OPINION
The end. We met via Zoom. We were in lockdown and on mute, so the manager wouldn’t have heard the air turning blue as 200 of us learned that Bauer Media New Zealand was pulling the plug. The Listener, North and South, Metro, the Woman’s Weekly - two of those titles were older than me and now they were gone.
Thirty-six years at The Listener. I loved the mag but for various reasons I’d been wishing for a way out. I hadn’t expected to bring down almost the entire local magazine industry with me.
Those scenes came back with a jolt with the news - what the actual heck? - of the death of the news. Or at least the news that has emanated from 3 National News, later rebranded as Newshub, since 1989. TV3 was a funny little channel then. It seems that stripping The Golden Girls and Benny Hill wasn’t enough to pull an audience all but superglued to TV1. And you shouldn’t always listen when people tell you what they want. There had been a call to bring back veteran newsreader Philip Sherry and his authoritative eyebrows to read the news as if delivered on stone tablets from on high.
That didn’t work. TV3 was soon struggling. It always pulled through and has always been our house’s news of choice. The style has been more relaxed, less ritualised and, in the early days, often quite mad. Bill Ralston, later to be TVNZ’s head of news and current affairs, was TV3′s political editor in the early years. The Nightline item in which he showed Jim Bolger being serenaded by a South Island school choir with the Beatles’ Nowhere Man was a classic Ralston provocation. It’s no good blaming opinion writers or “biased” journalists when just recording what politicians do can be more devastating to their PR than any columnist’s snark.