Summer reissue: Six months on from the tale of a homeless man making street coffee, Lyric Waiwiri-Smith reflects on the story that became a hit, and then a punchline.

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It started with a message in our work Slack in March of this year: a screenshot of a post from a Facebook group, shared by a homeless man promoting his burgeoning coffee business. Out of a shopping trolley on Auckland’s Queen Street using instant coffee, Jon Low – better known as Patchy – was building a feel-good coffee empire with cups at $1.50 a pop.

Some news stories are difficult to pitch, a few are almost impossible, and others – like Patchy’s – show their news value straight away. The editors at Stuff, where I worked as a reporter, wanted a review of the cheap coffee brewed by a man living rough in one of Aotearoa’s most expensive cities (colourful food reviews and cost-of-living bites come under Stuff’s guaranteed bangers list, next to the “neighbours at war” and scandalous influencer stories). As the reporter responsible for a few of Stuff’s out-the-gate offerings, I put my hand up to write it.

When an editor of a large newsroom that relies on constant fresh news to drive clicks asks for a story to be written, they wanted it yesterday. I shot off a Facebook message to Patchy, and when he hadn’t replied the next day, the editors sent me off to Queen Street with a photographer to catch him in the wild. We couldn’t find him, and by the time he finally answered my message a week later, Patchy had amassed a growing following on TikTok.

The angle changed: write about the homeless man with a cheap coffee business and TikTok fame. I did my due diligence and contacted Auckland Council in late March before we met, to ask if they were aware of Patchy’s coffee trolley. Journalists don’t necessarily dot their i’s and cross their t’s like this to dob people in – Stuff couldn’t promote a business operating illegally.

This would be the first (but not the last) time I felt guilt in this story: the council’s team found Patchy and asked him to discontinue his coffee cart (I think some council workers may have already been aware of Patchy, and willing to let him fly under the radar, but then the media got involved). The culpability set in the next day when I called him for a catch up, and he told me about the council run-in.

Patchy and I met in Britomart Square a few days later, alongside a Stuff visual journalist, to get the story in video as well as writing. Despite the initial nerves – will you edit the clip if I say something wrong? Can we start over if I muck up the take? How will you tell my story? – Patchy was a natural on camera, stepping into a character that was business-savvy and ambitious, like he was trying to channel his business heroes: Elon Musk and Uber’s Travis Kalanick. 

Off-camera, we spoke about his marriage breakdown and distance from his children, and his experience of spending the last 10 months living homeless after a spate of bad luck. Growing up around Karangahape Road as a teenager, I recognised Patchy as a reflection of the many other homeless people I had met on the streets whose lives, I felt, would have been different if they felt that someone cared about what they had to say. I never paid for the coffee he made me.

He mentioned a Givealittle page set up by a group of young girls who had been following his TikTok journey, and asked if it was possible to include a link to it in the story. I obliged – the page was already sitting at $900 in donations, and I didn’t doubt that some readers would see the story and also want to help fund his dreams.

Patchy’s story was published that weekend at 5am. Essentially every major news outlet in New Zealand pushes their big news stories of the day at 5am in time for the country to wake up, and weekend stories are ideally light fodder for passive readers. He was a hit: the story sat on the Stuff homepage for the whole day, was republished by RNZ and later picked up by Newshub and Breakfast, while Patchy’s donations rolled in.

We kept in touch – Patchy sent me updates almost daily on his talks with the council to secure necessary permits to run a food business, and meetings with investors and business people, which I assumed would equip him with the knowledge needed to pull his coffee empire off. He had a slightly erratic way of messaging, which I chalked up to him being overwhelmed by all the public attention and career opportunities. “It’s good to hear you have people on your side helping you out,” I wrote to him a few weeks into our correspondence.

He told me he needed a retail space to secure a food permit, had been “intensely” working on his business plan and fielding advice from investors who had contacted him through TikTok. It was something of a surprise when three weeks after the initial story, he told me he was getting ready to sign a lease on a store with the more than $10k in donations he had received – it happened so fast, and I had assumed he’d start small with a mobile coffee cart to match his branding.

