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PodcastsMay 30, 2016

Podcast: The Get #1 – champion feature writer Kim Knight tells us her secrets

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The Spinoff and Barkers are proud to present a new seven-part podcast series: The Get. Each week Canon award winning journalist Naomi Arnold will interview some of New Zealand’s best feature writers and news journalists about how they hunted down the biggest stories of their careers. 

A few years ago, I got annoyed that I couldn’t easily find good New Zealand feature writing online. I was a newish feature writer at the Nelson Mail at the time. Beginners are constantly exhorted to read to improve their work, and I was keen to find some inspiration, and to indulge in little bouts of professional self-flagellation.

But while the main news organisations offered their flagship feature stories as beautifully designed packages in print, they ignored them online, shoehorning well-crafted narratives into templates built for news. Crazy line breaks, crappy ads, and too many links made reading on the web a frustrating experience.

So in February 2014, I started Featured.org.nz, a library of links to all the good writing I could find online. Two of New Zealand’s top writers, Nikki Macdonald and Mike White, have since taken over. Two new stories are added every week and a half-dozen overseas picks feature in our newsletter. And now there’s The Get, a new podcast which features interviews with journalists from across New Zealand about how they work, why they work, and how the best New Zealand writing is made. We hope it will grow into an inspirational library of its own.

In episode one of The Get, Naomi meets Kim Knight, the multi-award-winning feature writer who moved recently from Fairfax to the NZ Herald.

You can listen to this episode of The Get by using the player below or by subscribing through iTunes.

 

Keep going!