As you read this, the editor of The Aucklander will be packing up his desk.
Mind you, there's not enough to fill even a small box - a picture frame of my partner and of the five kids; a ceramic replica of a takeaway coffee cup, a $10 Secret Santa office present the year before last; an ancient and worn dictionary, not so wittily renamed my 'dick shone eerie' on the replacement cover I made with cardboard and Sellotape; and a couple other reference books, such as the origins of Auckland street names.
What isn't going in the box, however, is the stock of memories from working for almost four years at the greatest community newspaper in the world.
That's how I've always thought of The Aucklander, though I've never said it out loud, let alone committed it to written form. Judges of media awards have occasionally backed my silent assertion but every week I've set out with the ambition to prove it. I've worked at newspapers before which I secretly named "the little paper that could" or "the big and bland" (no, I'm not naming them). But The Aucklander, I've come to believe, is great.
It has certainly given me great memories. Such as staring into the uneasy faces of a Parliamentary Select Committee as the then-editor declared the newspaper opposes what the Government is doing to Auckland. Or conducting an interview on a vertical bungy catapult. Or the satisfaction of exposing things that somebody didn't want exposed.
