Travel opportunities

You’re talking to someone from Radio New Zealand National and we have no travel budget really, even within the country at the moment. So money is tight, but I have travelled. I’ve been to the Edinburgh Arts Festival twice, I’ve been to Korea to look at the film industry there, and I’ve been to Ireland as well. So I’ve been lucky in my life that there have been some opportunities come up, and I know Julie is the same, but they’re quite rare. I went to France last year to cover the opening of the new museum, La Musee du Quai Branley, which is a cultural museum and the French embassy paid. All of these trips that I’m mentioning have not been paid for by RNZ, they’ve been paid for by the British Council or the Korean Government or the French Government, but I know that Radio New Zealand is clamping down on that now. So I don’t know if there will be so many of those trips, which is a shame because it’s kind of cool to actually see New Zealand’s place in the world and to learn about other arts organisations. If you want a you know, a wild crazy life of travelling I would probably say that my company is not the one to join, but there’s also probably being a foreign correspondent, although there are very few opportunities. That seems to be more TV and a bit of print now at the moment. If travel is important to you, there are only really in New Zealand very few media who can afford to do it.

I was quite lucky working for Frontseat, I got to travel sort of every week for that job, but yeah, there’s not a great deal of arts reporting jobs in the country, and even less so ones where you can travel all over the place, and technology is such obviously that you can do interviews from anywhere and everywhere at the moment so you don’t necessarily need to be somewhere to cover it obviously.

TV more so than anywhere else because they want the pictures. So they will send, say their arts reporter, over to Australia to interview Ian McLellan because they’ve got the budget to do it.