My story – and some extra Crux paid subscriber benefits

It’s time to share more stuff!

By Peter Newport.

This whole Substack environment is a lot more personal that the main Crux website.

It’s a time of crisis in NZ media and so I thought we should get to know each other a lot better - after all I am depending on paid subscribers for the survival of Crux.

I want to offer more and hope that we can get more paid subscribers on board to improve how we do things and potentially even get a second journalist on board.

So, here’s my story and how I plan to share more, write more and hopefully provide an even more complete picture of the community we live in as well as some observations from the national and international news landscape. Let me know in comments if I’m on the right track and always feel free to suggest new projects for Crux.

In a time of growing misinformation, the work of experienced journalists has, in my view, become even more important.

I’m from Wellington originally and literally ran away from home at the age of 16 to fulfil a teenage dream of being a journalist. I went to Dunedin and walked into the editor’s office at the Otago Daily Times asking for him to give me a job as a cadet reporter.

I think the brazen confidence, or ignorance, of this approach must have had significant novelty value as I got the job. It was a freezing cold Dunedin winter and my first home there was an old Ministry of Labour boarding house – with no heating and big shared bunk rooms.

That was 50 years ago.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to work for virtually every NZ media platform. But some of the best years were in my late teens/early twenties working for what was then the NZBC out of their Dunedin newsroom in what was then the Methodist Central Mission building (now the Forsyth Barr building.)

Alan Brady was the news editor, before he went on to become the godfather of Central Otago pinot noir, and Ian Taylor was a Playschool presenter.

I spent many happy months, and thousands of dollars of PM Muldoon’s taxpayer money, flying around the Southern Alps and Central Otago covering a variety of stories that included the deer recovery helicopter wars, various tourist plane crashes and even made a short documentary about the end of the Manapouri power station construction and the last dance at the worker’s village before all of the buildings were shifted north to become Twizel.

In those days I had no idea about the concept of right or wrong in relation to journalism. There was no element of holding power to account. We were all young and just having fun – plus of course producing lots of content to keep the system of the day fed.

I was good at TV news and, and after a short stint with RNZ’s Morning Report, joined hordes of other young reporters across the Tasman as us Kiwis jumped on board the rapidly expanding media empires being created by Packer and Murdoch.

Again – we were young, heavy drinking, 100% confident – living the glamorous life out of TV choppers and getting treated like celebrities in the Aussie culture of work hard, play hard. I still get recognised at Aussie airports after all these years!

The reason all of this experience is important is that it was the springboard for almost 30 years of more serious work in Europe and Asia. I become Channel 9’s first ever London correspondent/bureau chief and worked for Reuters on a vast range of important assignments including the Belfast hunger strikes at the height of IRA tensions with the UK. It was a time of bombings, the Falklands war, the Iranian hostage crisis – Maggie Thatcher.

After that I worked in Hong Kong and went on to be the first western reporter to be expelled from China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. To this day I can’t go back to China or Hong Kong. I covered elections in Pakistan, Emperor Hirohito’s funeral in Tokyo, the British Spycatcher saga in Tasmania.

It was big stuff. Exciting and important. I ended up at the BBC as the deputy head of TV news.

But fast forward to Queenstown in 2025.

Suddenly I was figuring out how to earn a living with my international experience being far from useful in the world of hyper local community news.

Or so I thought.

Crux has been a big experiment. What if I used my experience to take a proper look at our local council and business leaders?

That just does not happen. Junior reporters train in the regions and then graduate to the cities. Local news is just “parish pump” sausage sizzles, run of the mill council reporting, award ceremonies, ribbons getting cut and a bit of resident whinging with the compulsory arms-crossed photo of someone at a controversial road junction that will be “an accident waiting to happen.”

What if we actually started to peel the layers back and figure out where the power really lies. Who has the power? Did they get elected who are they “self elected”? Is it simply the loudest voices – the old boys network – or something more complex.

I’ll share a recent story that explains my new fascination with how things work in small communities. In Queenstown, Wānaka and Cromwell.