The NZ Herald’s most senior editor became its newest journalist earlier this year – and almost immediately started a sensational media column. Duncan Greive spoke to Shayne Currie about it on The Fold.

It’s been a busy year for news media resignations. The leaders of Stuff and MediaWorks and TVNZ all went within a matter of months, along with, ahem, the much lower profile head of The Spinoff (me). But no resignation has proven more impactful than that of NZME’s editor-in-chief, Shayne Currie. He was the ultimate editorial authority behind the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB, two of the most storied and powerful news brands in the country – but Currie’s resignation was more shocking for what he did next than anything else.

That was a very surprising return to the shop floor. Within days of his resignation, he put out a column under a new brand, Media Insider, which detailed the steady descent to the fringes of a once blue chip news presenter in Peter Williams. Below came what has become a signature of the column – a genuine scoop about the paywall plans of arch rival Stuff, which also just so happened to advance NZME’s business interests. It archly noted that Stuff had hired former NZME execs with “intimate albeit outdated knowledge” the Herald’s digital strategy.

You could practically see Currie’s cheshire cat grin as he wrote it. This set the scene for a column which has immediately become the single most-discussed new media product of the year within this very chatty industry, adroitly combining a remorseless stream of legitimate scoops with a territorial loyalty to the organisation he has called home for 20 years. It has infuriated many rivals, while being compulsory reading (often requiring two or three bites at it – last week’s came in at just shy of 5,000 words) within the industry.

His new desk sits in a pod adjacent to the lift shaft, adding to the sense that Currie and Media Insider have moved him from the C-Suite to a kind of performance theatre of journalism for staff and visitors. His colleague, head of social Mitch Powell, describes Currie’s new presence in the newsroom. “He’s extremely studious, always with pages of Word docs strewn across his screens… If he’s in the office (at slightly more conventional hours now), you’ll either find him at his desk, the printer, or a soundproof booth recording yet another interview. All those places are within a five metre radius of each other.” So for all the theatrics, his diligence and sheer output show how determined he is to be seen and understood and a journalist first and foremost.

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Currie’s career in journalism began at Tauranga Boys’ College, where he edited the Reflector student newspaper, famed for correctly picking election results for decades running. His path started a year earlier, when he took journalism as an elective subject in his penultimate year of high school (a bleak contrast: the government’s Careers site now says “chances of getting a job as a journalist are poor due to low demand for their services”).

He trained at ATI under legendary names like Jim Tucker and Susan Boyd-Bell, before spending a decade working at papers like the Post and the Press, part of the group which would eventually become Stuff. He was pried away to become founding deputy editor (and eventually editor) of the Herald on Sunday, the last major newspaper launched in New Zealand. It pioneered a notably more aggressive style compared to the more restrained weekday and Weekend Herald, and Currie has expressed some regret over his role in the tone of the news agenda, exemplified by columnist Rachel Glucina. “I put a lot of responsibility at my feet around some of the gossip pages back in the day – they just went a little too far.”

For all that, the paper was a huge success in its early years, and Currie’s instincts and editorial style were a large part of that. Under the watch of editor-in-chief Tim Murphy, now founder and co-editor of Newsroom, the Herald as a whole seemed to move more into a swashbuckling style, more akin to the Herald on Sunday’s approach than the more reserved pace and tone of the daily paper. This was particularly true online, where a combination of fast-twitch trending reporters and syndication deals with the likes of the Daily Mail gave the organisation a very different digital feel. 

For all that, the Herald remains the closest thing New Zealand has to a paper of record, and Currie has overseen a core of reporters like David Fisher, Anne Gibson and Bernard Orsman which have given it a reliable and distinct texture, while adroitly recruiting the likes of Simon Wilson and Kate MacNamara to reinforce its move into the paywall era. It’s all part of an indelible mark Currie has left on the country’s most important newspaper, and on journalism itself.

I asked Currie to join me on my podcast The Fold to talk through his career, the complexities of the transition to media reporting and more.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.

Duncan Greive: Your career predates the internet, so also encompasses its rise. Do you recall a moment when it really hit you, what it would be. Or was it a slow drip?

Shayne Currie: It was a slow drip. We’ve said in the past – and this is the same the world over – media owners and administrators made a huge mistake in terms of not putting a price point and some form of paywall on that content at that time. But we were all in the arrogant belief that print would last forever. 

Digital was not necessarily a passing phase, but we never thought it would overtake the importance of print. How naive were we. But it wasn’t really until 2014-15, when we bought the newsrooms fully together, that it really hit. That’s when the three newsrooms – online, the daily Herald and the Herald on Sunday – truly became a digital focused organisation. 

That’s one of the takeaways from the RNZ report into its editorial failings around the pro-Kremlin edits – that it occurred in part because their newsrooms still aren’t combined. Was there resistance from the newsrooms in terms of that melding process?

I think it was that we were operating in silos. So that the main engine room of the Herald, sure their stories and photography and videos were being presented online, but not really being given any sense of audience size or engagement, or times a day that people were reading. There was still very much a focus on three deadlines for print. The newsroom rosters were set up to that, and there was still a lot of pride – there still is to this day – about getting your name on the front page of the newspaper. That’s still vitally important for a lot of journalists, of course. But we are now at a point now where we’re starting from a place of audience first. 

That’s driven through the shared knowledge of analytics and data. I agree that we can get swamped in that stuff too much at times. But also knowing just how many people are reading our content or watching it, and getting better direction on “would this be better as a podcast or better as a video, rather than a 600-word story or a feature?”

The other big change has been the paywall for the Herald Premium in 2019. How does it fundamentally alter the kind of journalism you make and what you do with it once the paywall is out there?

