Summer reissue: Told in one crucial moment from every year, by The Spinoff’s founder Duncan Greive.
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2014: An accidental birth, in a corporate boardroom
The Spinoff was never meant to happen. It was March 2014, and one of my best friends, Kerryanne Nelson, had recently returned from the UK, taking a role as a marketing manager at Spark. Kerryanne would go on to be The Spinoff’s first GM, but back then we were just mates, having a wine and talking about her new job. She was working within a small, cool team on a product called Lightbox, which aimed to bring streaming TV to New Zealand, a year before Netflix arrived.
I was hanging onto the edges of journalism with my fingernails. I’d previously written for, then edited, a music magazine named Real Groove, and was now freelancing for magazines like Metro, Sunday and North & South, but hadn’t had any luck going for an actual job in the mainstream. I adored print magazines, but they were in a prolonged post-GFC downturn, and I was freaking out about a chunky mortgage, with a third daughter on the way.
That afternoon, Kerryanne and I talked about the challenge of bringing Lightbox to market. It was the heart of the “golden age of TV” – Breaking Bad had just finished up, Mad Men was still airing – but despite those shows dominating the culture, if you missed them on Sky, it was off to Video Ezy or the Pirate Bay. Lightbox was buying up the rights to a bunch of great shows, and aiming to convince New Zealand to pay to watch “TV. Online. Anytime.”
The problem was that much as these shows were beloved, they were also largely catalogue – that is, they were in the past and thus had no news value. My idea was to commission great writers to create content around the shows and tell you which shows to watch. I was early on not loving algorithms, basically.
Kerryanne loved the idea, and pitched it to her boss, who greenlit it. We settled on a separate brand – Unboxed – and it would have to be a standalone site, linked from the main. This was largely because Lightbox was weeks away from launching, and it was hard enough to figure out how to stream video in 2014, without adding an editorial layer to the technology too.
Throughout this period I became a bit of an outside limb at the company. I gave feedback on names before they settled on Lightbox, wrote up a brief for the new editorial site and even ghost-wrote a speech for the GM. I remember telling friends that maybe I was a consultant now? It felt very grown up – and certainly paid better than my static-to-dwindling freelance print magazine income.
Still, throughout this time, I never intended to operate the platform. I thought I would conceptualise it, help recruit an editor and maybe check in once in a while. It was another gig – just like writing for the trade publication Employment Today, drafting press releases, or helping Dan Carter with his autobiography, all of which were key parts of my 2014-era hustle.
Then the lawyers got involved. I was invited to a meeting with the somewhat ominous name “Blog legal studio discussion”. I headed to Spark’s angular, imposing headquarters in downtown Auckland. There I met senior counsel Claire Addis and others from Spark. She politely but firmly explained to me that Spark had purchased its TV rights on the basis that it would create a video subscription service for New Zealanders, not host a news publication.
It meant that my idea was a no-go. I did not take it well. I remember remonstrating with Addis; I talked loftily about “fair use” (a US legal concept which does not exist in the same form here). I followed up with a lengthy and pompous letter, setting out my baseless position. Addis was very polite but unmoved – Spark was, for some reason, unwilling to take on the risks involved in hosting criticism and reviews; essentially, to become a publisher – in service of a marketing concept which represented a tiny proportion of their rollout plan.
A few days later, Addis had another idea. There was nothing stopping me starting my own media business. I’d be free to pitch to Spark. Lightbox quickly confirmed they would be our first client. That was not the plan. But it was interesting. Basically, I could have this idea, if I wanted it.
I started to see this for what it was. A long to-do list, with the dream of a digital magazine at the end. One friend (Simon Chesterman, who now runs Metro) let me camp out in his Karangahape Rd office. Another, Joel Kefali, designed a logo and a little brand book for $500. The platform was already built. And after scouring the internet, I found Alex Casey.
She was writing a blog called “the Filminist” for Flicks.co.nz. Her tone was incredible – so fresh, so funny, so self-aware. I sent an awkward tweet, we had an awkward coffee, and I offered her a very small job. We launched, and within weeks there was already what would become an army of Alex fans starting to build.
While she wrote, I started to flesh out the business. New Zealand’s news space felt loaded already, with the Herald and Stuff. But beyond a vibrant but largely unpaid blog scene, there was nothing that approximated what magazines did. I knew we had incredible writers, and was confident we could build an audience.
All that was missing was a business model to support it. I figured what we were doing for Lightbox could be built out across other companies and subjects. That on the internet, everyone was a publisher – but no one really knew what that meant. I never planned to start a business, but now that I was accidentally running one, I found it had its hooks in pretty deep.
2015: A derelict office with bad vibes
Jeremy Priddy turned the key, and opened the door on our future. He was head of leasing for Britomart, the flash downtown development owned by billionaire Peter Cooper. A few years later, my friend Leonie Hayden and I would pitch Cooper her idea for The Spinoff Ātea – after a single meeting, he wrote a cheque to start a section which has become a bedrock of what we do. Back then he was our would-be landlord, and Priddy was trying to find someone to take his least desirable spot.
The office was rough as guts. It had been the home of a promoter, and had generations of Red Bull fridges, astroturf and a dartboard (we kept that). Something had gone wrong: it seemed someone had been living there and left in a hurry. A room had been gibbed in and painted black. There was apocalyptic script scrawled across the interior walls. The vibes were extremely bad.
But it was massive – 300 square metres, two average homes – and dirt cheap. The commitment was small: it was only available on a rolling three monthly term. It was cheap because the lift was terminally broken and it felt a little dangerous.
