The Wintec Press Club lunch is held three times a year by
the Wintec School of Media Arts and is hosted by Steve Braunias. The
star-studded guest list always features big names in politics, media,
entertainment, sport, business, law and the arts. This time they included Sasha
McNeil, Matt Nippert, Hugh Sundae, David Farrier, veterans of the Waikato Times and what seemed like the
entire staff of the Spin-Off website (where Braunias runs the books pages), former Speakers of the
House Sir Kerry Burke and Dame Margaret Wilson, current MPs David Bennett and
Tim McIndoe and the odd novelist, alongside past and present students of the
Wintec media course.
The speaker is always a person of interest: this time it was Heather du Plessis-Allan, co-host of TV3’s current-affairs show Story. (Her co-host is Duncan Garner who spoke at the Wintec Press Club in May last year.)
Steve Braunias spoke at some length about the “crisis in
news”, here and overseas, with reference to newsroom staff cuts and the
desperation of news websites for stories that exhibit clickability. He talked
about the previous speakers at these lunches, singling out November
2014’s speaker Pam Corkery as “a generally unconvincing argument for
sobriety”. He handed out the 2015 Wintec Press Club awards.
There were some minor awards for Writer of the Year,
Sentence of the Year and other trivia, but what everyone in the room really
wanted to know was: who would win the coveted Best Friend of the Year award for
“the person outside of Wintec who has provided the most outstanding support for
journalism students”?
Reader, it was me. For, the citation said, my “entertaining
and almost certainly libellous chronicles” of these lunches right here on this
blog.
Braunias began his introduction of du Plessis-Allan by
explaining, “We’re in a hurry today because as you all know Heather has a jail
sentence to catch.” He insisted that the Chatham House rule applied to her
talk: if she happened to call TVNZ a bunch of c***s, no one was to mention it on
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a blog. So if she did, I’m not saying. (She
didn’t.)
He extolled her track record and reporting skills along the
lines of the advance publicity where he wrote: “Heather’s work on the Saudi
sheep scandal this year was one of the best scoops of 2015. Heather is a dogged
and determined reporter – and her decision to leave TVNZ for TV3’s news roster
has restored some credibility to the network after its idiotic decision to lose
John Campbell.”
She began by saying, “That was really generous of you,
because I know how mean you can be,” which got a laugh. But as Wittgenstein would of
said, of the rest I cannot speak so thereof I must remain silent.
One thing, though: she advised the students and by
implication other journalists to set up Facebook pages. She said she got “so
many stories that way. People don’t email any more, just find you on Facebook.”
Pro tip.
'Three more things: she was briefly rude about the Wellington
thinker and Twitter disputant Giovanni Tiso, which amused the three of us in
the room who had heard of him. In response to a Braunias witticism, she said,
“Ha ha. Fuck you, Steve.” And later to Barry Soper, her husband, after an
amusing exchange, “I’ll make it up to you later. I’ll buy you something.”
She was great: funny, full of good stories and, more
important, good advice. What was really striking about her talk, and her
replies to the questions afterwards, was the passion for serious journalism
that came through. It must have been inspiring for the students and recent
graduates present. It’s pretty dismal out there, what with all the job cuts at
the big media organisations, stories from Fairfax’s print editions appearing
(and staying) on the Stuff website only if they have a high click-through
rating, and other depressing industry developments. It must be hard for keen
young journalists to stay motivated.
On the other hand, nobody looks at Rachel Glucina’s
ridiculous clickability-driven “entertainment + celebrity news” website Scout,
so there is hope. Faint hope, but these days we’ll take what we can get.
So, in light of HDP-A’s possibly precarious position legally
gun-wise, here is Warren Zevon live in Boston in 2000 with “Lawyers, Guns and
Money”:
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