A working life wiped out in minutes

The end, when it came, came quickly. For me and my colleagues at Bauer Media New Zealand, which owns the New Zealand Listener, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s Day NZ, North & South and a host of other magazines, the first notice was a text message at 8.30am yesterday saying we needed to be on a Zoom call at 9am. ‘‘Your attendance is required’’, the text said.

At the Listener, we already knew that we were not publishing a print edition this week. Bizarrely, the Government had announced a few days ago that weekly publications were not allowed to publish because they may be a health risk.

It was so absurd to think that a democratic government would close down any media during a state of emergency that I assumed Bauer would fight the decision or, in the finest media traditions, publish and be damned. As it transpired, we were damned; we just didn’t publish. Instead, the company seemed to acquiesce with what felt to me to be worrying ease.

The Listener’s indefatigable editor Pamela Stirling, who has led the magazine for 16 years, and my colleagues who had all just set themselves up to work from home, started furiously preparing to put the content of the next issue on the noted.co.nz website. We might not have a Listener that our readers could hold in their hands, but after 80 years of publishing, to not have any kind of Listener was unthinkable on our watch. A week without Jane Clifton opining on politics, and the Listener cryptic crossword, felt unimaginable.

Then, yesterday morning, that call. Bauer was discontinuing publishing in New Zealand, closing all its operations here, and the decision affected all staff, effective that day. I noted, pedantically, that ‘‘affect’’ and ‘‘effect’’ were correct. It was like seeing a poppy on a battlefield.

The news was a shock, yet no-one in mainstream media is truly shocked by closures and layoffs any more. Being in the media has for the past few years felt like being in a dystopian novel where the bad stuff keeps coming. Some plot variation would be a relief, and I hope some of the magazines prevail. Even as I write this, people are picking over the offerings.

Some of the magazines, like the Listener, are New Zealand institutions and have their own personalities and their own beating hearts. But right now, it is the welfare of the real personalities and the beating hearts of my colleagues at all of Bauer’s titles, and the company itself, of whom I am thinking.

So many livelihoods. So much devastation. Publishing – whatever the form – is labour-intensive and there are always challenges to produce something with too few resources and too little time. We do it together. Now, because of the lockdown, we cry alone.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column in the Listener in which I was too dismissive of the health risks of the Covid19 threat. The reaction was furious and often vituperative – which is another thing we have all become accustomed to these days. My column that would normally be spinning off the printing press right now, said, ‘‘I got it wrong’’.

I did get it wrong, but our job is to scrutinise, and I remain more afraid of the economic fallout of NZ’s response to Covid-19 than I am of the virus itself.

What has happened to us at Bauer has already happened to the tourism industry and to hospitality. As Finance Minister Grant Robertson said on Tuesday, at present, ‘‘an hour’s like a day, a day’s like a week, a week’s like a month’’. And, he might have added, whole working lives are gone in minutes.

Yesterday, Joanne Black was deputy editor of the New Zealand Listener.