Cheap is relative though. We absolutely couldn’t afford it. Still, the idea of having our own place danced in my mind. I took a deep breath and signed, figuring we could find people to flat with us. Before long my friend Brody’s tech startup Parkable moved in, as did James Frankham and his team from NZ Geographic.
The lease was very “as is, where is”, and I needed someone to help haul all the scary abandoned debris out. I’d met Don Rowe a year or two before, while he was a student at Wintec, at one of Steve Braunias’s infamous, brilliant Press Club events in Hamilton. Don was a young writer whose best sentences were utterly sublime. He was also very strong. He and I – but mainly he – slowly got rid of the junk, then Don painted the floors. By the time he was done, I hired him as a junior writer, and it almost looked like a place you could imagine people working.
Appearances were deceptive. It was up three flights of terrifying stairs, with a mid-thigh-high rail and a sheer drop. It was freezing in winter and baking in summer, with no plausible way of impacting that. When it rained, it leaked. If it rained hard enough, the leak became a torrent (The Spinoff once livestreamed a particularly powerful leak during a storm in 2016). Bad as it was, it was ours – and something about all that space let The Spinoff’s dreams expand to fill it.
Those dreams got big on us quickly. In mid-2015, I spent a few frantic weeks pitching writers and businesses the idea of us being a lot more than a TV blog. A group of firms took a punt on us, perhaps because what we were offering was so different to the display ads, boosted Facebook posts and promoted search listings which constituted digital media at the time.
Flick Electric came on to sponsor the brilliant, trailblazing parenting coverage of Emily Writes. We made a buzzy video series starring Shamubeel Eaqub for Kiwibank. Flight Centre had us do travel writing for their website. Coliseum Sports got us to do a whole bunch of content for Rugby Pass. Universal Music paid us to interview a Jonas brother and a young Troye Sivan on an abandoned couch. Unity sponsored the Books section – and still do! The Herald, our hometown paper, reached out to commission TV reviews. I’m so grateful to them all – especially Spark and Lightbox – for taking a punt on us.
On the other side, I cajoled a small group of writers to come across. Some were legends, slumming. Braunias wanted to cover the book world with vivid, mischievous prose. Scotty Stevenson would write on sports in a way that made you feel the dirt on your skin. Toby Manhire said he’d blog about politics, but did far, far more. Catherine McGregor went from a senior job at Metro to an immense and largely unseen role.
Others we found largely by figuring out who was funny on Twitter – Calum Henderson and Hayden Donnell. Mad Chapman started as intern a few months later, and Sam Brooks not long after. That became the core of the first generation of our in-office writers.
On September 10th, The Spinoff relaunched, claiming that we now covered sports, politics, social issues, books and parenting, in addition to television. It required a new website (completed by Tom Dale, who by some strange twist of fate is now my daughter’s high school media studies teacher), and a huge amount of nerve. I remember staying up working until dawn on the night before our first birthday, heading home for an hour’s sleep, then catching the train in again for 7.30am. We backfilled each section with a mixture of new and previously published work, then flicked a switch to make it live at 9am.
The financial underpinnings were extremely tenuous. But there was freedom, camaraderie and a sense of infinite potential. It felt like all we wanted to do was shock and awe and crack up our colleagues – the surest test of whether a post would hit with the wider public. We’d write all week, drink all Friday night and come up with a fresh set of ideas, then do it all again the next week.
I used to talk about how it could blow away in a strong breeze, as a way of motivating us – it would be nice if that didn’t happen! – but also giving us a sense of the stakes (very low). People started to sense how open we were. Jane Yee wants us to do a podcast about The Bachelor? Great! José Barbosa wants to make videos? Cool! A Toby Morris comic called The Side Eye? Sounds awesome! It was probably going to fail, we might as well have some fun with it.
It was liberating. We made our impermanence an advantage.
2016: The Spinoff declares war
‘People would literally rather watch their own body decomposing in the ground, eyeballs being eaten out by worms, than sit through a council meeting,’ says Hayden. His eyes are bulging, he’s got an open beer next to his laptop, and his voice is distorting slightly. It’s a video collaboration between him and José, and recaps, in lurid language, a council meeting from the early part of 2016.
In it, young Aucklanders like Sudvhir Singh struggle to be heard, while making an incredibly mild request that the needs of younger people – for affordable housing – might be considered. Councillors, and dozens of other submitters, angrily shout them down.
We had only just started making video at the time, but it attracted 10,000 views on YouTube, and many more on Facebook – tapping into a sense that Auckland was becoming a gerontocracy, run in the narrow interests of a relatively small group of older residents who wanted it preserved exactly as it was when they were in their prime, regardless of what impact that had on anyone else.
The response got us thinking, and eventually coalesced into a campaign called The War for Auckland, a pop-up series aiming to cover the fate of the Auckland Unitary Plan. This was a huge piece of legislation which would essentially decide whether the city would allow for more and denser housing, or would continue to value single houses on sections more highly than people having a place to live.
It was a landmark for us in many ways. It was the first time we had taken a specific stand on an issue, and the first time we had gone to our audience asking for money, after spending months unsuccessfully meeting with banks and engineering firms trying to convince them to support this admittedly unconventional mode of coverage.
We set up a PledgeMe campaign, seeking $10,000, which would pay for Hayden to work on it full-time for a couple of months, while also allowing us to seek outside contributors. The response was incredible: we raised almost $25,000, the bulk of it in the first 24 hours. A makeshift team assembled, including Chris McDowall, whose gorgeous data visualisations showed the stakes and results infinitely better than the creaky PDFs otherwise available.
