The Herald's newsroom has changed beyond recognition; it's pictured here on election night in 2020.
OPINION
As the New Zealand Herald turns 160, senior editors past and present reflect on the power of the newspaper and their own experiences working at the title. Today, senior political correspondent Audrey Young reflects on the weight of the Herald’s history, and the power of media in holding politicians to account.
I should have been much more excited and grateful to start work at the New Zealand Herald than I was, but for the first few weeks, I would go home every night and cry.
It wasn’t so much the Herald itself; it was grief for the Auckland Sun.
A close-knit group drawn from around the world was up against the powerful Herald in Auckland’s morning market, the institution sometimes known as the “Royal New Zealand Herald” or “Granny Herald”.
The power of the Herald won out. The loyalty it had built up from readers and advertisers over 125 years proved too strong against economic headwinds.
The informal guarantees from the start-up’s backers that it would be given at least three years to establish itself proved worthless after the stock market crash of 1987.
In the winter of 1988, we were suddenly closed. Security guards escorted staff out of the building. The black-and-white broadsheet as it was at the time had seen off the cheeky colour tabloid.
The Herald’s foundations went deep into Auckland. It was traditional and staid compared to the Sun and the Star and slow to change. It wasn’t always loved, but even its harshest critics knew it mattered. It was the paper of record and substance. It was dependable.
Some refugees from the Sun went to the Auckland Star, which closed three years later. Some of us, including Wynne Gray, Chris Rattue and Brian Rudman*, were lucky enough to get jobs on the Herald, them as writers and me as a sub-editor, as I had been at the Sun. The tears stopped after a while.
In the following 35 years, there have been some incredible changes in the country, the industry and at the Herald itself, witnessed in my case from the subbery, then the reporting staff as a social welfare and housing reporter, and later in the Herald’s Press Gallery office, where I still have a desk.
When we started there, it was a newsroom filled with cigarette smoke, the clacking of Imperial 99 typewriters and the sucking of pneumatic tubes that transferred copy and dummy pages downstairs to the typesetters. Shouting over missed deadlines or disagreements was not uncommon.
The influence of the paper was and is undeniable at 160 years. A front-page story can make all the difference. I wrote one once on the dire financial state of the Ranfurly centre in Epsom that was home to people with disabilities. It received a cheque for $50,000 the next day.
The Monte Cecilia Trust for emergency housing was in huge demand following the benefits cuts and housing reforms of the early ‘90s. A front-page story on its own precarious position saw the Social Welfare Minister of the day, Jenny Shipley, pay them a visit that week and guarantee their survival.
At that time, the paper’s influence was reflected primarily through story selection and placement. Attitudes within articles were largely confined to reviews and to editorials, which sometimes thundered from the typewriters of what we called mahogany row. Occasionally they surprised: the Herald supported homosexual law reform, MMP, and for a long time has supported compulsory te reo Māori in schools.
But reporters, at least not junior reporters, were not expected to express points of view.
During the 1990s, that began to change. With the advance of new technology and colour, there was an acceptance and sometimes encouragement that some stories should be written with more “attitude”.
The Herald was slow to the trend and has been more cautious than most. Thankfully.
I still bristle when I see junior reporters writing commentary accusing politicians, for example, of using “weasel words”. That is the language of politicians, not journalists. There has to be a difference between journalists and politicians, and if there isn’t, the journalist should get into politics.
Readers demand strong opinions as part of the Herald’s offering – that much is clear from the number of clicks opinions get – but it is sometimes better to import them from outside voices whose superlatives and absolutes flow easily.
Senior journalists are given more latitude to offer opinions, and sometimes they carry great weight. One of the more memorable ones was one written in 2003 by my former boss, the late John Armstrong, on the day Don Brash was challenging Bill English for leadership of the National Party.
It was not just pure opinion. It also contained excellent analysis about why a close vote in English’s favour would be the worst possible outcome for the party, and he reasoned that the caucus should “just do it”. It was a bold call in those days.
John was told that his column had changed a couple of votes that morning, and very likely the outcome of that historic vote. I heard the vote had been tied and one of the whips decided to change his vote in favour of Brash.
One of my stories probably had an influence on history. It was the revelation in 2008 that Sir Owen Glenn had made a $100,000 donation to Winston Peters’ legal bills and it had not been declared in the MPs’ pecuniary interests register.
Four months earlier, Peters had held up a “NO” sign to answer questions about whether his party had received any donation from Glenn.
Peters was the subject of a dramatic privileges committee hearing over the matter. A complaint against him was upheld and Parliament censured him. National ruled out working with Peters, and his New Zealand First Party failed to return to Parliament a few weeks later.
Some outlets tend to regard all politicians as crooks unless proven otherwise. The Herald’s default position is to treat them with respect unless proven otherwise. It is better to exercise the power you’ve got carefully than to be cavalier with people’s reputations. Readers can work out who to trust in their politicians and their media.
The Herald has gone from having no direct competition in the morning market to having 24-hour competition from all mainstream media outlets with websites. As the industry expanded digitally, the threshold of what makes “news” has changed dramatically. It reflects many more voices than it ever has in the past.
We are not perfect, and there is plenty of talent among our competitors. But a quick search of the Hansard over the past 20 or so years suggests the Herald still matters to politicians. The Herald had 1937 mentions, the Dominion Post 932, Radio New Zealand 822, TVNZ 511 and Newshub 107.
As for how the Herald can best use its influence in the future, it should continue to take care, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be bold.
It is well-placed to play an important role in encouraging national debates around New Zealand’s nationhood, particularly with the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi being just over 16 years away.
It doesn’t mean it has to preach what people think, and it shouldn’t. It doesn’t mean it has to have a clear idea of what sort of country we should be in 2040. But it does mean allowing reasonable, and occasionally unreasonable, people to have a voice. Hopefully, those voices will continue to be informed by great journalism. I am proud to be part of that.
* After the Sun, Brian Rudman went to the Auckland Star and then free-lancing before joining the Herald as a columnist and then full-time writer.
Audrey Young covers politics as the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018. She was political editor, leading the Herald’s Press Gallery team, from 2003 to 2021.
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