Some supporters gave as little as a dollar, while others forked out $100 on Patchy’s Givealittle. “I will pop a little bit more in as we are so close. The three Stooges have just given my pension a boost so you can have a bit of it,” one donor wrote. Another, who donated $20, left this comment: “Wish it could be more as Patchy is why the world is a better place.”

Naturally, the signing of the lease became the follow-up story. I wanted to write about the premises itself and tour the small Rutland St store with Patchy but there were no photographers on hand to shoot the video, and the editors didn’t want to wait. Something had to be written now.

So in mid-April, Stuff’s second Patchy headline was plastered on the homepage: “Homeless coffee entrepreneur raises $10k to jump start business.” It didn’t take long for rival outlets to match our story, or for social media chatter to rip into Patchy. A message I sent to him on the same day the story was published showed the churnalism mindset in action: “the bosses are already asking for more stories.”

I hadn’t read any comments when the first story came out – that’s a golden rule of journalism – but somehow, the second story turned Patchy into a punchline so brutal it couldn’t be escaped. Though a lot of social media commenters echoed the messages of support from Patchy’s Givealittle page, some were (sometimes rightly) critical of Patchy’s sudden success and the direction he was taking his business in, and Reddit provided the most vitriol.

They accused Patchy of being a drug addict, a bully, a man on a mission to hoodwink the public. You could be reading a completely unrelated Reddit thread, and a user would still use Patchy’s name as a synonym for something being shit. It was like being in primary school, hearing the schoolyard bullies using “gay” to shun something – some people like to measure the value of something by comparing it to society’s most othered members.

Patchy was still sending near-daily updates, often asking when we could do the next story, as were the editors, hoping to recreate another quick banger. But the changes with Patchy’s business were becoming more bizarre, and online he was making a caricature of himself as a business prophet waxing Musk ideology on Instagram.

The latest angle, he offered in May, could be the touch screen ordering kiosks he was bringing into the store to allay shoplifters. When I asked if there had been a lot of shoplifting already, Patchy replied no. It was an immediate red flag to me: why bring in these expensive systems to fix a problem that didn’t exist? And what happened to the coffee focus? I told the Stuff editors we shouldn’t pursue another follow-up, for fear that the whole thing was turning into a cash grab.

At some point, the business briefly closed while Patchy reassessed his plans, then expanded into a delivery service via e-scooter and a convenience store, and had something to do with music videos. Patchy started taking aim at his “haters” on social media, making the Reddit backlash worse. I stopped paying attention.

Hearing his business has closed made my heart sink, and caused the bubble of Patchy-sized guilt that had been churning in my stomach since April to finally blow up and pop. I’ve ruminated over the same thoughts frequently: Is Patchy actually, at a human-level, doing OK? Do his donors feel cheated? Is this supposed to be ethical journalism?

So, where does Patchy go now? His lease on the Rutland St store was supposed to last for two years, but I assume now that will be cut short. The space isn’t just for his business, it’s where he lives, and a closure likely marks a return to the streets. He hasn’t responded to my last message or call, and I really hope he has a strong support system in place.

If we hadn’t written the story, I assume someone else would have stumbled across his social media presence and churned something out as well. We have a duty to tell stories with care, but Patchy’s was just one of hundreds I had written for Stuff, in a newsroom where you’d sometimes churn out three or four stories a day. But when a journalist propels an unknown into the spotlight, heaps them with public attention and then disappears, who remains to provide their connection to real life and love?

In the end, I wrote two stories about Patchy (well, I guess now it’s three), which spawned multiple others from numerous outlets, and endless obsessive Reddit threads. There are so many Stuff articles I regret writing, most being celebrity gossip write-offs, Herald matchers and quick-hit assigned stories I didn’t have any personal care for.  Few, if any, make me feel as morally conflicted as Patchy’s.

First published September 26, 2024.