The coverage was driven by Hayden’s fulminating prose and passion, and by its end, the contentious plan passed relatively comfortably. I’m in no way claiming credit for that – but the coverage seemed to strike an urbanist chord with many people, and would have a beautiful echo years later. It sowed the seeds of what would become The Spinoff Members in 2019, and helped galvanise a sense that while we were far smaller than other organisations, when we all fixed on something, we could make an impact as meaningful, in our own way, as the bigger outlets.
2017: An election debate which makes us, and starts to break us
None of this made any sense. The whole staff of The Spinoff – maybe a dozen of us – was scattered around the Generator building in Auckland’s freshly launched Wynyard Quarter, a shared working space, made to encourage tech startups to set up shop. It was September 6, less than three weeks before the 2017 election, and we were hosting what we grandly called The Spinoff Great Debate.
It wasn’t our first. Earlier in the year, there had been a by-election in Mt Albert, with the Greens’ Julie Anne Genter, TOP’s Geoff Simmons and a young Labour politician named Jacinda Ardern contesting the seat. Former Metro editor Simon Wilson hosted “The War for Mt Albert” – I am unsure why everything was a war back then, but I take responsibility. I remember the debate as partly a triumph. Simon had recently joined as Auckland editor, and plotted the electorate’s issues with a rare precision. It was also the first time I saw Ardern as the leader she would show up to be nationally later that year – her command of the whole of politics was dazzling, complete.
The debate was only partly a triumph, though, in a way which was a very pure expression of that era at The Spinoff. The event was held in a shipping container. Auckland’s finest, with superb Indian tapas and endless craft beer in Sammy’s Chai Lounge. But still: a shipping container. It was also notable that our livestream failed, perhaps due to the parlous budget of $0 we had allocated to poor José.
Six months later, and we were on a different planet. It shows just how long ago it was that Facebook, now allergic to news and politics, had agreed to partner with us on the event. That meant it would be elevated into tens of thousands of feeds. It also meant Facebook was (mercifully) in charge of the production and livestream. A rumour swept around that the total cost ran to six figures. I never saw the invoice, but based on the scale of the rig, it scans.
Setting it up had been a wildly stressful few weeks, trying to wrangle a motley mixture of major party deputies and minor party leaders or co-leaders. We were still very young and raw – two years earlier we were still a TV blog – and getting them all (and I do mean all – we had seven on stage) in one place was a huge logistical challenge. Some parties were only dimly aware of us. Others knew exactly who we were, and were disinclined to come as a result.
In the end, they all showed. It was, with hindsight, a cracking lineup: Paula Bennett, Kelvin Davis, Shane Jones, Gareth Morgan, David Seymour, Marama Fox and Marama Davidson. We matched the vast cast by having three moderators – Toby Manhire was joined by Simon and Leonie. She’d joined recently as our first te ao Māori editor. Given that six of the seven leaders were Māori, it felt important to have representation on both sides of the stage – Leonie, despite having far less experience leading political debates (none), very gamely said yes.
The event was an unqualified success. It ran for 90 minutes and ended up having a reach of over 250,000 and with more than 5,000 comments – metrics which seemed huge then and still do now. Paddy Gower was in the room, Gilda Kirkpatrick was in the comments. Toby was asked to do a walking piece to camera to introduce the debate with just minutes to go, with no autocue – an agonising curveball for a seasoned anchor, let alone a writer. He aced it, leading to one of current Spinoff editor Mad Chapman’s most beloved memes.
Shane Jones got angry and either feigned falling asleep or really fell asleep. Marama Fox was dazzling, flipping the bird with both hands in a grab that was everywhere for a while. Gareth Morgan was cantankerous. Kelvin and Paula got into it, but not with any great heat, while our trio of moderators all brought well-differentiated strengths to the party. It was fun, digressive, surprising. It felt like it could only have come from us.
I always played a Lorde lyric in my head at times like this, from Bravado on her debut EP. “And I can tell you that / when the lights come on / I’ll be ready for this”. They were blinding that night. And we were ready.
In the days after though, I started to hear whispers. The debate was part thrilling, part exhausting. Everyone still loved each other, and the work, and the mission – but the way I was directing it (ad hoc, pure gut) was starting to take a toll. It was a lesson I should have heeded. I didn’t.
2018: There is a limit
Over the previous few years both The Spinoff as an organisation, and me personally as a critic, had gradually become somewhat more prickly. This went across everything we covered – we became sanctimonious at times, I’ll admit – but we were particularly unblinking in our coverage of New Zealand television. When it was good, we weren’t shy about saying so – nor snobby. I wrote a long, loving feature about the end of Neighbours at War’s glorious run, while Alex’s writing about format reality TV was manifestly as good as anyone, anywhere in the world.
When we didn’t like it, we could be savage. A review I wrote of the series Filthy Rich typified the era, which prompted its creator to describe me as part of “a small group of wankers who think they should dictate to the rest of the country what the rest of the country’s tastes are” (accurate). He and others felt it was needlessly harsh, and a gross misunderstanding of the challenges of reaching broad New Zealand audiences. Some TV writers disagreed with him, and got in touch with me to say they appreciated the review. Still, there were many who had good reasons to hate us.
All of which is to say that there were always going to be eyes on anything we did in television. Our fans would be excited to see how we played in a new medium. Our enemies: considerably less charitable.
