Duncan Greive, founder of Daylight, hosted Newshub’s Samantha Hayes and Mike McRoberts on his podcast The Fold, ahead of their final bulletin. Here are some highlights from a reflective and emotional kōrero.
Duncan Greive: Could you characterise your mood and that of the newsroom during this heavy, heavy final week?
Mike McRoberts: It's very weird, and it's been a long time coming, too. We've always known this week was on the horizon. Some weeks have felt like torture – it's been a real weird mix of emotions, as some people have gone on to get other jobs, while others still have nothing. We're a pretty tight knit group anyway, so I guess there was at the start some relief that we were going through this together. But it's felt pretty sad over the last few months, for sure.
Samantha Hayes: It has been difficult to keep the show going every day. There's been some heavy lifting by everybody across the entire team. But in a way, it's been nice to have the time to come to terms with what is happening. Potentially, I'm still in a little bit of denial. Our last show is on Friday (today), and then that will be it for Newshub – but everyone's been amazing. We've got such an incredible culture at TV3 and Newshub. Everyone's just supported one another. You go through those stages of grief at different times – not everybody is feeling the same way every day, and we've kept an eye out for one another.
Duncan Greive: You feel that culture radiating through the screen. I can imagine going through something like this; you would really lean on that; it would keep you hanging together at a time when it would be quite easy to fray and break apart.
Mike McRoberts: The culture has changed over the years, but when I first started 23 years ago, it was very much the underdog up against the mighty foe. There was a bit of a chip on people's shoulders about TVNZ. I'd come from TVNZ, and I remember one of the producers didn't speak to me for six months just because he wanted to check me out.
That evolved when we started to do well, particularly in areas like foreign affairs and covering big stories, and our ratings started picking up. From 2007 to 2008, we had a real purple patch. We regularly beat TVNZ in our demographic. So that culture changed again, and I'm really proud of what it's become. It's not patch-protective, so we teach everyone how to do our own jobs. The support is unbelievable. It's still such a tight-knit group, and the support that Sam was talking about has always been there.
Samantha Hayes: Mike and I have brought through so many different presenters and taught them absolutely everything that we know about the job that we do. I know that it's not like that in other places because there's a fear that they might one day take your job. We spoke about this one day and agreed that, well, if they're better than us, they should have it. They should have our job.
Duncan Greive: It was the first big private sector newsroom to emerge after deregulation, up against this leviathan, the default provider in TVNZ. Mike, when you were in another newsroom, how was it perceived, particularly as it developed its own particular voice and character?
Mike McRoberts: I started in radio before I went into television. So we'd seen what commercial radio had done in radio – they'd gone gangbusters. There was always this feeling that a private television channel would do the same. It didn't. It took a long time for people to realise that it was going to be quite a quantum shift to get people to change from One to TV3 on a regular basis, particularly around the news. But in the end, it was the news that brought people in. Three has had a bit of a maverick role when it comes to news. Great storytellers – when you think of people like Melanie Reid, for instance, out there going undercover into Gloriavale.
Samantha Hayes: She got dressed up in their gear, and hitchhiked in there as an undercover agricultural student. She was the first person to come out of there and tell New Zealanders what it was like.
Mike McRoberts: Amanda Millar was another one. They just pioneered a different way of storytelling and that carried on through. I've always told younger journalists that if you want to be on telly, go to One. If you want to tell stories, come to Three. We tell amazing stories. And we're still doing that, and we will be doing that until the last day.
Duncan Greive: Let's talk about Nightline. Even by TV3 standards, that was quite extra. It created personalities like yourself, like Farrier, like Belinda Todd. It was just so different from the equivalent TVNZ product. What was it like to sort of earn your bones in that environment?
Samantha Hayes: The six o'clock news was just always this great, big, important, shiny thing – oh gosh, don't break it. You cannot be a part of that show until you are extremely good at your job, and you will never get anything wrong.
It used to be that you would work your way up through Nightline. The feeling was that the bosses weren't watching, and we could just get away with whatever we wanted. I did get called into [former 3 News boss] Mark Jennings' office a few times, so he was watching. But Gus [former Nightline producer Angus Gillies] would tell you that they just wanted to push the boundaries. In fact, if you weren't getting complaints, then you felt like you weren't pushing the boundaries enough.
Duncan Greive: Could you finish by each sharing a memory that sums up your time at 3 News and Newshub.
Mike McRoberts: I remember covering the 2016 presidential election in New York, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. And I was there just with a camera in Times Square, and then up rocks Kate Rodger – a beautiful, wonderful wahine toa, who does entertainment. She had been on a junket, and so she came in to help me in a chock-a-block Times Square. She ran kind of interference, got some talent for me. And that's just how we roll. If you're there and you can help you do it.
Samantha Hayes: That night was so good. Tom McRae and I were presenting from the studio, and we'd gone on for hours and hours. Trump hadn't come out, Hillary hadn't come out, and we just kind of refused to go off air. I think it was two o'clock in the morning in America when Trump finally came out and did his speech. Someone showed me this brilliant photo afterwards. It was two TVs in the office. One was on us, one was on TVNZ. We had Trump speaking, the new president of America, and they had a rerun of MasterChef.
I remember coming off air, and I said, Let's just keep going.
Read the full interview on TheSpinoff.co.nz or listen to the interview on The Fold.
