Journalism and a personal life

I’d say until recently I haven’t had a personal life to be honest, because I was working a six day week. It is demanding and the hours, I mean I would never want to work Monday to Friday nine to five. I have done it when I’ve needed to work a real job for money, because journalism’s not the highest paid career, but I always come back to Radio. I’ve left 3 times and always come back and taken a paid job for it because I love the work. But if you like, if you want a nice comfortable life where everything is in order and you can plan well in advance, journalism isn’t for you. You know, stories can break, even in the arts to a degree, but certainly in news. Stories can break anytime of the day or night. I mean I was chief reporter in Dunedin when the Aramoana shooting tragedy happened 20 years ago and that was a call at 3.30am in the morning saying, “There’s a whole lot of people dead, shot to death in Aramoana. Get in here and do the story”. It doesn’t happen to me much now but it is a demanding job. I’ll sometimes interview 4, 5, 6, if I’m doing Nine to Noon, 10 people in a day, and I’ll go home and I really don’t want to talk to anybody. I’m talked out, because while we don’t say so much asking the questions, it’s really absorbing if you do your job properly. You’re listening really intensely to the person you’re speaking to. You’re kind of getting inside their head a little bit. Sometimes inside their heart, so you know, I’ll finish doing those interviews and I’m absolutely shattered and I really just want to go home and not do very much at all, and certainly not communicate with friends and family. That’s not every day and it is still rewarding, but you know it is still exhausting and you do get a bit obsessed with it sometimes, but they would be the only disadvantages, and I’d say I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

If you work in a newsroom in radio you have to be prepared to do shift work which is getting up at four o’clock in the morning to do a shift, or working overnight, or that kind of thing, and that was definitely…, get rid of ... I found that quite (laughs) hard, and I’m quite pleased I’m not doing it anymore because I don’t cope very well on lack of sleep.