Alex Casey looks back at the first day of The Spinoff, 10 years ago today. 

September 10 2014 was a huge day for headlines in Aotearoa. “Gummy bear penis shock’’ detailed the outrage in Dunedin around “a gummy baby with a penis” that had infiltrated a mixed lolly bag. A giant nugget of kauri gum sold for a record $16,000 in Auckland, with the winning bidder admitting he got “carried away” and didn’t know how to break the news to his wife. In Hastings, Peanut the cat came home four years after going walkabout. 

Conditions were perfect for the launch of a brand new local television blog, which would bring with it an array of equally confounding headlines. Founder Duncan Greive reflects on the early days in this morning’s cover story, but what he fails to mention is that, on the day The Spinoff launched, he was on a plane to Spain for a bizarrely timed family holiday. Me? I was in the exact opposite situation – hunched over a laptop in a cold, damp flat, panicking in my pyjamas. 

It was rare, I was there, and here’s what I remember all too well about the first day. 

There were lots of emails

A blessing of Duncan’s poorly timed Spanish sojourn was that we communicated entirely over email for the first month of The Spinoff, which now serves as a sparse longform two-hander that I’m sure we can eventually sell to David Fincher to adapt into a Netflix shitter. Some emails are harder to decode than others, for example this deeply blurry image of Dr Phil and his wife (?) taken on a phone camera of a TV screen, accompanied by three words: “photo to photoshop”

At 10pm the night before launch, we were splitting hairs about how to write a standfirst for an agenda-setting article I had written about Joan Rivers’ (?) haunted (?) apartment (?). We settled on “Alex Casey questions whether this really is ‘the end’ for Joan Rivers” and called it a night. “Packing done. I’m doing my 5000th rewrite of my terrible over-earnest intro to the spinoff piece and losing my will to live,” said Duncan. “12 hours till launch. I’m going to bed.” 

We buried the launch piece

Twelve hours later came our first ever tweet: “The Spinoff is live – covering the magical wonderland of television from the magical wonderland of New Zealand”. Duncan’s aforementioned lose-the-will-to-live launch piece had made it to the site, but NOT in the lead slot (“that feels way self-indulgent. I’ll tweet a link to it”, the self-promotion whizz mused). Instead, we led with my “news” piece comparing the new Apple Watch (?) and DJ Roomba (?) in Parks and Recreation.

This is what happens when your boss goes to Spain. “There is a new iPhone that is slightly bigger than the old one and a new iPhone watch. For when your wrist needs to skype the kids back home,” the word salad began. “Innovative, but still not as good as the cutting-edge ‘DJ Roomba’ of Parks and Recreation fame.” I concluded with an enraged and confused demand that Suzanne Paul, a real person, launch DJ Roomba, a fictional product, for Apple next year. 

But wait, there’s more news

Other bulletin items included a rumour that Full House might be coming back (vindicated a mere four years later with the release of Fuller House on streaming giant Netflix, which wasn’t even available in New Zealand in 2014). But most thrillingly, the story revealed that I was confident enough to be on nickname terms with the Olsen twins: “have a squiz back at Full House, it really is MK & A’s finest role,” I wrote. OK Roger Ebert! (also Justice for Holiday in the Sun!)

Elsewhere in pop culture news, pre-Spain Duncan Greive had precooked a piece celebrating the “agitated, investigative” Shortland Street recap series made by a young Dunedin talent called James Mustapic. Nine years later, Mustapic would pull off the rare reality TV double of winning Celebrity Treasure Island and finding his mum a man. The Block NZ contestants Quinn and Ben had just announced their pregnancy on the show, so Joe Harper wrote us a list of potential names for the Block baby, including “Drill (Boy), Drywall (Unisex), Bunnings (Girl)”. 

Nine years later, I would marry him (Joe, not the Block baby). 

We made really bad Vines

Much of our correspondence before the launch was about how we would get Vine, Twitter’s long deceased version of TikTok, to work properly onsite (a problem we once again struggled to solve in 2024). “I’m going to ask our people why Vines are misbehaving,” Duncan emailed two days before launch. “They will be a big part of what we do.” Our early attempt at Vine captured moments from the live political debates. Rewatching them 10 years later, they are about as primitive and stirring as observing a cave painting by candlelight. 

Needless to say, Vine didn’t end up a big part of what we do. 

There were proper features

That put me and my DJ Roomba news to shame. There was Rosabel Tan, editor of the Pantograph Punch at the time, who was also patiently assisting with sub-editing, writing about the demise of the soap opera. “They’re the ultimate longform art,” she wrote. “They create worlds and characters that aren’t just passed down through generations; they evolve through generations, day-by-day-by-day-by-day. They bond families together. They’re society’s two-dollar glue-stick.” 

Matt Suddain also transported readers to the Scottish highlands in his exclusive set visit to the hot new time travel romance epic Outlander. “The armoury was everything I imagined. Imagine a massive room lined with implements of deadliness: swords, bows, halberds, muskets,” he wrote. “I got to hold a musket while our Master Armourer explained the damage a small steel shot would do to the organs of an advancing Red Coat. He’s one of only two Master Armourers in Scotland.” 

There were many, many recaps

To all those who scream their monocles off when we cover reality television these days: The Spinoff was built on the back of My Kitchen Rules NZ season one recaps. Part of it was purely function: it was four episodes a week, and we had a television website to fill. But it also spoke to a deeper purpose behind The Spinoff, to celebrate low culture alongside high culture and create a place where even a 23-year-old idiot could try political punditry through the cursed medium of Vine. 

At 8.21pm at the end of a long first day of The Spinoff, I sent an excited recap of my own to Duncan in Spain. Subject line? Day One. “Not much to report from day one. Apart from the fact that we have gone absolutely goddamn viral,” I wrote. “Did two new posts and some tweetin’ and facebookin’. Loving it, feeling good. Worked out how to comment as well (yep, we’ve already got commenters!)”

Duncan replied from his own Holiday in the Sun at 12.21am: “Things seem to be going pretty sweet, eh?”