Newshub's Mike McRoberts: "The end is hard to accept."

As Newshub enters its final week, reporter Adam Hollingworth talks to current and former staff about the news division's early days and key events in its 35-year history

This is part one of a two-part podcast. The second part can be found here.

At 6pm on July 6^th Mike McRoberts and Samantha Hayes will read the last ever Newshub bulletin. 

Both have spent the majority of their careers at New Zealand’s first private television network. The studio desk they sit behind was once the domain of other household names like Joanna Paul, Hilary Barry, John Campbell, and Carol Hirschfeld. 

By the time McRoberts slid into the presenter's seat, 3 News was no longer the cheeky upstart - but the underdog attitude was still a part of the network’s DNA, the idea of doing more with less seemingly engrained in the minds of reporters and producers.

"It made you more inventive and creative about the ways you created stories and often I thought they were the better stories. We didn't rely on having screeds and screeds of footage to show, we only had two minutes per bulletin I think of Olympic footage or Commonwealth games footage to show, so you were actually pushed into telling a much better personal story," he says.

McRoberts was a spearhead of TV3’s strategy to send reporters to areas where TVNZ was reluctant to tread. But it came with risks.

McRoberts headed into war zones without insurance cover – simply accepting the CEO’s word that his family would be looked after if he didn’t come back.

He says it was a company he was prepared to do anything for.

"There was a sense of putting your life on the line for this company, for the coverage, for the story, for my colleagues, and to know that that's coming to an end is really hard to accept."

In the same way that Stuff is racing to be ready on July 6, TV3’s early days were a mix of adrenalin and fear of failure. The company had suffered long delays in obtaining a broadcast license and faced aggressive competition from a well-prepared TVNZ.

When the first news bulletin aired on November 27, 1989 South Island bureau chief Mark Jennings (who later would become Head of News) was sitting on the edge of his seat. 

"The hairs on my neck were standing up, I was tingling watching the first bulletin go to air. We were all so nervous, because even though we had had rehearsals, nothing replaces the actual first night," he says.

Former TV3 reporter Melanie Reid, who now works as Newsroom's investigations editor, had doubts they would go to air at all. 

"I was like, is this actually ever going to happen," she says. "It had been such a fiasco trying to get there." 

In the early days, if you moved to TV3 you were said to be succumbing to 'the dark side' and when Reid made the switch, her former employers at TVNZ did everything in their power to stop her.

"They spent $17,000 on court cases to try and stop me from going," she says.

"And it wasn't because I was a good journalist, I was a regional news reporter, but it was just sending out the signal that 'no one is to go over there, because if you do we're going to annihilate you," she says.

Competition was fierce, but TV3 reporters were ready for the fight, and Reid says everyday was exhilarating. 

She knew that if viewers were going to be converted to TV3, they had to find and cover the big stories, and more importantly, beat TVNZ. That proved to be tricky.

TVNZ held most television sports rights, which left TV3 reporters being kicked out of various events, like the NZ Trotting Cup at Addington. But in typical underdog fashion, they found a way around the rules.

"We had to put the cameraman in the production manager's car and put rugs over the top of him and sneak him in," Reid says.

During an All Black test match in Christchurch, TV3 put a cherry picker in a nearby car yard and shot footage of the game through a gap in the grandstands.

Jennings says the perception that TV3 was over-the-top and crazy is a slight exaggeration but admits the team “were highly competitive and very resourceful.”

"We had to be - I mean, we were in receivership after about three weeks of the channel going to air," he says.

Reid, who was the first reporter to go undercover at Gloriavale, the Christian cult located in an isolated part of the West Coast, says the rules for news reporters were different in the 90s.

"We were laughing about it the other day because the bureau chief at the time, Mark Jennings, drove me to Greymouth in the (company’s) Ford Laser and he dropped me off and I hitchhiked up to Nelson Creek where Gloriavale is... imagine a news boss being able to do that these days," Reid says. 

While the 6pm bulletin had to fight to compete with its TVNZ counterpart, one aspect where TV3 had the upper hand was later in the evening, on Nightline.

"We were just running with scissors with our hair on fire and no one expected anything of it, so we did what we liked," says Belinda Todd, who was a Nightline presenter in the early 90s. 

Angus Gillies, who became Nightline’s producer after starting out at TV3 as a sports reporter, says dealing with complaints about the show's outrageous content became so normal that if they went one night without any, they felt like they'd failed.

"When you left the building not wondering whether you'd have a job the next day, you felt like you hadn't 'done it'," he says.

Throughout the lifespan of TV3 News, the goal has always been to do stories New Zealand wouldn't see anywhere else. Journalist David Farrier says that is what made TV3 stand out. 

"It wouldn't happen at TVNZ, it would happen at this scrappy other network that didn't mind pushing things or taking risks and that's what I will always remember that place for, is doing things on the smell of an oily rag, not having all the resources, and that made people take bold decisions that made for, I think, really compelling television," he says.

Part two of Adam Hollingworth’s podcast and video can be found here.

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