.png)
Paddy Gower is more than a household name here in Aotearoa; he’s an icon. An esteemed media personality, journalist, author, and now more recently the founder of his new media company and brand, “This Is The F$%^ing News."
In this episode, Paddy joins Daylight CEO Lee Lowndes to discuss the lessons he's learned, his future direction, and his perspective on the present.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. It’s best absorbed as audio, but read on for some of the conversation.
Lee: Kia ora Paddy! Let’s kick-off with the start of your career in journalism, in the era of print at The Herald when print was king. What was that like?
Paddy: Yeah, it was the early 2000s, New Zealand had just gone through Y2K fears, and I started at The Herald as a night duty reporter. Back then, The Herald’s circulation was massive—somewhere around 250,000 daily, though it was already beginning to decline. The media landscape was much simpler. One News and Three News dominated TV, with One News playing in the newsroom each night, and The Herald front page setting the agenda for the day. Reaching 90% of the nation with just those channels was the norm.
One of my most vivid early memories was seeing the sub-editing department—packed with people perfecting copy and crafting headlines, a role that hardly exists anymore. I remember seeing a guy I knew, Nick Stanley, sat at this Dick Smith Malteca type desk with all these wires hanging out from the back, loading stories onto the internet. No one knew how it would go. Search engines like AltaVista were still around, Google was new, and I even attended a course on how to use it. I remember the first time I found an overseas article relevant to a local story—showing it to my chief reporter, who was amazed at the “global” reach. That was only 25 years ago and the industry has changed so much since then - I’ve been there through it all.
Lee: What was that point that led you from print at the time at the Herald to your first initial roles in TV when you started to become a public figure?
Paddy: Funnily enough, one of the reasons that I went to TV3 was I thought that it had a better future than print and the Herald. At the time, print was declining, the internet was picking up, but things were uncertain. I remember thinking, maybe it’s time to get out before this goes south. But in the end, things went terribly for TV too - so I was completely wrong about that.
Duncan Garner poached me from the Herald, and took me on a whole different path in TV. People sometimes forget I was a print journalist for 10 years - I loved it and wanted to write big, long magazine features, but that never quite happened. Instead, I got into political journalism, first at Parliament for the Herald, then at TV3, eventually becoming political editor. The career shift led me into a high-pressure world where everything felt like a game - something I played at times to my own detriment. Parliament is a kill-or-be-killed environment, and no matter what anyone says, that won’t change. I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Lee: With podcasters and social influencers being allowed in the press briefings in America, there is this huge shift with how information is disseminated and interpreted, allowing a whole new inexperienced audience into the conversations. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Paddy: Yeah I do, and it’s a great conversation to have. Media has changed with lots of different ways for people to get their information now, and some of them are partisan. NZ’s press gallery has largely had independent media that are non-partisan by institution. Opening it up to podcasters and influencers raises questions; how do you accredit them, who decides, what kind of environment does that create?
Lee: What was the journey like for you, deciding you were going to build a new brand and identity around Paddy Gower?
Paddy: I always used to avoid saying I was going to turn myself into a brand, but that’s what I’ve done. When rubber hit the road, I decided to hardcore turn myself into a brand and just lean into it.
I was introduced to you and the Daylight team, and we created TITFN together, long before we knew whether we were going to go to Stuff or any other media company. I just wanted to reclaim TITFM and own my kaupapa. I wasn’t going to care about what people thought, or how I should frame it. I was just going to use myself. I know it’s the biggest cliché ever, but there have been a lot of learnings.
