The greatest mystery in the world, I have decided, is how in the world I ended up as a journalist. It has all been a terrible mistake, and I am not alone in feeling that way. A recent survey for Seek found over half of responders regretted their career choice.
It doesn’t help that when my cohort, Generation X, left school we were assured we were bound, if not for glory, then for greater prosperity than our parents, which we’d get through a respectable profession or a solid, reputable trade. Journalism, then as now, was viewed as neither. It wasn’t as bad as going on the stage or on the game, but it was something of a shabby business all the same.
My path to respectability and prosperity was supposed to be as a “bean counter”. My father, a man with a keen sense of where money came from, told me I should become an accountant. I am not entirely sure I knew then what accountants did, but I took his advice. It didn’t turn out well.
Eventually, I washed up in a year-long journalism course, and just before the end of 1992, I had somehow been employed as a junior reporter at the New Zealand Herald for the low, low price of $25,000 a year, even then an appalling wage. The highlight of my first year was interviewing Ronald McDonald at Auckland Zoo. The only way was up.
Only it has not, in the end, really turned out that way for me, or for many of my colleagues – the now middle-aged generation of journalists, or at least the ones who have stuck with our shabby trade. For most of the past 20 years, media outlets have been struggling. Now, they are closing or under existential threat, while full-time job prospects have gone from bleak to near non-existent. The internet, loss of advertising and readers, and now AI have all but done us in. We old hacks ought to be in our peak career and earning years. Instead, many of us are on, or near, the scrap heap.
It’s not just a New Zealand phenomenon. The New York Times published a lament last week about the “Gen X career meltdown” for those who went into the so-called creative industries, including journalism, in the 1990s.
“Every generation has its burdens,” its author Steven Kurutz writes. “The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world, only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.”
So, my terrible mistake wasn’t a terrible mistake after all. It was a massive blunder.
Before it was a graveyard, journalism was fun. In what other job are you able to say, as I can, you’ve not only interviewed prime ministers and presidents, Ronald McDonald and the bloke who wore the Darth Vader costume in Star Wars, but been sued by David Lange as well?
Doing journalism used to make for amusing (if, now, slightly mortifying) work stories, too. Like the time I was forced to stalk Mike Hosking. During interviews for a North & South magazine profile in 2001, Hosking, a keen car enthusiast and truculent subject, wouldn’t tell me what sort of vehicle he drove. My equally truculent editor insisted it be in the story.
So, one Saturday morning, I found myself sitting outside a central Auckland radio studio waiting for the Hosk to finish his show and to leave the station’s carpark, just so I could find out what manner of super-expensive super car he drove. When, disappointingly, he appeared to be at the wheel of something run of the mill, I panicked that it may not be him. I followed him all the way to his mansion in Remuera to make sure.
What a way to earn a living. At least it used to be. Not any more. As Private Eye magazine’s frequently “tired” correspondent, Lunchtime O’Booze, would always conclude, “One thing is certain … nothing will ever be the same again.”
