Hunting for news in New Zealand

It reminds you a little of The Office, the British version, with people sitting around, answering phones in a lackadaisical way. Not the kind of atmosphere you’d expect in a newsroom, really.

But for New Zealand’s oldest broadsheet, The Taranaki Daily News, it’s just business as usual.

A story meeting around 11 a.m. The editors and reporters huddle and discuss the day’s developing stories. One seasoned reporter points out that there’s a very rude parrot in town that’s been bothering neighbors.

“Has it been swearing? Do we have video?” the editor in chief asks.

No, more like just being really loud. And engaging in some rude dancing.

A five-minute discussion commences on the parrot, and other troublesome birds in and around Taranaki, until the meeting moves on.

This is not your average daily newspaper, but if you’ve managed to stay afloat for over a hundred years in New Plymouth, a coastal town in the Taranaki region, you must be doing something right.

We hear a lot of doomsday talk about print journalism these days. Newspapers folding up, seasoned reporters being cut, people turning online for all their daily informational needs. “Who needs newspapers?” the bloggers love to sneer.

Try telling that to the neighbors of the lady with the rude parrot.

A bunch of Asian journalists (me included) visited Taranaki during our tour of Fonterra’s dairy operations last year. Stopping by the offices of The Taranaki Daily News (and reading the priceless local newspapers every morning with my coffee) was just a bonus.

Leafing through a typical copy of the Daily News, you’re in imminent danger of spewing coffee through your nose while reading stories about a local referendum on “smacking” by parents (“some say there should be limits to parental control”); a woman rest home worker convicted for “gagging” a patient for being “too noisy”; and the arrest of a man who “took pot shots” at passing aircraft, throwing rocks at the windshield of a helicopter and causing “about NZ$20,000 worth of damage.”

Leafing through The Dominion Post, another regional paper, you get stories like this (and mind you, these are all from a single day’s paper):

• “Flu excuse fails to fly.” (A woman caught drunk driving told a local court that she was getting over swine flu, and so the three glasses of wine she had that evening “may have hit her harder.” No go: she was fined NZ$500.)

• “Man charged for smuggling spiders.” (A man described as a “spider enthusiast” was charged with illegally smuggling in seven deadly orange tarantulas from — here’s the kicker —the Philippines! He had requested the spider package to be labeled as “gift” to avoid customs scrutiny.)

• “Fun with dolphin takes cold, scary turn.” (A young woman’s “frolic” with Moko the dolphin, a popular attraction at a local beach, took a sinister turn when the dolphin “kept pushing her out to sea,” not allowing her to return to shore. “He’s ever so lovely,” a local bar manager said of Moko, “but we keep warning people that unless you can breathe underwater, use some sense.”)

After that, I needed an extra napkin for all the coffee I had spewed.

Sitting down with the chief editors of the Taranaki Daily News, you realize that such humorous items are not the meat-and-potatoes stuff of their journalism. It’s simply the gravy.

There are, after all, wire agencies to provide the national and international news; so it’s even more of a challenge for reporters to unearth those charming little local nuggets that make papers like The Taranaki Daily News and The Dominion Post so rare nowadays: small-town news that really reflects a community.

“We do have a hard time finding news here sometimes,” admits editor Jonathan MacKenzie. He didn’t seem overly troubled by this, however. His plaint was in contrast to the tales of the assembled Asian journalists, whose local beats — Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila — are often fraught with political turmoil and violence. I mentioned that the Philippines had, to the shock of some and the pride of many gung-ho journalists, one of the highest mortality rates for newsmen (this was before the Maguindanao massacre, mind you), right up there with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Daily News editors collectively raised their eyebrows.

(I have to mention at this point that we had our sit-down chat with the editors in what has to be one of the coziest employee lounges I’ve ever seen at a newspaper. There was a billiards table at one end, where a few people were casually knocking a few balls around; a dartboard was mounted against the wall, and a nearby cappuccino machine caught my eye. Who says newspapers are going under?)

The challenge for most newspapers in the coming decade will be to remain viable assets to the communities they serve. Often, this means focusing on the gossipy nuances of local town meetings or, for instance, the “human interest” to be found in abrasive parrot behavior. Believe it or not, the stuff that shows up on blogs worldwide has to come from somewhere. Often, it’s wire agencies that pick up kooky local reports (such as the recurring “My Way Killings” in Manila that finally made it to The New York Times) and turn them into international stories. The things people chuckle over with their morning coffee. The things people blog about.

New Plymouth itself has a rocky coastline that would feature nicely in a remake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I took a stroll after breakfast one morning along the boardwalk, where rains lashed determined joggers and seagulls took cover. The town is quaint, with wood clapboard storefronts and houses and a bar that holds a “Taranaki Idol” singing contest every Friday. Surrounding the town are endless stretches of grazing land, and Fuji-like Mt. Taranaki looms in the background as a convenient photo op. You could easily imagine living here. You could easily imagine David Lynch living here.

After our visit with the Taranaki News editors, one of the paper’s photographers took a group shot of us, and we started to entertain illusions that our visiting this newsroom was, in itself, Very Big News. We pictured tomorrow’s headlines: our group photo sharing newsprint space with the “smacking” referendum and the “gagging” health care worker.

But I checked the next day, and the next. Our photo never appeared. We didn’t make the big-time, not even in Taranaki.

Damn. I hope we weren’t bumped by that rude parrot.