Opinion: The final day of Newshub is upon us with newsrooms in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch preparing to say good evening and goodbye.
It's the end of 35 years of news made and broadcast by TV3.
Many of us have been here since before the channel was rebranded as Three and well before we went digital with a website, let alone a streaming platform - ThreeNow. I remember the joy of 3news.co.nz where suddenly the stories we had laboured over - and spent hours, days, sometimes weeks or months perfecting - could live on for more than just the few minutes they occupied on the airwaves. You could email your friends and family a link if they missed it. What a novelty! Ironically - given how important they are to news today - Facebook and Youtube were banned, the company worried we might waste time online when we should be working.
But it was back in the days before you could simply google something that I first walked into the Auckland newsroom as a 17-year-old on work experience with the cult evening news show Nightline.
In my first week, entertainment reporter Michael Beran called in sick. He was supposed to be interviewing American metal band Megadeth and producer Angus Gillies - who I still work alongside to this day - looked around the newsroom to find somebody, anybody, to step in. His eyes landed on me. So off I went, the work experience kid, to talk to a big, scary, metal band I knew virtually nothing about. Fortunately, my brother had their CD and had told me the lead singer used to be in Metallica, but got kicked out - material I could work with.
We set up at their hotel to film and I tried to elicit some other information from the band manager. He wasn't playing ball and told me straight up - if they realise for one second that you know nothing about them, they'll walk out. I gulped and crossed out the questions I had scribbled in my notepad (my first reporter's notepad!) on the short drive over. I prayed I wasn't going to blow this opportunity.
Frontman Dave Mustaine and then-guitarist Al Patrelli sat down and after a few vague questions I asked Mustaine: "Why did you leave Metallica?" There was a long and awkward pause, followed by a few sideways glances, then Mustaine replied: "I'd like to say I quit, but I got fired because I was a violent drunk".
The band manager was slicing his finger across his neck, trying to wrap up the interview. I squeezed in one last question: "If you could make music with anyone alive today, who would it be?" And he said he wanted to put the animosity behind him and get back together with his old bandmates in Metallica.
As we packed up the band manager told me Mustaine had never spoken publicly about this split, and I went back to the newsroom with an international scoop and got my first story on air.
At 22 I landed my first full time job with TV3 in the Wellington bureau and was thrown in the deep end soon after with my first live cross. Frank Bainimarama had just completed a successful coup in Fiji, then made a surprise trip to our capital city. I was on the tarmac and the most nervous I had ever been in my entire life. The excitement of that live cross into Nightline was the first hit of an adrenaline rush I have chased for the past two decades. It's why I say yes to covering stories or hosting shows that scare the living daylights out of me. Once you have a taste for it, it's impossible to turn away from.
Then came the opportunity to present the news from the big studio at Flower Street in Auckland. I was sent up to Auckland to do a screen test and it felt like the path of the rest of my life pivoted on that moment. I worked myself into such a state that I arrived in make up with an enormous cold sore. It was the first time I had seen an autocue and without a chance to pre-read, away I went, and despite the enlarged lip and a pounding heart, I guess I have never stopped since.
The first time I sat at the news desk in the studio and went live I could barely breathe. I was sure the microphone would be picking up the sound of my heart thumping.
From presenting Nightline to reporting for 3 News, covering the environment and climate change round. To India, Copenhagen, America, Arrowtown. Wherever I went I was delighted. For a kid from South Otago I couldn't believe my luck. Kenya, Tanzania, Lebanon, Jordan, China, Japan, Hawaii, a stint in Sydney as the Australia Correspondent and then I fell in love with Antarctica. I don't know what it is about that place but it got under my skin and I still can't get enough. There have been three trips so far and I hope there are many more to come. Perhaps it's the exclusivity - it's an extremely hard place to gain access to - more likely it's the otherworldliness. You may as well be living on an outpost on Mars. The brains in the heads of the scientists down there are enormous and with 24 hour sunlight you have almost unlimited time to pick them.
There was current affairs, another love affair. Being able to tell long, intricate stories with beautifully shot pictures is a rare indulgence for a news reporter and at 3rd Degree I got to work with the very best in the business. There were more trips - to Stewart Island, Costa Rica, and into the forbidden realms of both the Mongrel Mob and Black Power headquarters.
Then just this week I found myself standing in a freezing cold river, a fire roaring on the riverbank, next to four members of a community I wouldn't usually cross paths with. A karakia was said, giving us safe passage for the story we were about to embark on and as I stood with my feet going numb in the water, sparks and ash from the fire floating around me, I contemplated how lucky I am that journalism has allowed my world to be so vast and open that it takes me into places I would never have otherwise encountered.
That story will air on our first broadcast of the new news - ThreeNews. It's with churning emotions that I have navigated this final week at Newshub - like I'm adrift at sea and the sea is raging. On the one hand there is the heaviness and sadness of losing the shows we've worked so hard on. On the other hand it's all the wonderful people, the journalists, producers, camera operators, editors, engineers, directors, sound mixers, graphic artists, make-up artists, bosses, workmates, colleagues, friends. All of us will go our separate ways after Friday's final bulletin and I know at 7pm my heart will break in two.
So to my Three and Newshub whānau, who truly are a family, Friday will be haere ra and arohanui. The extraordinary things I have seen and done are because of you. You've given me a life filled with wonder and colour and chaos, deadlines and stress and laughter and a richness beyond any of my wildest dreams.
I am so, so grateful for all of it - thank you for allowing me to be a part of it.