Phil Smith’s email felt irresistible from the moment it landed. “We are looking to keep a show ‘in character’ with The Spinoff web offering,” the pitch read, “that slightly boho feel. It wouldn’t be a prudish, lecture-ish series (like a fourth estate media series that is full of tut tuts) – rather a more pithy, topical and deeply observational feel with plenty of light and shade, and definitely talking in parallel with the target audience.”
Smith ran the production company Great Southern, and wanted us to make a TV show. It was exciting. It was scary. We were definitely interested. We met up, and I learned just who I was dealing with: a true TV legend, one whose CV – Eating Media Lunch! Holmes! perfectly mapped to our own ambitions. Latterly he’d also made The Hui with Annabelle Lee-Mather, who had become a close friend of The Spinoff, as co-host of Gone by Lunchtime.
The pitch was simply taking what we were already doing and switching medium. How hard could it be? A question only a wildly overconfident naif could ask (and part of the reason I’m so impressed with what Stuff has done with ThreeNews). Smith got Three’s head of news, Hal Crawford, involved, who was a champion of the project and stayed supportive throughout. We put together a prop, and Great Southern pitched NZ on Air for funding – we’d never done either of those things before, but somehow, the funders said yes.
From the jump, the timing was excruciatingly tight. We were funded just prior to Christmas 2017, but only started work in earnest in March, and it went to air in June. We knew almost nothing about what the show would be, nor who would host it. This was how we had always been. Leaping first, then checking for a parachute.
Quickly the crew came together. We held auditions for hosts, and found Leonie and Alex impossible to ignore. They had incredible chemistry, as two-thirds of the On the Rag podcast, which had joined Gone by Lunchtime, Business is Boring and The Real Pod as mainstays of our nascent podcast lineup.
The pair embodied everything we sought to be: smart, opinionated, quick-as-whips and wildly funny. That they had no experience hosting a TV show seemed a minor detail. This whole period was electrifying and stressful in equal measure. Toby had just started as editor, we’d signed a lease on a new office and Penguin had asked us to write a book. Busy! But fun.
We put together a team comprising equal parts Great Southern vets, young comics we loved, like Tom Sainsbury, Angella Dravid, Frickin’ Dangerous Bro and James Mustapic, along with people from our side. The group began scratching away at the show. It would be a mix of original reporting, comedic interludes, in studio work and sweet non-sequiturs from Toby Morris, who’d become a mainstay of our emerging visual culture, alongside designer Tina Tiller. A tight half hour, playing out after 7 Days in a perfect 9.45pm Friday slot.
Almost nothing went easily. Starting with moving office. We had a hard deadline to get out, but the renovation at our new place in Morningside became extremely fraught when the developer unexpectedly hit a rich seam of volcanic basalt, spending vast sums and breaking multiple large machines trying to shift it. We ultimately moved in long before it was really ready, and tried to prep for the TV show with works still going on – caked in dust, with decibels regularly breaching 100, roughly the sound of a subway train hurtling past.
You probably know what happened next. The show went to air, and honestly, we loved the first episode. Strange, a bit janky, expressing a really different worldview, the product of us trying to make each other laugh and think. But it was objectively half-cooked, and needed a lot more development than it got.
Almost immediately, things started to blow up. Ratings, initially fine, began to slide, and our friends at the Herald covered them with something that felt like glee. A brutal review cut right to the quick of our insecurities. Mike Hosking, who had every right to enjoy our troubles, given our coverage of his show over the years, started editorialising about us almost daily, memorably writing in an editorial that “The Spinoff TV is crap and a waste of our money”. Melissa Lee created what the Taxpayers’ Union called “The Spinoff TV Memorial Bill” in response. It was stressful, I’m not gonna lie.
Within a couple of weeks I had a network exec furiously excoriating me about the show, threatening to dump it into a basement slot, from which it could never recover. I convinced him to hold off, but a couple of weeks later it happened anyway. The vibe in the office that week was as low as I’d ever felt it. I made a speech to the room, about how organisations are forged in moments like this. I was shooting for Friday Night Lights (shamefully, I think I might have unironically ended on “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”). I probably hit David Brent.
Honestly? We had it coming. More precisely, I had it coming. We had that blogger’s mentality – you write in some ways like no one’s reading, because at the start, it’s literally true. Until it’s not. There isn’t a moment which comes along when someone says “hey chill out, these are just people on the other end of that keyboard.” We meant what we said, but didn’t realise the extent to which we as outsiders were increasingly not just speaking our truth to power, but had some of our own power too.
For everyone we’d pissed off over the years, The Spinoff TV was the most sublime schadenfreude. For those making the show, it was really tough. Some gradually disappeared, showing up less and less. Others just walked out one day and never returned. A group of us, including some Great Southerners who we remain close with today, stayed the course, and over 16 weeks, in that late night slot, we slowly worked it out. Once the frenzy of criticism moved on, and the expectations got lower, it became goofy and free. By the end we were crazy enough to make an hour-long finale, just because we wanted to (and knew its chances of renewal were nil).
I still love that episode, and think if The Spinoff TV failed, at least it died trying to do something new. Still, the scars were real. A combination of inexperience, an excess of pace, the drama of the move and that public savaging really hurt people. It was like the aftermath of the Facebook debate, only it ran for 16 weeks. People at The Spinoff used to talk about bad energy as “the fog”. It descended again.
