Cool. An interview with a media mogul. As I’ve never interviewed a media mogul before, the prospect might have been exciting. I knew that Sinead Boucher, the owner and executive chair of Stuff, was a media mogul because I read it in the Guardian, so it must be true. That paper described her, in 2020 – the year she bought the company for a buck – as “New Zealand’s newest corporate media mogul”.
Her latest possibly mogul-like move was to successfully negotiate a contract with Warner Bros Discovery to take over Three’s now-defunct Newshub on a contract to provide the TV channel with a new news service. Alas, calling her a mogul is what is known in our trade as a media beat-up. I now know this because she laughed – she has a laugh like a tinkly bell – and assured me that she is not a media mogul, or even a mini mogul. She is not much of a scoffer, but she does scoff at that. She doesn’t even think New Zealand has media moguls.
I might have known she was destined to disappoint. Moguls are supposed to be filthy rich and given to extravagant gestures, such as flying on private jets and going to lavish parties. A lady mogul would wear sky-high Dolce & Gabbana stilettos and head-to-toe Dior, say. Oh, and she would have homes in New York and Aspen and a little apartment/mansion in London’s Regent Park. On reflection, I don’t think I would want to interview a mogul. Or even be capable of interviewing a mogul. I had to look up all of those mogul references on Google.
Boucher doesn’t really go to parties, lavish or otherwise. “I’m a classic introvert and hardly ever go to anything outside working hours.” Here is her idea of a really good time: “I don’t count reading or watching news as work. I’m usually up early and love an hour or two of peace to read all the news sites and see what’s been happening elsewhere.”
The 54-year-old wears pretty, floaty frocks, or blazers and stripey T-shirts, and her hair is blonde and curly, bordering at times on unruly. She lives in a perfectly nice house in Wellington’s Miramar with a messy garden and things that need doing about the place, which she never gets around to doing. She has pretty eyes of the type that are invariably described as sparkling Irish eyes. Her father’s name is Sean O’Hanlon. You don’t get much more Irish than that. Her parents emigrated to New Zealand from Belfast when Boucher was a preschooler.
She looks, and is, friendly and approachable. She might be a bit like her dog, Rizzo, a golden retriever. The dog is named for the character in Grease, one of her favourite movies. Betty Rizzo is the tough-girl leader of a girl gang. She’s the bad girl. Olivia Newton-John played Sandy, the good girl. She might be more Sandy than Rizzo. We’ll see.
She and her husband, Mark, met as journalism students at Aoraki Polytechnic in 1992. They separated last year, perfectly amicably – he pops around a few times a week to cook dinner. They have two kids, Ben who is 16, and Harriette, who has just had her 21st birthday.
Boucher made an exception to not going to things and went to her daughter’s party, “a Dunedin flat party. My first one.” She didn’t get drunk and dance to ABBA. She sent a text: “Only a small part of the floor was cordoned off, so no one would fall through it. We had a great night, but no dancing for the parents – we were ‘released’ from duty after the speeches, ie, shuffled out.”
Definitely Optimistic
She once said: “Don’t mistake me for a Pollyanna.” You can see why that might be a little diminishing. “No. I don’t see it as diminishing. I would definitely describe myself as an optimist. But I’m not someone who sees the world through, like, a lens of everything is sunshine and roses. I think I would describe myself as someone who faces up to the hard realities and tries to plot the best way through them, particularly in an industry where it’s hard reality after hard reality.
“You just have to do the things you need to do. And they’re not always pleasant or, you know, things you get home at the end of the day and feel happy that you’ve done, but they’re necessary. I would be happy for people to view me in positive ways and I’m definitely optimistic.”
Is she sure she’s not annoyingly positive? “No. Well, God I hope not … I don’t think I’m a gusher with praise.”
Whew. Being a gusher who exudes positivity would have made her the weirdest journalist ever. Journalists are supposed to be cynical, grumpy old hacks who get about in wrinkled raincoats, surely. She said about the cynical, grumpy label: “That’s probably their reputation. Ha. I think the best journalists are not the cynical, grumpy old hacks. I think they are the ones who are curious and don’t accept things as they’re presented all the time and always try to dig deeper.”
