Rewards in journalism

I think it touches on some of the things we’ve spoken about really. I think it’s in the arts you can often be unappreciated. It’s a tough life in New Zealand to try and make a living being an artist. We’re a small population, wealthy in some ways, but you know there aren’t great arts’ patrons or so many of them, so it’s hard. If you want to be an artist, a visual artist, or an actor, or something like that, and you know Julie because you’re in the theatre industry too, it’s a very tough call. So I love discovering people, perhaps not the famous people, you know it’s nice to talk to people like Ian McLellan sometimes, but I’m more interested in talking to the emerging artists who I know in a few years time will do well and sort of helping them on that path, getting them some exposure, and making them feel a little bit valued because sometimes just being interviewed by a journalist is a very big deal for, for an artist. You know you will get people to their exhibition or to their show and it’s just somebody saying, “Hey look I think you’re really cool. I know you’re just starting out, but what a great idea, and I love your energy and I love your ideas”. So I think that certainly in this later part of my career in arts journalism, focused on arts journalism, that’s what I find rewarding and then I’ll go to their exhibitions, I’ll go to their shows, and I’ll follow their careers, and I get really chuffed about that.

I think as writer, you know if you’re a novelist or something like that, you might get to publish 3 or 4 novels in a course of your lifetime, but if you're writing for a newspaper you get to publish something every week, so it’s kind of something really solid that you have there to show for your work, and yeah, that’s what I like about it as well.