Long-suffering Spinoff writers reveal the stories that haunt them to this day.

We knew going into this that a story detailing all of our regretted stories is simply an open invitation for readers to comment all of their least favourite Spinoff stories. But we decided to do it anyway because sometimes the most interesting articles are the ones we try our best to forget.

Toby Manhire, editor-at-large

Having previously predicted / fluked the date of the 2020 election, in early 2023 I attempted to repeat the trick, in a bloated, painstaking, overwrought post that confidently settled on November 18. I was so mawkishly excited about the whole thing I even recorded an accompanying podcast. Not only did I get it very wrong (it was October 14), but the whole exercise was blown into obscurity when the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, swiftly followed her declaration of the election date with an announcement about her career plans that got a bit more attention.

Duncan Greive, founder

The story I most regret writing is this, chastising TVNZ for moving to a single anchor, and keeping Simon Dallow over Wendy Petrie in mid-2020. I just re-read it for the first time since publication, and it’s not wrong about the relative longevity of women’s and men’s careers in anchor roles. I stand by that. But a few things still grate on me, two small, and one big. Firstly, as I’ve got older I’ve gotten more sympathetic to the challenges of operating media businesses. The fact of cuts is inevitable for a company like TVNZ, which was looking for $10m in savings then, and likely will be again now. Quibble about what’s cut, not cutting per se.

The second is that I really wasn’t all that passionate about this – I did it because I was asked, because it was news and we wanted a take. A bad reason – you need to really feel it with opinion. Lastly, it was because, through lack of research, I didn’t clock that Simon Dallow is Māori. It undermined the whole thesis of the column in some respects, and is just a lame thing to do on multiple levels. I still feel bad about it.

I pretty much regret everything I wrote when I was in the throes of earnest social justice politics circa 2014-2018, but I’ll go with An incomplete account of the sexism in Jacinda Ardern’s first 24 hours as Labour leader. I’m embarrassed that I white-knighted Jacinda Ardern, a phenomenon I went into more fully in this argument with myself. It’s true that a lot of the commentary around her leadership was sexist, but in the greater scheme of things and considering what women from all walks of life are up against, I reckon it was a waste of time to come to the defence of one of the most powerful women in the world. Also just prose-wise it makes me cringe now; there are some adverbs in there I’d be drawing a big line through these days.

Alex Casey, senior writer

I can barely get through this sanctimonious and deeply unfunny piece I wrote in 2017, perhaps the height of the social justice + online misdemeanor + white feminism frenzy, about Jimi Jackson leaving a sexist comment on Facebook. While telling a woman “your fingers were made for hand jobs not typing. So shut the fuck up slut” remains bad, particularly from someone with hundreds of thousands of young male followers, my writing makes me feel violently ill. Really difficult to pick the biggest clanger. Could it be me saying I’m going to “grapevine away” from the “complexities” of blackface (what the fuck?!)? Or describing the situation as a “delicious tiramisu revealed to be made entirely of cat craps”? Or what about “I’m sorry Mr. Jackson (oooh) but misogyny is for real.” Grapevining myself right into the nearest woodchipper.

Chris Schulz, former senior writer

“Learn to cook, mate,” said one. “You have the IQ of a potato” said another. If the Facebook comments (currently numbering 284) weren’t brutal enough, the emails were savage. Someone submitted fan-fic – 1200 words! – that ended with my family dead, slumped on our chairs after dining on poisoned meat. For a 2022 story, I’d tried to make my family eat fake meat for a week. Instead, I started a beef for the ages: me, a meat-eater, vs the country’s entire vegan population, up in arms over the thought they all subsisted on nothing but soy chicken, hemp burgers and tofu sausages. The drama dragged out for weeks. I wound up on RNZ trying to defend myself, and only made it worse. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have put a single forkful of that fake bacon in my mouth.

Madeleine Chapman, editor

I have written already about regretting my night at Max Key’s DJ party but there’s plenty more regrets where that came from. One that sticks out is when I argued that of course NFL players would dominate world rugby. It was 2018 and I’d just finished ghostwriting Steven Adams’ autobiography which included watching him train with the Wellington Saints and then watching him train with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Seeing the shocking contrast in training intensity between the two teams (coupled with my own experiences of playing sport in different countries) must’ve inspired me to write such a supremely confident hot take. To be honest, I still believe it a bit, but if I were to write it again, I’d hope to be a bit more nuanced.

My main regret about the whole saga is that it catapulted me into the New Zealand Rugby corner of the internet, which meant I had a bunch of c-list NZ celebrities in my DMs wanting to “discuss” the article. It got to the point where two years later I had to request to the editors that it not be put on social media ever again because every new post brought a wave of intense messages and emails with it. Frankly, I did not care enough about the topic to discuss in my leisure time. So that’s the real lesson: don’t write a spicy take unless you actually care enough to stand by it.

Calum Henderson, production editor

Everybody I’ve ever interviewed for The Spinoff could reasonably expect to find their name here, but Gabriel Macht is the interview that haunts me the most.

