The sausage roll gave it away

Northland Age sports journo Francis Malley knew something was up when he was summonsed to the office at (for him) the obscene hour of 10 o'clock on Friday morning. And his suspicions deepened when general manager Joanne Nattrass made him a cup of coffee to go with his almost warm sausage roll.

"That struck me as a bit odd," he said.

"I didn't know Joanne knew how to make a cup of coffee, although I did have to talk her through it."

The treat was indeed well deserved, marking as it did the 10th anniversary of Francis' arrival at the Age, weeks short of completing his journalism diploma at Waikato Technical Institute.

"He flew up from Hamilton and we took him to lunch at the Beachcomber to talk about the job, and by the time lunch was over he had it," Joanne said.

"We did have some slight misgivings; I don't know where he got the tie he wore that day but we're all grateful that he's never worn it again."

Francis filled the sizeable gap in the Northland Age ranks created by the retirement of the redoubtable Ted Bagshaw in 1995. The linotype operator who morphed into a photographer and sports reporter was succeeded by around a dozen individuals with varying degrees of experience and ability, some of whom moved on to bigger and better things while others soon decided that the job wasn't for them.

A Wellingtonian (Titahi Bay to be precise), Frank found his way to journalism in his late 30s after running his own house-building company in Raglan. Late in his diploma year he and his fellow soon to be graduates were told that most of them would struggle to find jobs, but there were a couple of offers on the table including one at the Northland Age.

"That was the one for me," he said, citing the opportunity to work for one of the few surviving paid community broadsheet newspapers, and, as a perhaps more significant factor, the surfing to be had at Ahipara.

"It wasn't always easy for Frank when he first slid behind his desk," Northland Age editor Peter Jackson said however.

"It would be fair to say that he encountered a fairly steep learning curve.

"It's a fact that acquiring a qualification in journalism is only a small first step towards learning the job, but in Frank's case the intricacies of some of the sport he was expected to cover were a real mystery to him. He stuck at it though, and has become a major asset to this newspaper.

"He's never lost the enthusiasm he displayed on his first day, he's established an extraordinary network of sources, and he's broadened the range of sport we cover enormously. Not that that was universally applauded by the rugby fraternity when they saw what he was doing."

Francis agreed last week that there had been a few speed bumps over his first decade - he had adopted the byline The Offsider because he very quickly seemed to get offside with just about everyone, he said - but the road was much smoother now, and he was still getting as much satisfaction from the job as he ever did.

And he had made a couple of resolutions for the next decade - to write a treatise on the place in modern written English of the apostrophe, and to continue working on weaning himself off his semi-colon addiction.