Editor's Letter
Words count. No one knows that better than a nation with a treaty as its founding document. Litera scripta manet. The written word endures.
That holds true, too, for the Listener, which for more than 80 years has proudly borne witness to the vital events of this country’s life and been at the heart of its most important national conversations.
Words matter, too, with even the simplest of documents. As I write this, my final editor’s letter to you before stepping down, I have on my desk a handwritten letter that Michael King, the eminent historian and author of The Penguin History of New Zealand, sent me on learning I was to be the editor of the Listener. It was a daunting role; one I had not sought. But his warm letter to someone he generously thought “worthy of what many of us still regard as the most important job in journalism in the country” carried more strength than he would ever know.
We invited him into the office. Tragically, he never made it. Michael and his wife were killed in a car accident on the road to Auckland. One of my first actions, then, as editor was to commemorate King, who, while squarely confronting this country’s unpalatable past truths, looked to our future with such optimism. We stopped the presses to feature him on the cover. As editor, over the past 17 years, it has been my enormous privilege to lead a whole team of passionate, talented and dedicated people who continue the Listener’s long and proud tradition of important journalism. Together, we have covered everything from the global financial crisis, Pike River and the Christchurch earthquakes to the mosque attacks and Covid. We have survived, just, our very own existential crisis with the sudden six-month shutdown last year of the Listener.
Through it all, I have never forgotten Michael King stressing that the words we use matter. It was in one of my articles, he once publicly said, that he first saw the word “kaitiakitanga” in the mainstream media, in the early 90s. It was used in that perhaps most unlikely of topics, the Black Power gang. After covering a distressing rape case
– sadly, Māori are so often the victims – I had assigned myself to challenge the gang on their policy on rape. The Black Power are not the Boy Scouts. They were somewhat stunned to see a nervous young female journalist edge past the rottweilers at their fortified headquarters. Yet they treated me with respect when I said, simply, “Help me understand.” In several marae-style meetings, they set out a plan, in fact, for a ban on rape. President Rei Harris was surprisingly eloquent, outlining what it is like, as Māori, to be “alienated from the centre”, both as a result of colonialisation and later by being used as the shock absorbers for economic reform. The article made the national news.
The death threat – the police alerted us to a credible plan already under way – came not from the Black Power. It was from a rival gang upset at the breaking of the Omertà code. Words do count.
The number of words also matter. Climate change is an emergency such as humankind has never faced before. Our team is proud, in the face of huge climate-change denial and vexatious litigation, to have run cover stories sounding the alarm long before such publications as Time magazine. And we have continued to do so, including no fewer than four in the past few months.
Many of the issues highlighted in my first few cover stories as editor are still crucially important. Within weeks, we had run an influential cover story on the Māori Renaissance. I am delighted to report that our young cover girl, Aroha, has successfully achieved her dream of becoming a lawyer. At the same time, however, we did the first of several hard-hitting cover stories on the abysmal failure of NCEA to support such ambi
One of the biggest barriers to achievement in this country is the tyranny of soft expectations.
tions, through its lack of a fair, robust and transparent system and the proliferation of easy “play way” credits that did not lead to tertiary study.
One of the biggest barriers to achievement in this country, as I know from my spending almost two years as a pupil mostly doing cultural activities at primary school in Cannons Creek, is the tyranny of soft expectations. I loved my time there. But I left believing I wasn’t smart enough to read the Listener, let alone work on it.
Yet New Zealand remains a land of opportunity, where we strive to deal with challenges – and there are many – within a warm, engaging and innovative culture. This country has one of the lowest “power distances” in the world. We’re still egalitarian at heart and
feel entitled to challenge those in power. In fact, we’re very uneasy about the notion of power at all. We admire Kiwis who don’t have tickets on themselves. The quintessential New Zealander is still Sir Edmund Hillary, courageous and compassionate. His immortal line – “knocked the bastard off ” – still captures the classic Kiwi understatement better than any other words.
The ways to inspire and empower have changed, of course. The year I became editor was the year Facebook launched. It foreshadowed both a turbulent time for media and a growing tension between two distinct ways of exercising influence. The Harvard Business Review defines the old forms of influence as working like a currency, held by a few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded. The new channels of influence operate differently. Like currents, they are participatory and peer-driven. They’re most forceful when they surge. Yet there is a fine line between democratising participation and acting with a mob mentality.
In a world of polarisation and increasingly tribal identities, it’s more important than ever that there are places like magazines to provide “calm news” and meeting points for
The Listener was recently attacked – for printing a letter on a topic on which engagement had been invited.
conversation and debate. Yet even we are increasingly the target of hot diatribes and polemics. The Listener was recently attacked – for printing a letter on a topic on which the Ministry of Education had invited engagement – as being racist. Such inflammatory ad hominem statements are too often used as an attempt to bypass meaningful discussion and shut down debate. The quiet personal irony was that my siblings and I had just set up a substantial fund, in our parents’ names, to support Māori and Pasifika tertiary education.
After 17 years, the time is now right for me to hand over the editor’s pencil. I am delighted to be leaving the magazine in such great heart. Since our relaunch, the readership has grown substantially higher than it was before the first lockdown. Our subscriptions are strong. Our retail sales are up. We are winning awards for important journalism.
My heartfelt thanks go to the extraordinary Listener team and to you, our loyal, stimulating and highly engaged readers. Together, we saved this much-loved publication. I cannot thank you enough for all your support. There are not enough words. l