In the early years of The Spinoff, our television coverage was sponsored by Lightbox. This involved writing enthusiastic recommendations for the shows available on the streaming service regardless of whether or not we’d ever watched them. It became a running joke that I really loved the legal drama Suits, to the extent that a producer from RNZ once emailed hoping to secure an interview with one of New Zealand’s biggest Suits fans.

The joke went too far when the actor who plays “Harvey Specter” came to New Zealand on a promotional tour. I was the natural choice to interview him. For reasons I can no longer explain, I spent the night before the interview getting drunk on those 1L cans of beer with the goose on them before going home to prepare by putting on S1E1 of Suits and immediately falling asleep. I arrived at Macht’s hotel at 9am the next morning with a terrible hangover and subjected him to a torturous 15 minutes of questions which gradually revealed I had never watched a minute of his show.

He was polite about it, perhaps suspecting he was the victim of a “bad interview” celebrity prank. No doubt he forgot about the experience within minutes of me leaving his executive suite. But I still think about it, and the ethics of quietly unpublishing my own stories, eight years later.

Shanti Mathias, staff writer

I regret writing this piece because it revealed to me the risk of commenting on the media: the only thing that changes is that you feel more irritated when the thing that you’ve written keeps happening anyway. What New Zealand does seem to have in common with other countries, rich and poor, around the world, is that powerful people merrily continue doing things even if the media has criticised them. I require some level of confidence in “the power of journalism” to do my job, and all this piece did was remind me that journalists’ well researched opinions drawing on nuanced reporting often make no difference whatsoever to the functioning of the world.

Hayden Donnell, former staff writer

As Frank Sinatra once sang: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, not too few that I’d be able to get out of detailing them exhaustively in an article for The Spinoff”. Most of them aren’t journalism-related. They’re things like calling my primary school teacher mum, falling off an e-scooter after getting drunk with Wayne Brown, and sacrificing my youth to Christianity. But I’ve also made a lot of bad decisions in writing. I shouldn’t have cracked open the sarcophagus containing the true meaning of the K in K Bar. I shouldn’t have described an elected representative as a Waiheke sea goblin. In light of recent developments, I shouldn’t have demanded that a series of mayoral candidates divulge their Hogwarts houses, even if it did uncover the fact that Chlöe Swarbrick is probably the first Hufflepuff leader of a political party.

But if I construct an Olympic podium for my regrets, bronze would go to criticising Wellington’s diversity when I myself am pretty much what would happen if the default character model in an RPG came alive. Silver would be writing something headlined “We need to make driving in Auckland even worse“, mainly because, in what will go down as a first for the internet, many people didn’t quite get the nuance of my message. Gold would be accusing Stuff of being ruled by Mark Zuckerberg. As it turns out, Stuff doesn’t like Mark Zuckerberg. I retract and apologise.

Tara Ward, staff writer

The piece I regret: New Zealand’s most shocking road safety ads.

In the interests of paying tribute to the weird era when we peppered our TV ad breaks with messages of death and distress, I decided to rank New Zealand’s most memorable road safety adverts. These ads were deliberately made to be visceral and upsetting, but I doubt the ad executives in the 1990s ever envisaged that three decades later, some clown would binge watch about thirty of these ads, over and over again, just to rank them on a website one random Friday morning. The trouble was that all those safety ads stayed with me long after the list was published. For weeks, I couldn’t start the car without “it’s the same day, David!” screaming in my head, or go through an intersection without dreading that heavy thump of a body hitting a windscreen, or take a sharp corner without welling up over those poor kids waiting for the school bus. I indicate all the time now, even when I’m not turning (that’s a joke, I would not do that, it might cause an accident). Next time, I’ll just stick to ranking Mike Pero’s fingers.

Stewart Sowman-Lund, Bulletin editor

My biggest regret would be the time I unleashed a vicious attack on a giant (dead) worm in a live update, triggering what can only be described as a “backlash” from environmentalists and prompting a formal apology (which I did not write, but stand by). While I do not regret being personally affronted by the size of the (dead) worm, nicknamed Dead Fred, I do regret describing it as a “hell monster”, a “dirty earthy snake” and suggesting it should be confined to pits of hell. None of that was called for and I should have realised this at the time. I have learned from my mistake and would never, ever dare to publicly criticise a creature like this (dead or alive, but definitely not dead) again.

Alice Neville, deputy editor

As a childless know-it-all in 2018, I argued that parents should tell their kids that Santa isn’t real. I still agree with the underlying philosophy: “To ensure a healthy, mutually respectful parent-child relationship, trust is essential. And if you’re feeding your kid bullshit, once they realise it’s bullshit they’ll hold it against you.” But now that I have a child of my own, I have realised that in order to survive parenthood, sometimes one must take the easiest route. And the easiest route in this case will probably be maintaining the facade and dealing with the consequences later. My two-year-old is going to hold all sorts of things against me as she grows up, so we may as well add to the list barefaced lies about bearded blokes delivering presents.