Samantha Hayes and Mike McRoberts have become close friends as well as colleagues at Newshub. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
The dateline and opening credits will roll just one more time.
As Samantha Hayes and Mike McRoberts’ Newshub colleague Paddy Gower might have once declared, ‘there is just one hour to go’.
Hayes and McRoberts can sense the clock ticking although, strangely for them, it still doesn’t feel this close – the newsreading duo are down to their final 6pm bulletin.
It might have been a little touch and go earlier this week as to whether they’d appear together for Friday night’s final Newshub Live at 6pm bulletin.
The pair, close friends after sharing the news studio for eight years, have also been overcoming an untimely and nasty bug.
McRoberts missed a bulletin earlier in the week. Samantha Hayes missed a big Newshub farewell party she so wanted to be at on Wednesday night, to help protect her voice.
They both popped lozenges and sipped tepid water seconds before Wednesday night’s bulletin.
Over coffee and tea at an Auckland cafe on Thursday afternoon, McRoberts declares in a deeper-than-usual voice: “I’m channelling Barry White over here.”
It’s been the worst timing, laughs Hayes, who has been working long hours after each Newshub at 6 show to rehearse for her new Stuff-produced news bulletin, from next week.
“I think half the newsroom is down and using pseudoephedrine at the moment . . . so thank you, David Seymour, for that,” says McRoberts, referring to the Act party’s successful policy to have the more powerful meds on chemist shelves.
“It’s been a pretty tough few months and now that the finish line is in sight, everyone’s starting to get those bugs and illnesses.
“But we’ll pull through, we’ll be all right.”
The pair – with almost 300 Warner Bros Discovery colleagues – have been through a frenetic, sad four months, knowing that Friday would eventually arrive.
Hayes says of the final bulletin: “I’ve been personally trying not to think about it.
“That’s my approach to it and what will be, will be on the final night, in terms of the emotion of it.
“In terms of what we might say, it just has to be genuine and in the moment.”
McRoberts: “I’ve had a few things rattling around in my brain. It still feels a long way away. It will be a thank you of some sort, for sure.”
They are both adamant that they will be covering the news right to the end – Friday night’s show won’t be a full-on Newshub retrospective.
“We’ve got to do the news. We have always been here to do the news and we’re going to keep doing that right up until the very last minute,” says Hayes.
McRoberts: “Right up until they kick us out.”
Do they have a decent lead-in story in the works?
“Nothing we can tell the Herald about!” Hayes says quickly.
“We’re still your competition,” says McRoberts. “For the time at least.”
The pair have been on the other end of microphones, cameras and questions over the past four months, and especially in recent days.
“There’s a lot of interest obviously,” says McRoberts.
“It’s the end of an era and we’ve been in people’s lives for a long time. I don’t think it makes it any easier. If anything, it makes it harder because you’re kind of pushed to reflect on what a time it’s been.”
His voice trails off, and then quietly: “Yeah.”
The pair are holding it together today, smiling and joking, reflective at times.
Hayes says the entire newsroom has been going through a grief process. “It does come up and down a bit.”
She was close to tears before a recent bulletin.
“I do a quick make-up check before I go into the studio for 6 and I can’t even remember what it was about, but Mike walks in and he can see that I’m about to lose it.
“He was fantastic – instead of saying, ‘Are you okay?’, he just said, ‘Okay, we’ve got a show to do’.
“It was good – it reset me. But it hits at different times.”
McRoberts: “Far be it from me to be the pragmatic one, but we did have a show to do. And it’s been like that for four months. As a performer, there’s definitely been nights when I didn’t want to be there. And I’m sure there has been for the whole team.
“I’ve been so proud of the professional attitude everyone’s taken to make sure we’re still performing at our best and providing great news stories for the country right up until the last stage. It’s been humbling.”
Hayes says she has heard one piece of regular feedback over the past four months.
“I don’t know if I should say it,” she says, starting to laugh.
“Oh God,” says McRoberts.
More laughter.
Warner Bros’ Discovery’s PR person, sitting alongside, is wondering where this is heading.
Hayes suddenly gets serious.
“I’ve just heard a lot of people – at the supermarket, the courier driver, just people in general – say that ‘when you guys go, I’m not going to watch the other channel’. I’m just not going to turn the TV on at six.
“And so that’s why I’m really grateful that we’re going to be able to keep going with Three News.”