2019: One day in March
For a brief period in the late 10s, the tech companies wanted to be our best friends. They had different ways of showing it. Google put on sumptuous events and flew you across, while Facebook created an “Accelerator” which got a bunch of erstwhile news enemies to hang out and take classes on things like checkout optimisation and email distribution from genuine all-world experts, all while staying in fancy hotels. I still remember seeing a platter of lobster as big as a motorbike at one of Sydney’s finest restaurants. The things you can afford when you don’t really pay tax.
In March of 2019 I was at one of these events in Singapore. I don’t want to be too harsh on big tech – the accelerator was an extraordinary experience, these events were often very valuable, and Google is now a big supporter through their News Showcase programme. In Singapore, I got to have a chat about digital media with Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalistic legend who founded Rappler, has faced multiple jail terms and had just been named Time’s Person of the Year. The next morning, I woke up to news there had been a shooting at a mosque in Christchurch. Details were still scarce, but it was clearly really, really bad.
We all know now what had happened that day. I wasn’t in the office, so I’m relying on what has been told to me, over and over, by those who were there. Toby Manhire, a former senior editor at the Guardian had quickly become both one of our most beloved and brilliant writers, and a person who really knew how a news organisation worked. As editor, he brought standards and protocols which were sorely lacking during my time in that chair. We had to make fewer humiliating public apologies.
He loved our strange, surreal humour – it matched his own – but he also knew how to handle a real story like no one else. He had taken on the role a year earlier, and on March 15, he gathered everyone around. This was the only story, and would be the only story for the foreseeable future. While we were a magazine site, and even covering this event wasn’t necessarily in our bounds, we were going to figure out how to do it.
It happened fast. Don Rowe had always had an eye on the alt right internet. He caught wind that the massacre had been livestreamed on Facebook, and quickly found the video. What happened next still fills me with admiration – and dread, because I am not at all confident that I would have had the same instincts.
Don wrote the story, breaking the globally significant news that New Zealand’s worst modern act of domestic terrorism was streamed on the world’s biggest platform. It was an astonishing effort from a very young journalist – but what Toby did was as profound. He made a call that we would not publish a single frame of the footage, nor the terrorist’s manifesto, nor his name. He clocked, correctly, that the act was intended to incite further violence, and that giving the perpetrator the infamy he sought was playing into his (and his community’s) hands.
I sat, impotent and grief-stricken in a luxury hotel in Singapore, at a conference put on by another big tech company, writing an opinion piece I still hold to this day: that our lack of an attempt to guardrail content online, as we have everywhere else, makes internet-fomented crises inevitable. Toby did so much more, continuing to make calls that I believe speak to his fundamental character, and helped galvanise us as an organisation.
Chief among them was to centre Muslim voices in the national reckoning that followed. The scale of the tragedy remains so visceral as to be hard to contemplate. What’s worse is that the arrival of Covid a year later meant that the day of memorial not only didn’t go ahead, but our collective challenge seemed to wipe away a national conversation about how that day could happen, so that we might do our utmost to ensure that it never does again. But still – on that awful day, the whole team at The Spinoff stood up and did their best to meet a horrific moment, and I remain filled with admiration and gratitude for everyone who was in the office that day. None more so than my great friend Toby.
2020: The plague year
I think of being editor of anything as a strange kind of shift work. You punch in your card at the start, and when you do so you make a commitment to stay the course. Maybe it’s fun, maybe the sun’s out. Maybe something delicious and electric happens – the 2017 election, say. Or maybe an act of unspeakable terrorism is followed by a global pandemic. Toby really caught a tough shift. March of 2020 is etched into all our minds. I want to tell you what I remember.
Toby and I got coffee at Kind, the cafe under our then-offices. The weather was fine, but our conversation was tense. The previous Friday we’d farewelled Mad Chapman, who’d quit to do … well, she didn’t quite know. I was initially crestfallen at the news, especially given that her resignation was followed so soon after by Alex Casey’s, who was leaving to work on the reality TV shows she’d been writing about so sensationally for so long. They were our two young stars, who had become best friends – both wildly talented, funny and intelligent writers with a tone all their own. When people thought of The Spinoff, they thought of Alex and Mad. Would they think of us at all without them?
Mad’s leaving drinks had been fun, though, and we were growing accustomed to viewing change as an opportunity rather than a verdict. After the party, that weekend had brought the pandemic into sharp focus. It was mid-March, and the world was closing its borders. Something awful was going down in Italy, and it suddenly felt plausible that this was the big one: that event which changes the world and defines your life.
What was our role in all this? We liked to write longform and opinion and jokes about TV shows and politicians and radio hosts. A pandemic was just not in our playbook. Toby and I threw it back and forth, but quickly decided that we had to change our whole business to meet this. From now on, we were in this for as long as it lasted. We would publish live, rolling updates throughout the day, and every journalist was now tasked with angles on Covid-19.
Within a couple of weeks, we were in lockdown. Toby was at his masterful best, ensuring our coverage was deeply grounded in the best science we could find as the situation evolved – but that we scrupulously avoided the excesses of much of the media. He was supported by Catherine and Alice Neville, a former food editor who became an indispensable part of our team in 2018. The two deputies had a commitment and dedication that rivalled Toby’s own. Our editorial focus was on what you as humans could best do to protect yourself, your friends and your whānau during this shocking new era, rudely thrust upon us.
In my home office, my day started at 4am, reading global news, data and science sites, filling out live updates while Alex Braae, the original, masterful Bulletin editor, created a singular product out of the maelstrom of news. Braae then took over our nascent live updates, and we handed it around in shifts among a team of magazine writers, learning fast and under extreme duress what it was to cover an incredibly delicate news story.
