Perhaps it was just a slow news day. They do happen, albeit not as often as they once did. And the 'silly season,' the period between Christmas and halfway through January, when everyone goes on holiday and staple sources of news tend to dry up, isn't what it used to be. But either TVNZ had nothing else to lead with or its challenge to women's magazines in terms of content continues unabated.
The best slow day in history, perhaps, belonged to the press secretary for some long forgotten politician who told the writer that he had formerly worked for a small Wellington radio station, where his duties included writing and presenting a three-minute local news bulletin at midday. At 11.30am on this particular day he had nothing. So he phoned the hospitals - all quiet there, but that was normal for the time of year. The police - no crime whatsoever, although that was also not unknown this time of year. Even the SPCA was quiet, but that was usual ...
At 11.45 he received a phone call from a woman who had found an albino hedgehog, and he was saved. What followed was three minutes about the discovery, what makes some hedgehogs albino and the great majority a brown colour, the chances of albinoism being passed to its young, albino hedgehogs in history. It's amazing how inventive one can be when the pressure's on and one cannot find an albino All Black. Or one who missed his flight. Or one who didn't, but could have, run amok with a machete.
Of course the world has changed from the days when gathering news, even when it was happening, could be difficult given that the fax had yet to be invented and email and digital cameras were a figment of someone's imagination. Incidentally, the first time the Age encountered digital cameras was at a conference; they were on offer for $15,000 per bag - a camera and two or three lenses.
The arrival of the technology that everyone now takes for granted was the cause of some excitement. For the Age it began with the gift of a telex machine from the Ministry of Agriculture. It would sit quietly in a corner, we were told, and spit out news from and for the agrarian sector as it happened around the world. It would never sleep. And it didn't.
Its first night shift produced a knee-deep drift of paper all over the office floor. It didn't have the ability to cut the paper so someone of lesser status than editor Derric Vincent had to wade through it. This soon palled, given that most of the information related to the likes of the price of wheat in Argentina, not the sort of stuff that Northland Age readers were hanging out for. Some days after the machine arrived we unplugged it. It's probably still here somewhere.
The fax was a different story. The writer, who in those days was the secretary of the Kaitaia Chamber of Commerce, was instructed to ask the Postmaster-General when this technology would be arriving in Kaitaia. The answer was that it wouldn't be, which made some sort of sense, given that the Post Office could see the fax driving it to extinction. In fact it was some years after faxes became common that the Kaitaia Post Office finally acquired one, capitulating to the opposition.
The fax did contribute to the making of history at the Northland Age in 1987, however, when brand new Bay of Islands MP John Carter delivered his maiden speech in the House. Arrangements were made with military precision to have his speech faxed to the one and only machine that was then in use in Kaitaia on the Wednesday afternoon. The Northland Age would be there to collect it, and all going well would publish it the following day. Small beer now, perhaps, but exciting stuff in 1987.
All the owner of the fax wanted was $1 per sheet, which seemed reasonable. Having absolutely no idea what these things cost to run, money changed hands, the Age having failed to realise that politicians tended to use quite small pieces of paper. John Carter used 28 of them, and in those days $28 wasn't far short of a week's rent. And it wasn't reimbursed, because the organiser of this piece of journalistic magic had not sought managerial approval in advance. Two lessons - check the cost of a roll of fax paper and don't spend money until the boss says you can - were learned that day.
Few of those who inhabit TVNZ these days would remember a world without modern communications technology, although 1987 wasn't that long ago. They might not remember a time when much more attention was paid to reporting news fairly and accurately either, and when no one dreamed of telling their audience what to think.
The general election of 2014 revealed much of what is wrong with television in particular, starting with Nicky Hager's Dirty Politics, when TVNZ's political editor waved a copy at us, declaring that he hadn't read it but it was a bombshell. How he could reach that conclusion without reading the book defies understanding. Then much of the campaign proper focused on spies, lies and leaked emails, the self-appointed defenders of our right to privacy giving not a toss for anyone else's privacy, as long as it suited their cause, largely at the expense of policy.
The fault for that does not lie with the parties, or at least not exclusively, but with the media. They told us what was important, although the election results suggest that a lot of us weren't listening. And then, when it was finally over, some had the gall to tell us that the campaign had been derailed by irrelevancies. Really? And who was driving the train?