I raise a quote from former TV3 news boss Hal Crawford, who wrote this week: “We were intensely competitive with TVNZ, although that competitiveness was mostly one-sided as far as I could see.”
Both McRoberts and Hayes believe a common label attached to TV3 news and Newshub – of it being a scrappy underdog – is outdated.
“I feel like we evolved from that and started believing in what we could do. When I first started at 3, 23 years ago, a lot of people had a giant chip on their shoulder about TVNZ,” says McRoberts.
“I’d just come from there and I looked around and I said, you’ve got nothing to have a chip on your shoulder about.
“Our culture has been one of storytelling and I love that – we do everything for the story.
“We’ve got great teamwork, this connection that we have as a group – everyone talks about it and it’s real. That’s the thing that I’m going to miss the most when I walk out the doors on Friday.”
While some – including Hayes – are heading to Stuff for Three News, it is the end of the journey for the “Newshubbers” as a team.
“That’s a tough thing,” says McRoberts.
“I was talking to [former news boss] Mark Jennings at the Voyager Awards and he was like, ‘Oh you know, Mike, when you leave it takes a wee while, but you’ll get over it’.
“And I said, ‘When you left, Mark, there was still something to go back to’. We don’t have that any more. And it’s not just six o’clock, it’s AM, it was the late news, it was The Project last year.
“So many points of connection and engagement for our audience, and so many lost.”
Hayes says a lot of the team have stories they’ve been determined to get on air over the past four months.
“Even Michael Morrah last night; he is not letting up on cameras on fishing boats. He had another great yarn about the progress, or the lack of progress, that’s been made around that. He came in and did a chat with us in the studio.”
McRoberts: “I had to ask him a question at the end of it and I was always going to say, ‘Do you reckon you can wrap this up by Friday?’”
McRoberts has tried hard this week not to be down. We’re so lucky, he says.
“We’ve got so much to celebrate.”
Hayes won’t confirm whether she’s on air on Saturday or Monday for Three News.
“You’re just going to have to tune in and find out what’s going on.”
McRoberts: “Very skilfully deflected.”
I ask Hayes how she’s finding handling a deeply emotional time with the end of Newshub, while at the same time, building up to a new-look bulletin with another news organisation.
“On the one hand, this thing that we hold so dear, and has been a massive part of our lives, is coming to an end,” she says.
“And so that’s really difficult to deal with and very emotional and it hits you at different times.
“And then on the other hand, like many other people in the newsroom, I’ve got this new project that I’m going to be working on.
“It’s a little bit different. It’s the same, but different.
“I’ve actually had lots of different people coming up to me when I’m out and about saying, ‘Well hang on, the news is finishing, but then are you still going to be doing the news?’
“So it’s enormously... odd.”
But she also says she feels energised.
“When we’ve been doing our rehearsals, it has a real breaking news vibe because I don’t know which camera I’m looking at and what’s coming up next...
“It’s exciting because it’s a new space and it’s a solid team that’s coming over from Newshub and then we’ve got these new people coming in from Stuff and they have great talent. I’m really enthusiastic about it. I don’t have any nerves about the first shows.”
McRoberts, who is heading to the National Business Review (NBR) in early August after a holiday to Los Angeles with his wife Heidi, says: “As journalists, we tend to shy away from using the word performance.
“It’s something that Paul Holmes taught me when I worked with him for three years – being on air is absolutely a performance in a good, truthful and honest way.
“Sam’s a great performer, so I’ve got no doubt that she’ll give it a bloody good kick.”
The pair’s chemistry – built, they say, on eight years of being completely honest with each other – is on full show over our afternoon tea.
They don’t live too far apart. They’ll still see each other.
“Popping around for a glass of pinot noir maybe,” says Hayes.
“Sounds good!” says McRoberts.
Hayes says she still believes in journalism.
“We’re always going to need people to tell New Zealand stories.
“If someone came and asked me today – maybe a teenager or someone looking to go to university – ‘Should I become a journalist?’
“I would 100% say yes. Yes, become a journalist because it’s the most incredible career.
“You spend every day learning about something that you would not have otherwise encountered in your life.
“It’s such a privilege and an honour to tell the stories of people who are, in some instances, going through the worst moment of their lives; in other instances, the best moment of their lives.
“I love those stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things and also extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including managing editor, NZ Herald editor and Herald on Sunday editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
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