After my morning shift, I’d often get on the phone to our then-GM Mark Kelliher. We had become close friends, and I relied heavily on his cool head and judgement. It was tested like never before during that period. I remember with a pit of dread asking him to go through our commercial partners, look at the length of our contracts and try and make a call about which might stick around through this. From that, we could forecast out revenues and see how far it went. The answer was not surprising, but still gave me waves of nausea and deep sadness. We had about three months – maybe six if we were very lucky.
The government announced a wage subsidy, which we gratefully took. But it bought us maybe another month. We all worked 18 hour days or more, and tried to ignore the fact it would soon be over. The work gave us purpose at least.
Then a series of unfathomably strange events happened. Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles got in touch, suggesting that she collaborate with the gentle genius that is Toby Morris, then our comic artist and art director. They created a series of short animations that explained various aspects of the virus, how it worked and how best to protect yourself and your loved ones. Siouxsie suggested we release them under creative commons, meaning others could adapt, translate and share them.
Optimised for social media, they became a global sensation and our traffic soared to unimaginable levels. Jacinda Ardern held a printout of one at a press conference, then Obama tweeted a link to a story about them, then governments in Germany and Argentina started using them as the basis of their public health communication. It was weird, but there was no time to dwell.
Then Bauer Media called a Zoom, and told its staff it was shutting down. The government had banned magazines from publishing, in a move which still irks many in publishing to this day – suddenly iconic titles like The Listener, Metro and Women’s Weekly vanished. The combined impact of the loss of those mastheads and the warmth toward Toby and Siouxsie’s work seemed to generate a groundswell of desire to support The Spinoff. We saw the number of members donating to us triple in the space of a few short weeks.
By the end of April, all our worst predictions about commercial revenue had come to pass. But the support of our members meant we were no longer facing oblivion. We returned our wage subsidy less than a month after we claimed it. The truth was, thanks to an extraordinary series of events, we no longer needed it.
The pandemic was an incredibly challenging time to be a journalist, and there are elements of our coverage I would change if I could – the whole media dealt with people’s fears around vaccination, and those who did not get vaccinated for one reason or another, with a lack of humanity which still scars this country. Still, for a small organisation, set up to do something entirely different, I cannot really comprehend how we managed to do what we did.
2021: The Spinoff’s first intern becomes its editor
Alex’s style – fast, funny, pure blogging at the start – attracted a devoted, cult-like audience. It also attracted other writers, who seemed to sense in her approach room for their own. We recruited a bunch who were and remain indelibly part of our story – but for some reason the walk-ins feel a little like magic.
Two are particularly noteworthy. The first is Tara Ward. She was living in New Plymouth, raising young children. I received an email late one evening, saying “I would like to submit a recap of tonight’s episode of The Block”. That email arrived on September 11, 2014. The Spinoff went live on September 10th. She started writing the following week, and is still on staff today.
The other is Madeleine Chapman – our current editor. On December 1, 2015, she wrote to “Mr Greive” with a formality which would never again characterise our relationship. She described a life of house painting and a terrifying athletic ability, as an age-group basketball rep for New Zealand and former cricketer for Sāmoa. She wrote, “I had been leaning towards comedic writing over journalism but after reading The Spinoff I realise that it is indeed possible to do both.”
We spoke on the phone, and soon agreed to her joining us as an intern. I didn’t really know what an intern was, and nor did she. Within weeks she was writing for the site, and before long started to reveal herself as one of the most original voices of her generation.
The genre of “experiential journalism” had become in vogue, but often consisted of the writer attending an F45 class or going to Fieldays to understand life as a farmer. Mad really committed to the bit. She spent a week living according to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s fitness and diet regimen. She tried to ride an Onzo bike with no gears and solid tyres to Hamilton (she made it to Huntly).
She took on writing Steven Adams’ biography on top of her day job. She’d finish work and write again until midnight. Most mornings I got to work and she was asleep on the couch. Sometimes her intensity showed well beyond writing. I remember one weekend I felt pretty stoked about myself for running a half marathon without training. A couple of weeks later she did the same thing – but made it a full. One summer she’d started throwing the javelin again, and after six weeks had the New Zealand title. She’s built different, is what I’m saying.
She also had this unshakable quality to her – I’ve never met someone so unimpressed by the hierarchies of society. She became friendly with Simon Wilson, who joined us as a trailblazing Auckland editor. He despaired for her love of KFC, and belief that it was as good and meaningful a kai as fine dining. The pair took one another to their favourite restaurants, stories which became as beloved and instructive as any we’ve ever published. And you all know about her rankings.
What you won’t know is what she did for our worklife. Along with Alex, another intern-turned-staffer named Alice Webb-Liddall, our longtime designer and illustrator Tina Tiller, and successive office managers Ashleigh Bogle and Lucy Reymer, she helped build the culture of The Spinoff. I had never worked anywhere where culture went much beyond “beers on a Friday”, but this group created a magical bond which helps take the weight off.
Alex, Mad and Ashleigh pioneered MVP, whereby we’d submit anonymous notes, praising work we’d seen done that week. Tina made everyone feel loved and seen, with a buoyant energy that leavened the inevitable stresses of a scrappy startup. This has been picked up and run with by the likes of our beloved podcast manager Te Aihe Butler, who brought waiata into our lives, and video editor Isaiah Tour, who makes coffee every morning, and makes people feel good all day.