There’s several aspects to it. One is actually talking to the journalists – some love their stories behind the paywall, some don’t. That’s just natural that some would love a mass audience. Whereas others see the benefit of it being behind the paywall, because your story actually stays on the homepage for longer, you actually get as many views as a free story. So there are discussions going on all the time around the differences, and there’s actually human decisions still being made about what is paywalled and what isn’t. 

That will sometimes depend on if it’s a quiet news day. And we do need something exclusive to lead the site, so at times it will come out from behind the paywall. That’s a real-time decision making being led by the content chiefs and in the newsroom. 

There’s a criticism – I’ve certainly voiced it from time to time – about the mismatch of very clickable news.com.au-type stories, sitting alongside these quite sophisticated pieces of premium reporting. It is a bit atypical for a news brand. Do you see that that’s a valid critique, and can you imagine a stage where there is actually an attempt to serve a highbrow premium homepage to your logged in users versus the very Meghan Markle-forward approach to the free stories?

We’ve pulled out of the news.com.au agreement now. So you won’t see news.com.au material any more. We pulled out of the Daily Mail deal about five years ago. But a mass media website like the Herald still has to have a fine balance of what [Currie’s successor] Murray Kirkness often calls fruit and vegetables, but we also want the ice cream and the sweet stuff as well. So lifestyle and entertainment plays a hugely important part of it.

What drove your decision to step down, and then to adopt this new ‘Media Insider’ column?

I’d been managing editor for eight years. And I could see that there was another tough year coming, and I just needed to change, I needed to refresh. I think we’ve seen quite a few changes at the top of our media companies in the last few months. I remember, at the end of 2019, telling the newsroom, “We’ll never have a busier news year, this will be a once in a lifetime”. We had sporting events, and unfortunately, the mosque shootings, along with the US election. Then of course, we get to 2020. And that’s just been the same every year since. So I just thought, time for a change. For me personally, but I also thought it would be good for the newsroom to have refreshed leadership. 

But I loved the business. So I proposed the role of editor-at-large to Michael [Boggs, NZME CEO]. I hadn’t quite figured out the media column. I said to Michael, I guess I know a little bit about this media, maybe maybe there’s an opportunity there? But it wasn’t really until the first two or three columns that I thought I’d better start doing this every week. 

So Media Insider, I love doing it. Just about every media business is undergoing some form of transformation or change. And by and large, they’re willing to talk about it. It impacts people and impacts personalities. I’m trying to make it a column, where people obviously can trust me to talk to them, whether that’s on background or upfront, and to try and also make it of interest to the wider public. So yes, I’ll try and have personalities in there and a hook to make it of broader interest, but also get into the business of journalism. I’m trying to do a little bit of marketing and advertising, but I’ve still got my training wheels on there. I’m really optimistic about our media industry, but I do know that it’s a tough time at the moment, obviously.

One of the things I really think it does very well is in focusing on a broad definition of media. It implicitly fights for the socio-cultural value of professionally-made media, even when the economic value is challenged.

We’ve had media columns off and on over the years, and I know how well-read they were. So I did see a gap there. I actually think there’s so much interest in the media, generally. And that’s from the wider public as well. But also, you know, while I love talking about the people, I don’t want it to be gossipy. One of my old mentors gave me a rap over the knuckles a few weeks ago, Rick [Neville, former head of the Newspaper Publishers Association] said it was too gossipy. And he was probably right. It’s got to be a balance of personalities, but I’m also trying to have two or three core business-type pieces. I’m also told I’ve overwritten it too many times. And I need a good editor to call me back. 

The Stuff newsroom seems to be quite leaky towards you at the moment. There’s that slightly queasy thing where you are writing about a direct competitor of the paper that you’re publishing in. How do you manage that conflict?

There’s been a few stories about Stuff in the last few weeks. But I’ve also, you know, I wanted to interview Laura Maxwell about her new role, and what she hoped to achieve. And she graciously did that, that was great. And, and talked about the changes at the top. But I’ve also got to give a shout out to the Herald newsroom here. Because, you know, one advantage is that I’ve got 330 contacts, basically sitting alongside me. They’ve been really generous at feeding me information as well. So I’m very lucky in that respect. 

I’ve got to be careful with NZME in the sense that I’m still coming out of that exec role, where I was privy to a lot of strategic information. That means I can’t go into any of that stuff at the moment or ever. But if there’s new information that I find out about, through the business, it’s fair game, and the company knows that, and the newsroom knows that – that’s really important.

If I’m not writing about NZME, others will be, I’m sure. But certainly, with the Stuff leaks, I’ve got a lot of friends at Stuff. I’ve worked alongside a lot of their leadership team in the past. There’s nothing personal about it – we all realise transformation is happening and that from time to time names will leak. I remember when we were having our big changes in the early 2015-16. I was getting a lot of calls from rival media then…

Can you talk about the impact of the Public Interest Journalism Fund on trust in the media and perceptions of how the actual business is conducted?

 I look back on it now and just think why was it ever badged as public interest journalism? NZ On Air, as we all know, has been funding a lot of media companies, including our own, for many years on different projects. So suddenly, as a result of Covid, the specialised fund was kind of badged. And I think that was the worst mistake. It allowed the conspiracy theorists to go down a pathway that just should never have existed, saying that the government had some kind of editorial control or direction over our journalism and content – absolute rubbish. It’s just sad that some opposition politicians picked up that line as well. It just was not helpful for the industry. I’ve said the line many times, I’ll say it again now – if any of our journalists or editors felt that they were being influenced by the government, there’d be a walkout. The newsroom wouldn’t be staffed.

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