Tim Pankhurst

A lot of writers would envy me for being given an hour to pick the brains of one of the most experienced journalists in the country. Which is why when my taxi broke down en route to Dominion Post editor Tim Pankhurst’s office, I was less than happy that I was going to be showing up five minutes late.  But ever the professional he brushed off my apologies, and showed us into his office, walls plastered with the front pages of significant issues of the Dompost, and every square inch of desk covered in paper.

Newspapers are known to be places filled with scandal and controversy, so I’m here to find out everything. He’s been in the limelight a bit lately, so what did Tim do to get to where he is, and does he have any plans in the pipeline for him or his paper?

Pankhurst hasn’t always known that this was where he wanted to be. “English was my love at school” he admits, “I was a voracious reader, and our house was always full of papers, books and magazines.” But still, he calls his start in journalism ‘enormous serendipity’. “I’ve never done a diploma of journalism. I’d probably be the least qualified person here!”

He started his career in 1975 on suburban chain Sentinel Newspapers, which was located above Miramar Wharf. Tim tells of putting out a total of six suburban papers (two weekly, two fortnightly and two monthly) with a grand total of three staff. “On day one they also handed me the camera and said, ‘by the way, there’s the dark room and you’re the photographer as well.’ Talk about being thrown in! But it was just a great fit, I just knew when I fell into it that that’s what I wanted to do.”

Thirty-three years and jobs at more than ten different papers later, he is now the editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post, and still believes that it is a great time to be in journalism.

He speaks of the challenge of the evolving news technologies. “The print model is under siege, there’s no doubt about it, but through that we’ve got this enormous challenge and opportunity to broaden what we do.” With doubled online hits last year on the Stuff website (also owned by Fairfax media) it seems they have been successful in developing that aspect while still, Tim says, protecting their print model, which of course is what pays the bills. “Two or three years ago we were worried about dropping our pants and putting stuff up online and people not buying the paper anymore. But we’ve got more readers now than we’ve ever had!”

I ask how the changes are affecting staff job descriptions, expecting to hear about layoffs of unhappy old staff, in favour of new, more technologically experienced ones. But Tim describes the enormous shift in mindset and huge amount of training that’s taken place. It seems that although the paper makes a point of not forcing anyone to use the new technology, many staff are willingly embracing it. Tim recalls the last time he argued with the Union about HR issues: “Interestingly, the issue was not ‘our members want more money for having multiple skills,’ it was ‘make sure you include our members, we don’t want them to be left behind and not be equipped with all these skills’.”

So even the newspaper, an age-old social fixture of society, cannot avoid technological advances. Actually, the Dom Post now goes so far as to have an entirely digital edition. Page by page, the whole paper and all it’s advertising can be accessed from all over the world in 12 different languages. But Pankhurst seems excited, rather than grudging about these changing times. “If you’re living in Beijing and you want the Dominion Post read to you in Mandarin, you can have it done!”

And of course, as in every business, it is still the skills of the staff that make a great difference. While almost all the staff at the Dominion have diplomas in journalism and 80wpm shorthand, Pankhurst heralds experience as very valuable too. “We’re still very happy to have somebody with life experience, perhaps from the other side of the tracks. Increasingly we are seeing older people, and people with different backgrounds. For example a law degree is fantastic preparation for journalism because it teaches people how to analyse. Id love to see people come here with science degrees, it’s the same kind of thing.” Even student magazines count for experience. “There’s actually some quite good journalism in some of the uni mags. Or the those writing for community papers, people might be doing a netball report or writing on music. Just showing that they’ve got the interest and can string some words together is enormously persuasive for us when they come knocking on the door.” And to be well read is vital, Pankhurst is ruthless about that. “If anyone comes here and they haven’t read the paper, then bye bye. And some do!  I ask them what they thought of today’s editorial, or who are their favourite writers in the paper, or what they’ve you read lately that they appreciate. One person came in here and hadn’t even heard of Phil Kitchen, well if that’s you then you really oughta think about what you want to be doing because it aint journalism!”

Pankhurst himself got a bit of flak in the media last year for missing the biggest political event in New Zealand in years – our election. But he defends his choice to go to America for their election as one of 12 journalists on a 3 week all-paid Jefferson fellowship: “I was really hoping that Clark would go for an early election and I could have had the best of both worlds, but I know which one was more exciting. The election here just ran out of steam and just petered out. The positions were well known, we’d been in election mode all year and I think people were in the mindset ‘lets get it over with’. It was absolutely stunning to be in the US and to have that sort of ringside seat at these historic moments.”

Pankhurst’s trip to the states opened his eyes as to the seriousness of the recession there and he acknowledges the media’s role and responsibility in delivering bad news. “I do see us as having a supportive role. We’re a spruiker for Wellington in a lot of ways, and it’s a good community, people like living here and it’s a fantastic city. We don’t want to be telling people all the time ‘hey stay in bed and pull the covers over your head, it’s terrible out there’. A good example is a couple of weeks ago we had a front page story about the decline in the retail sector, and we turned it around and said ‘hey there’s some bargains out there, let’s go shopping’. Another example is Wellington Hospital, it has had a fair amount of bad press over the years, and we’ve got stuck into them. But it’s great to have a positive story about how everybody wants to come to the new Wellington hospital and they have no vacancies for young doctors. That’s great for Wellington.”