Mad was extra, though. She started a tradition called Hallomeme, asking us to dress as our favourite meme of the year on October 31. It kept escalating, until in 2019 Mad and Tina stayed up literally the whole night turning our entire office into a meme museum. It was scandalising, likely defamatory, unbelievably funny and strange. This gift to their colleagues and no others, just because she could, like no one else ever would.
There was this moral weight to her convictions – maybe it’s coming from a large, Pacific, Catholic family – which we all respected a lot and feared a bit. Eventually my worst fear came true: the intern was leaving, after five years, with a plan to get a job overseas. We hugged and shed a few tears. It was February of 2020.
We stayed friends. When Toby resigned as editor after the mother of all shifts in the middle of 2021, it was my turn to email Mad out of the blue. She always had a leadership quality about her, and was working at North & South as senior editor at the time. I told her Toby’s news, and asked if she would meet for lunch. We offered Mad and Alex the jobs of co-editor, and they quickly accepted.
We then went into the prolonged lockdown of 2021, which wore heavily on everyone (the seeds of my own resignation began then, for sure). Alex eventually declined the job, though would stay on as a senior writer. Mad and I met up to talk about what came next. Ahead of the meeting I wore my fear like a coat cinched too tight at the waist. I could feel the world closing in – that it would have to be me, again. We met up. We talked. The strongest person I know said she’d take the job alone. At 27.
If you’ve read The Spinoff over the past few years, her personality, vision, creativity and work ethic are present everywhere now, particularly in an electric group of young writers and editors – Maddie, Claire, Shanti, Gabi, Stewart, Joel, Lyric, Liam and Hera – that she has hired or elevated. They’re joined by some Spinoff vets including Toby, Calum, Tara, Alice and Catherine, with me and Alex still here, doing more or less what we always tried to do. To watch Mad methodically building it out has been truly awe-inspiring.
2022: Delusions of grandeur
We always used to talk about The Spinoff in terms of a high/low brand. We meant that in terms of our scope – poetry and podcasts about reality TV. We don’t really mess with the middle. It also handily describes the pandemic era. The low of thinking we were done. The high of being saved by our members. The low of lockdowns, and the external discord unavoidably seeping into our own worklife. The high of an email from the World Health Organization birthing Daylight, the creative and digital agency that sits alongside The Spinoff, and with whom we share offices.
Through all this, I was trying to figure out the right path for The Spinoff. Before it started, I’d never worked in management, never had a direct report – I don’t remember having a performance review, though it must have happened. I’m not trying to make excuses, I just really didn’t know what I was doing. When we started, it felt liberating; as we grew, it increasingly felt like a chronic condition.
What I did do was study, to essentially try and infer the right course by talking and reading about business and media. I subscribed to business magazines and read endless books about media. I come from an entrepreneurial family. My father ran a business, as did my uncle. My cousin runs a pair of gaming studios, and my mum launched a startup charity in her 60s. I’ve benefited from great advice, particularly from our longtime advisory board member, my friend David Brain. I know I’m pretty good at some things, but I’m bad at others, and would too often retreat to writing when things got complicated.
The Spinoff had done well in 2020 and 2021, as the closed border economy boomed with stimulus. My philosophy had mostly been to reinvest what you make, let’s see what we can build here. But with two businesses, operating in the bizarre media microclimate as we came out of the pandemic, I felt in over my head.
My solution was to get some senior support in. Over the space of a few months we hired a bunch of really serious people, who’d spent time in hardcore roles in much larger companies. In the space of 18 months, our payroll doubled, and we took on something which resembled (to me anyway) a mini corporate structure. I was convinced that this was how we would make the leap.
It wasn’t. Everyone we hired, I respect them all. Some remain friends, like our ex-CTO Ben Gracewood – who did so much to make us a truly digital business – and all have gone on to do incredible work elsewhere. All made contributions that were hugely important while working for what we briefly called The Spinoff Group. It truly was not them, it was me. I did not know how to set up and run and direct a senior team, and just hiring good people is not enough.
The thing is, when you make big hires, and your costs go way up, you’re exposed to headwinds in a way you never were before. Losses compound, and turning them around takes longer. The cushion we’d built up deflated at a startling rate, particularly as the economy started to sour, when inflation took off and Adrian Orr began to crank up interest rates. We had to make hard decisions, which hurt people along the way.
To be clear, the failings were mine. “High on your own supply”, a beloved colleague put it to me recently. I can’t deny the charge. It was the hardest year of my leadership, and I felt a loss of confidence which took a long time to return.
2023: Amber answers the call
For the bulk of my time running The Spinoff, it gave me unimaginable energy. In those early years I remember running up the three flights of stairs to that dank space – it’s so geeky, but I just could not wait to start work. It felt so light, so free, so dazzlingly alive with all that possibility. It stayed that way for most of my time leading it. I’m not saying that the weight wasn’t crushing at times – there were months where I barely slept, riven with stresses; people, commercial partners, audience drama. I am so grateful to my wife and kids, because I was often a distracted and distant husband and father. The job just engulfed me.
I felt this compulsion, bordering on obsession. The Spinoff was all I thought about, read about, talked about (I was often very bad company). Until, quite suddenly, I couldn’t stand to do it for a moment longer. I wrote about this at the time, the way the job had gone better than I could have possibly imagined, but I just burned myself to a husk.
The moment I knew was our Christmas party, 2022. We were in this gorgeous new office, built for us and our needs, with our buddies Daylight across the hall. We’d been through immense challenges and were coming out the other side. I got up to make a speech to our crew. I’d done this every year, and grown to love it. Over time it got more elaborate – for years I’d do a minute or so on every person who worked there.
