The Splendid Isolation of the Gallery
Back in the nineties I was not in a very famous TV show; I did, however, do a three year stint working for Wellington Newspapers, the then-owner of the Dominion and the Evening Post, back when there was still enough money in the press to have two newspapers in one city. I worked in a support role, wrangling the Macs and the scanners and PostScript RIPs and the creaky old ATEX system, a fearsome row of ten minicomputers based around the old DEC J11 processor, clustered together and running a specialised operating system from the seventies.
I don’t know if it’s true of all news organisations, but it was certainly true of that one: there was a strong sense of hierarchy, albeit one which was sorely contested. The rivaly between the two papers was genuine and often bitter, and within each you might have very different opinions on who was doing all the important work. The deputy editor of the Dom, a gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten but whose splendid moustache, one worthy of a Victorian pornographer, complained that the editor, Richard Long, did nothing and he ran the paper despite not being in charge.
(This was unfair to Long. He was very concerned with the detail. For example, I sighted the written reprimand he delivered to a reporter whose coverage of a story showed that she did not understand that her job was, and I am quoting as closely as I remember the words “to make sure that people understand what a danger these people are to the country, not to just report stories”; the “these people” were the Greens and Alliance, and the story was that one of the big multinational accounting firms had audited election manifestoes and found that theirs was the only one which actually added up; Long would go on to a job working for the National Party, changing who paid him but I guess not what he did for a living.)
The subs, a splendid group of people and the ones I spent most time with, cracking open beer and wine at the 2 am end of a Dom shift, would gleefully show you the barely literate scrawl produced by award-winning reporters and explain that they were the ones who ran things. The photography and illustrations teams would point out that their award winning pictures and graphics were what got people picking up papers. And so on and so forth.
In spite of the constant deadline stresses - the two worst being sports reporters for the Dom filing for an evening match of rugby in time to hit the first printing of the paper that got shipped up to places like Gisbourne and Auckland, and the start of day for the Post where you had 30 minutes to bring up the twenty year old minicomputers from cold before it would make the paper late, miss the lunchtime delivery run, and cost the paper thousands or tens of thousands of sold copies and ad refunds - it was actually a convivial place to work for the most part. The librarians were interesting to talk to - each paper had their own library with a staff of three and a head librarian - and the lead designer for the Post kept turning down job offers from the likes of the South China Morning Post because of how internationally well regarded he was. The complex of buildings, starting at Willis Street and wending through to Boulcott via a maze of alleys and bridges and cables, was a hive of activities as journalists and admen would make their way out into the world, looking for stories and sales, bringing the fruits of their labours back to the hive - reporters to Boulcott, ads in the middle building - for the subs to knock their copy into shape and the layout teams to make sure that this advertiser wasn’t next to that story, that the movies weren’t by the “adult entertainment”. Typesetting film made its way through chemical baths to be handed off to couriers who would rush it out to Petone to print the final product.
Now I say that people came back to base, but that’s not true for everyone. When you walked onto the fifth floor of the Boulcott Street building, you walked past Frank Haden’s office, from where he once supposedly threw a telephone out the window exclaiming “telephones are for me to bother other people, not for them to bother me”, as well as Long and the deputy editor. The first desk you’d hit would be the chief sub, usually Brett Webling glowering at you, powerful shoulders hunched up, fingers stabbing at the keyboard like a man trying to literally beat stories into submission. Down the left were the photographers and illustrators, the centre of the floor dominated by subs. To the right were the business reporters, then the pride of the Dom (or so they told me), and toward the back were a grab-bag of sports reporters, juniors, local council, and various specialist beats. Who you’d actually see on the floor depended on the time of day.
Except, of course, for the gallery reporters. The gallery reporters didn’t come to the floor. WNL had put - at great expense - a cut-down minicomputer down at the Parliament complex, connected to the main office back via a dedicated telecom circuit. The gallery didn’t come to the office to file stories, or to spend time with their colleagues. Their lives were lived in the splendid isolation around Molesworth Street, hanging with the other gallery reporters, the politicians, and their staff. They had little to do with their own colleagues and less with the rest of us, except to throw tantrums that would shame a toddler.
The sports journalists, in spite of working in an era where their copy was shipped over dodgy dialup modems from DOS laptops from freezing press hovels at the likes of Eden Park and the old Wellington stadium in Newtown, were generous to a fault when they had to call for help. The gallery, though? At one point during my tenure, the chief sub of the Dom told me simply not to take calls from the gallery, and to direct them to him because they had acquired a reputation for such terrible behaviour.
They did not see themselves as reporters alongside their colleagues back at base. They were a cut above, a self-styled elite. So when I see political reporters lashing out at their colleagues who don’t “stay in their lane”, or the public who, they aver, are too stupid to understand their job, I am afraid I think back to my own years inside the business. They were an insular mob who had been captured by the baubles, not even of office, but of mere proximity.