But it’s not just for community service, Pankhurst actually believes that good news sells papers, and a lot of thought goes into getting those sales. “Half of our sales in retail are casual, so we put a lot of thought into what’s above the fold. Of course major news events will spike sales, and they’re usually tragedies, but we do actively look for positive stories.” Pankhurst knows he has about six seconds to grab somebody’s attention when they’re looking at the paper in a shop. “When I’m in the supermarket queue and watching somebody pick the paper up, I’m thinking ‘buy it you bastard!’ and if they put it back in the stack, we’ve failed. And I’ve even followed people out of the supermarket and asked them why they bought a herald instead of the Dom Post!”

So what are Pankhurst’s goals for his paper? Some expected rivalry rears its head here: “I would love to see the Dominion as a national newspaper. The NZ Herald in its title pretends it’s a national paper but besides a few at the Christchurch airport, it doesn’t even go to the South Island! The only way we could ever realistically attack the Auckland market is to print in Hamilton or Auckland. We’re not in a position to do that unfortunately but boy I’d dearly love us to be attacking the herald in its prime market – that would be top of my wish list. They’d better look out if we ever could!”

He knows the Dom is not perfect, though he says that is part of the appeal, and I’m surprised he openly admits that. “You’re never going to get to a stage where you look at your paper and say ‘this is perfect, we’re here, we can’t improve on this.’ I suppose that is one of the beauties and attractions of it; you’re never going to nail it. It’s a cliché but it’s a first rough cut of history, you are making a jigsaw without all the pieces and sometimes you have to take a bit of a punt at the direction of it.”  He’d love to have more staff, more paging, more depth, and correspondents overseas billing copy with a New Zealand flavour: “you cant beat getting a kiwi spin on it.” This is achieved through government grants and fellowships to some extent, especially for big events, but he would much prefer to have someone based in Asia, the UK, the States, and so on, all of the time. He says he can’t just rely on reader loyalty while continuously putting out the same paper month in month out, and so they’re working on a redesign for the paper to be launched early 2009.

And what’s next for this editor? It is pretty clear he loves his job, and there’s been little mention of scandal so far. “There are not too many jobs where you come to work and you don’t know how the day is going to pan out, in a positive way. We have a news meeting in the newsroom at 2.15 every day, and the firepower and the energy just about crackles. It’s very creative, very stimulating, there’s just some people here with astounding ability.”

So he has no immediate plans to move from this paper, nor it appears, from this city. “Wellington is my city, if anyone asks where I’m from it’s Wellington. I think it’s fabulous, it’s the place to be for the media and its such an interesting city. You’ve got to come to terms with the weather though. It blows, it tests friendships, it’s challenging, get over it. When it comes to his weather dependant hobbies, fishing and diving, he is thankful for his understanding wife: “When the weather is kind you’ve got to go for it. You mightn’t get out for six weeks but when you do it’s fantastic.”

So overall he is happy here, but he does admit there are negatives to the job. I expect to hear more about how he is often attacked over choices he makes on behalf of the paper. But instead he talks about the subjects of those stories. “It goes with the territory, but I don’t enjoy the conflict very much. Sometimes people have good reason to be pretty upset. When we ring people who have suffered a tragedy we will say to them ‘do you want to talk to us?’ and very often they do. They want to put what’s happened in perspective, they want to record the life and achievement of somebody they might have lost. But other times if they say ‘go away’ then we wont harass them. When we take photos at a funeral we ask if we can be there. We try to be sensitive but you still are going to have conflicts and some days can be fraught. You go home and feel like you’ve been through the ringer and come Friday night, you’re stuffed. Big weeks, long hours, big days, and you just go from one thing to the other. I see some people in other businesses going to the gym or going for a run every lunchtime. We don’t have the luxury of having that kind of structured day! The reporters know that normally they finish at five pm, but very few are out of here at five pm. If they’re working on a story, they stay until it’s done! They don’t get overtime for that, that’s just part of the job. They always have the option of going to work for PR/Comms for 10 grand more and less hours, but they’d be bored shitless!”

But for its faults, Tim is quick to defend the rewards of the job, if it is approached in the right way. “I can’t understand people who are in this game who don’t have drive and ambition; you get back what you put in. From the work you put in you see this wonderful ego-enhancing result, you’ve created something and there it is. I mean, imagine working in a bank or being PR for the parole board, one of those jobs where you’re doing the same sort of thing day after day. I just couldn’t imagine that.”

So there you have it. One of our most well-known newspapermen has given me the scoop on his career, and it wasn’t nearly as dark and scandalous as I thought. He works long hard hours, regularly has to defend his editorial choices, and wishes for more resources to play with, but overall he simply loves his job and the city he works in. Clichéd though it might sound, I leave Tim’s office feeling that the ‘mouthpiece’ for the city remains in good hands.