Graeme Jenkins Journalist at the centre of some of our biggest stories
For sports fanatic Graeme Jenkins it was the dream job. It took him all over the world to watch the All Blacks and to witness the dramas of five Olympics and three Commonwealth Games over 26 years from 1952.
It also led to leadership of the New Zealand Press Association, the former national news agency that serviced every daily newspaper and was a major player in the country’s journalism for more than 130 years.
But working in the days when All Blacks teams were listed in an oldfashioned style with no familiar first names but their initials, and reporters were largely anonymous, with printed bylines a rarity, few people would know who he was.
His match reports were usually published with the simple letters NZPA, or by NZPA Staff Correspondent.
Because they were published in every paper in the country, ‘‘he was probably the least known but most read writer about those events’’, observed former NZPA staffer Ron Palenski, who went on to become a prolific author of sports books.
Jenkins, who spent 36 years working for the Press Association before retiring as general manager in 1990, died of cancer at his home in Waikanae, aged 91.
Son of a Dunedin plumber, Jenkins went to Otago Boys’ High School and joined the city’s Evening Star newspaper in 1948. Nursing a hunch that local Yvette Williams could become the first New Zealand woman to win an Olympic gold medal at the Helsinki games in 1952, he arranged leave from the paper and an agreement that it would publish whatever he wrote.
After paying his own way to Helsinki, he was the only New Zealand-based reporter in the stadium when Williams justified his hunch.
He wrote: ‘‘Sixty people in a crowd of 70,000 might not seem many. But when they were New Zealanders – about a third of them from Dunedin – and Yvette Williams had just won the women’s Olympic long jump title, the tiny group became the most important and proud in the vast Helsinki arena.’’
Returning from his OE, Jenkins joined NZPA in July 1954 and, after reporting the Springboks’ tour of New Zealand in 1956, became the agency’s regular rugby reporter until 1964, when he was posted to Sydney as Australian correspondent for a year. He covered All Blacks tours in Australia, Japan, the UK, France, Canada and South Africa.
He was appointed deputy news editor, in charge of the evening shift, in 1962 and became news editor in 1969. Awake early at his home in Hataitai on the morning of April 10, 1968, he phoned the newsroom to break the news that the inter-island ferry Wahine had grounded in Wellington Harbour.
The resulting ‘‘flash’’ message alerted papers all over the country to the pending disaster and Jenkins then went to Seatoun and reported that the ship had keeled over.
He reported nearly all Olympic and Commonwealth games between Helsinki in 1952 and Edmonton in 1978. He was on the media organising committee of the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch in 1974 and designed the results service.
As news editor of the Wellington-based agency, he had responsibility for educating an often reluctant and Ludditeleaning newsroom staff to transition from typewriters to new technology when NZPA’s first computer was installed in January 1978. There were frequent teething problems and he was usually the only person available around the clock capable of fixing them.
He succeeded NZPA’s long-term head Les Verry as general manager in 1981, inheriting a continuing struggle with the country’s fractious newspaper proprietors whom, in horse racing parlance, he dubbed ‘‘our owners and trainers’’.
Uniquely, the NZPA, which was 101 years old when Jenkins took the top job, had retained its founding principles as a non-profit-making co-operative. It was jointly owned by all the daily newspapers and each one was obliged to send news from its region to NZPA to distribute to all the others.
The smallest papers in the small towns got the same service as the biggest metropolitans, though they paid less for it, subscriptions being based on their circulation.
‘The industry was shoulder-toshoulder with irascible proprietors who were usually keen for a scrap and NZPA was a convenient battleground,’’ recalls Peter O’Hara, who succeeded Jenkins a decade later.
‘‘In the Jenks era it would have been an often fraught time refereeing the local sparring partners. They were of course usually only shadow-boxing, given the large financial benefit they got out of copy-sharing, but they were also merciless in using NZPA, to use another cliche´ , as a punching bag.’’
The principal players on the NZPA board scrapped around the board table while Jenkins and his colleagues at the coal-face had to deal with regular complaints such as one paper deliberately filing a good story too late for rivals to print it. Or one paper filing a good local story and the reporter being peeved that the desk had spiked it as of no national interest.
Sensing inevitable change in the industry, Jenkins expanded NZPA’s own reporting capabilities in the mid-1980s, setting up news, sports and finance desks to supplement the member papers’ coverage.
It all got worse when the big Australian companies moved in, taking over New Zealand’s two main newspaper companies. Bitterly competitive, they had no time for the Kiwi co-operative model and eventually sabotaged it, forcing NZPA to close in August 2011 after 131 years.
Happily for Jenkins – who was ‘‘steeped in the tradition of NZPA and the agency world’’, as former staffer Chris Peters puts it – he had long retired. He completed 53 years’ service to the newspaper industry in April 2001 after a nine-year retirement job as secretary of the Press Council.
‘‘In his roles, I’d say he had a profound (if little known publicly) influence on news gathering and the newspaper industry generally,’’ says Ron Palenski.
Always convivial, Jenkins worked hard and played hard, particularly when visiting his correspondents overseas, as all can testify. ’’He was a forgiving boss who understood human foibles and always gave his lower echelon minions a chance,’’ says ex-agency man Tim Donoghue, who organised a tribute lunch for Jenkins and his wife Jeanne, attended by 80 former staff, when NZPA folded.
Nearly a decade later, eight ex-staffers attended a simple ceremony when his ashes were laid at the grave of Jeanne, who died two years ago. Graeme had asked that there be no funeral.
‘‘He cared very much about the people who worked for him and their ability to get their stories to the Wellington hub accurately and on time,’’ says Donoghue
Peters says: ‘‘He sometimes came across as bluff and gruff, but I never found him vindictive and I think he was a softie at heart.’’ This was confirmed by daughter Wendy as she laid his ashes, supported by her husband Shane Durrant and their four children: ‘‘He was the best dad,’’ she said. – By David Barber
Sources: Tim Donoghue, Peter O’Hara, Ron Palenski, Chris Peters, Deadline NZPA. Contact Us
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‘‘He sometimes came across as bluff and gruff, but I never found him vindictive and I think he was a softie at heart.’’ Former NZPA colleague Chris Peters