Afterwards someone would reply. It was often our legendary commercial editor Simon Day, who along with Matt McAuley and Mark Kelliher had built a partnership content operation which felt like it captured the same creativity and intent as our editorial side. He also cooked the whole staff meals a few times a year. Incredible guy. One summer, Simon came back from my speech with a rap, in the style of Tupac, set to a Lynley Dodd rhyme scheme. It was an intentional homage to Kendall Roy in Succession, but I’m not sure everyone clocked that.
In 2022, writing a speech was suddenly unimaginable. I tried to knit together some kind of narrative, but I felt so hollow writing it, and like a fraud delivering it. I just wanted to disappear from view. I thought the holidays would fix it, but when I returned the dread was worse. I started behaving strangely, and called the GM, Mark, in and told him I wanted to resign, and asked if he could take over. It was a strange situation, but after some contemplation, he said he would pick it up, effectively sharing leadership with Mad.
I told my wife Niki what I had done. She had been an enormous part of The Spinoff throughout – we talked endlessly about it, and she worked on it throughout, almost always unpaid, issuing invoices or helping draft contracts or doing whatever it required. She stoically accepted the brutal and constant hours and broken holidays along the way. She was bemused and quite annoyed at my news, particularly how it was conveyed (see the shameful grab). Resigning from leading the company that you both own, and spent a decade building – it seems like something you should maybe talk to your partner about.
Worse was to come. The following day, Mark asked me to go for a walk. He wouldn’t be taking the job, he told me, because he’d been offered another leadership role somewhere else. One that paid a lot more. We hugged and I went back to my office to stew. Then I called Amber.
She and I have been friends for decades, known each other since we were teen punks kicking around K Road. Her husband Henry, who now edits Metro, was once The Spinoff’s music editor, and our kids were in the same class for most of primary. The ties are deep. She’d come on to produce a wildly under-budgeted show named Get it to Te Papa (still one of my favourite Spinoff things), and never really left, coming on to lead our video division, where she, Sophie, Jin, Natalie and Isaiah created a run of beloved series, including Bad News, Scratched and Youth Wings.
Amber picked up my call on a family holiday just outside Dunedin. She asked to think about it. She called back the next day to say she was in – but wanted to get a drink to make sure I really meant it. A week later, we got cocktails near the office. I really meant it. And it really was the CEO role. And truly, hand on the whole of my heart, she has been extraordinary from day one. The Spinoff has been transformed over the past year, from a startup which needed to grow up, into a mature, aligned business with clear goals, that looks after its people, its audience and its partners with integrity and care. Amber has this infectiously buoyant nature, but also a steel and intellect which means you know she’s not playing.
She is supported by a whole new generation of leaders. The former Bulletin editor Anna Rawhiti-Connell now heads a new and powerful audience team in Tina, Sacha Laird, Angela Windust and Ben Fagan. Elisa Rivera has built a commercial powerhouse, with Bec Murphy, Liv Sisson, Brooke Macauley, Gemma McAuley (no relation!) and Jane Yee, fresh from leading a standalone podcast department. Amber leads a svelte operational team in Cécile and freshly minted GM Sophie Dowson.
What Amber and that new group have done floors me. Just a couple of weeks ago she restructured the organisation, integrating the standalone audio and video departments into different facets of the business. It might sound arcane, but Jin Fellet, Isaiah and Te Aihe Butler joining Mad’s editorial crew creates a whole-of-content team which immediately began to pay creative dividends. I mainly just watch. But the company feels in better shape than at any point before as it turns 10, and I put a huge amount of that down to Amber.
2024: The rest is still unwritten
Since stepping down, I’ve taken on this new, extremely nebulous job title. I’m “founder” at The Spinoff, which is literally true – I founded it – but also describes nothing. I end up being a bit of an odd-job man. I’ll write sometimes. I’ll do some podcasting. I’ll go bang the drum for what we do at a media agency, hoping they’ll work with us. I take a lot of meetings; sometimes I’m not quite sure why. I still chair the board, and do the same for Daylight, which has grown to be as big as The Spinoff itself, and often draws me into its fascinating work. I’m not as busy as ever, but I’m busy enough.
The office is a quiet, serious place, soundtracked by furious typing, which occasionally erupts into laughter. The best thing about it is that now things happen at The Spinoff, and I find out when everyone else does. We hire new writers, or start a series of events, or lose our beloved free lunches on Wednesdays (turns out there is such a thing as a free lunch, but Nando’s largesse doesn’t last forever). I find out at the Monday all hands. It’s truly thrilling.
Earlier this year, I found out about the War for Wellington. It was a sequel to the War for Auckland in so many ways – about the passage of a plan which would have a profound effect on the city’s future, particularly for young people, even for those not yet born. Our Wellington editor, Joel MacManus, poured himself into the War, with the same intensity but a different style to Hayden. He immersed himself in PDFs and became a real authority on the subject. He wrote powerful and persuasive stories about the panel working on the plan. It got tens of thousands of people deeply exercised about it, and over time, the plan changed.
This time, I’m pretty confident that Joel’s work really did have an impact on the debate. Not just him, obviously – but he played a vital role. It’s not just me who thinks so: senior people on the ground have told me directly. And Wellington will be different, work better and make room for more people as a result.
The best part is I never saw it coming. A little bit like The Spinoff.
First published September 10, 2024.