journalists may rate poorly in public opinion
surveys, but here was one who obviously enjoyed the respect and affection of
his fellow citizens.
I had never met Nick but I attended his
funeral because I admired a whimsical column he wrote called Take It Easy – a
column that I thought deserved a bigger audience. On occasions I emailed him to
say how much I had enjoyed his latest piece, and I always received a courteous reply.
But there were lots of things I didn’t know
about Nick until I heard the tributes at his funeral service. I learned from
these that he came to journalism relatively late in life after a few false
starts in other careers. I learned that he started out by acquiring an old
printing press and producing a news sheet for local rugby fans. That got him a
part-time job writing feature stories for the Wairarapa Times-Age and eventually he became a full-time reporter,
rising to become deputy chief reporter of that paper before taking over as
editor of the Wairarapa News, a
weekly paper that goes into virtually every home in the region.
I also learned that he had become a bit of
an identity through his calls to a local talkback station, where he assumed the
persona of a hard-case bucolic character named Larry and soon acquired a cult
following.
He was obviously a man who made a deep
impact on his local community, both as a personality and as a journalist.
Why am I telling you this? Because Nick
McDonald represented a breed of journalists who deserve more recognition than
they get. I refer to those who toil in the unglamorous field of community and
suburban newspapers – those papers that turn up free in your letterbox every
week.
For many young reporters, a stint on a
community paper is a stepping stone to bigger things – a rite of passage that
has to be endured before they have enough experience to step up to a bigger
paper. But Nick appeared to have found his niche in community papers and seemed
content doing what he was doing – reporting the generally unexciting community
news of a provincial town, while providing himself with an outlet for his
writing skills through his column. He was clearly capable of bigger things, but
as far as I can tell he had no aspirations to wider fame.
There is a temptation to regard journalists
like Nick as being well down the food chain in the journalistic eco-system.
They’re not national names and they don’t break sensational stories that
destabilise governments. But no journalists are closer to their communities or
their readers. And as much as we focus on the big national and international
stories of the day, local news is often the news that impacts most directly on
the reader. The local cinema that’s being restored; the street that’s being
closed to traffic for a day to accommodate a bike race; the couple around the
corner who’ve just celebrated their golden wedding; the heroic effort of the
local rugby team against a vastly superior visiting side – no stories are
closer to the daily lives of people in a small community.
It’s in the community paper that people
read about people they know and institutions that they are intimately familiar
with.
It’s these stories, in fact, that help create
a sense of community. The early European settlers recognised this, which is
why newspapers were often among the first businesses to be set up in newly
established towns.
If anything, the role of the community
journalist has taken on new importance as mainstream news outlets have withdrawn
from the field of local news. Television has almost abandoned the local story,
and under-resourced radio stations make only a token stab at local bulletins.
Even daily newspapers no longer have the space or resources to cover the
minutiae of community life that once filled their pages.
That leaves the field to the community
paper – and here’s an interesting thing. While many daily newspapers struggle
to maintain readers in the face of consumer indifference and aggressive
competition from other news outlets, circulation figures show that most
community papers have posted healthy gains in recent years.
What does this tell us? I think it confirms
that for many people, news about an increase in local swimming pool fees, or an
outbreak of vandalism in the local park, is at least as relevant to their daily
lives as Orewa 3 or the Palestinian elections. I know of many people who don’t
bother to pick up a daily paper or watch the TV news, but who will always skim
through the community paper.
Pat Booth, arguably New Zealand’s most
distinguished journalist, chose to spend the last few years of his career on
suburban papers. He points out that in our bigger cities, some of these papers
now engage in quite sharp, aggressive reporting on important local issues – and
the politician who ignores them does so at his or her peril, given that they
reach hundreds of thousands of readers.
Yet as Pat points out, it’s still the local
paper that people will go to if they’ve lost their dog, or want to save a
notable tree that the council has decreed must come down.
There’s no glamour in reporting these
stories, but someone has to do it. And the job demands a particular type of
journalist.
It has to be someone who doesn’t feel it’s
demeaning to report what some would consider to be parish-pump news. To some
extent it requires a suspension of ego, since the journalist must accept that
he or she is never to be going to be famous and still less rich. And it helps
if the journalist actually belongs to the community he or she is reporting and
understands its concerns and interests.
Nick McDonald seems to have been that sort
of person. By all accounts he was an everyman who loved his family, who enjoyed
a beer and a punt on the horses, but who retained a sharp and perceptive eye for
everything that was going on around him.
And here’s something else that I think is
significant about Nick. He had no formal training in journalism, but learned by
doing it. That was once the norm in the news media, before we became obsessed
with tertiary courses and qualifications.
I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that such
courses be dismantled and the qualifications abolished. But the question should
be asked: was Nick poorer as a journalist for having no formal qualifications?
Unquestionably I think the answer must be no. He reminded us that there is, in
fact, no great mystique in journalism that can be learned only in lecture
rooms. That’s a relatively recent misconception.
An inquiring mind, a degree of tenacity, a
facility with words and a commitment to report honestly and impartially – these
are some of the key attributes of a good journalist. Some journalists never
acquire them, no matter what courses they complete, and some possess them
naturally. Nick McDonald was clearly in the latter category, and I believe it’s
essential that the news media always keeps the door open for roughies like him.
And I don’t use that word “roughies” in a
pejorative sense, but in the horse racing sense – to indicate someone who’s a
bit of an outsider. I’d like to think that Nick, as a keen student of the turf,
would take that as a compliment.
2 comments:
Hi Karl, Today the 1st of September during our first day in lvl3 Covid-19 lockdown I though it would be a good idea for my childern Elise 9 and Nick McDonald 11 to research their granddad, that they never got the chance to meet. I appreciate this piece of work it warms my heart and shows my childern the man my father was!
I have been holding off but I have all of dad,s weekly column's tucked away, I haven't been able to bring these out to date as it breaks my heart! but soon!
Cheers, Sam, Elise and Nick!
Nice to hear from you Sam - thanks. If you didn't intend this comment for publication please let me know and I'll delete it pronto.
Post a Comment