In the Guardian piece that anointed her a mogul, there is this: that her staff “have barely a breath of a bad word to say about her”. Another tinkly laugh. “I’m sure,” she says emphatically, “that is not true.” She is a boss and there are always people who will doubt you and dislike you. “We’ve had to do some really tough things, including making people redundant.” She says that this is, obviously, much more horrible for the people being made redundant than for the person making people redundant. But still, she hates it and it keeps her awake at night.
In June, Stuff shut the last of its Northland community newspapers, the Northern News and the Whangārei Leader, and the property lift-out Far North Real Estate. The Kerikeri-based Bay Chronicle closed in March. All consigned to become fish and chip paper — if fish and chip paper was not as outdated a concept as regional newspapers. On a brighter note, Stuff bought the Wairarapa Times-Age, my local rag. It’s much invigorated.
She claims she can, and has, shouted at people. But then she has apologised. An apology for shouting? In a news organisation?
The media business has always been a shouty business. I once got shouted at by a sweaty fellow with steam coming out of his ears. There was no apology. There may well have been one now. The culture has, changed, you hope. I once witnessed a hack heaving his typewriter (remember those?) out of a third-floor window.
Or it may be that she is a decent boss. I couldn’t imagine her shouting. Imagine, I suggested idiotically, that I was working for her and had defamed somebody. Could she shout at me? She said, perfectly reasonably and with good humour, that she couldn’t “shout on demand”. And that she doesn’t shout about genuine mistakes. She might shout at perceived “shifty” behaviour.
When it was announced that she had bought Stuff from Australia’s Nine Entertainment for a symbolic dollar, somebody sent a text, to her husband apparently, saying that it was a “ballsy” move. Nine had taken over Stuff from previous owner Fairfax and did not have much interest in holding onto a NZ media company. She denies that it was even a bold move. She doesn’t much care for the ballsy reference, either, “but also, it wasn’t anything like the sort of big, brave, corporate kind of move. It was more like: ‘What’s the alternative to this?’ Our company’s going to be wound up. It was more like doing this has got to be better than that.”
Her family say she should get a hobby, “because they’re all gardeners and crafters and potters, and I don’t do anything like that. I just read. Reading apparently doesn’t count as a hobby.” Instead, she decided to walk the 643 kilometres of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, where you walk for a month, averaging 25km a day, and stay in hostels in bunk rooms with other sweaty pilgrims and their tramping socks. It is one way to choose to spend your holidays. It is certainly not how a media mogul would choose to spend their holidays. She seems to like doing hard things.
To a point. She certainly wasn’t replicating the mad person who walked the entire trail in bare feet. “He was embracing the pilgrim spirit.” There wasn’t a guy doing the pilgrimage carrying an enormous wooden cross on his back, but it wouldn’t surprise her to learn that there has been such a guy.
She was supposed to be thinking about Jesus. She wasn’t doing that. “I was usually thinking about where would be a good place to have lunch.”
Doing hard things
What might doing hard things say about her? “I quite like the idea of doing something and finishing it.” She doesn’t really know why she wanted to do the walk, except that her 82-year-old Catholic father wanted to do it. She and her sister Fiona thought, “We’re going to have to go really slow and have short days. Not a bit of it. He was like a spring lamb. We had crippling blisters. We all had aches and pains. Everybody except him.” Her father became a “sort of semi-celebrity” because he was the oldest person on the trail. “And, you know, he’s an Irish charmer.”
Her father worked as a glazier and her mother, Mary, as a cleaner in factories and in the university cafe. She often worked two or three jobs at a time. She has two sisters and two brothers. She is the eldest.
She was raised a Catholic and went to Villa Maria College in Christchurch, where she was taught by the Sisters of Mercy. She says she got a good education. Her nuns were “smart and well educated and really ambitious for the girls at the school”. She was a “very needy, socially awkward” sort of kid. She preferred books to socialising and, being a classic introvert, still does. Fiona once said that Boucher was a bit of an “ugly duckling”. Until she wasn’t. “I probably got braces and contact lens.” She observes that teenage girls are now “glossy. And when we were teenagers we were nothing like that.”
She doesn’t now have any sort of faith. “I’m probably just, right now, I’m definitely not a practiser or follower of any organised religion. And when I saw that stuff about Jesus saving Donald Trump, I thought: ‘How do people believe that stuff?’”
She is, quite obviously, not going to say what her politics are. She is allowed to have politics as long as, she says, “I don’t, think it’s appropriate that anyone knows what … they are.” I say I think she’s a leftie. She did laugh, but she wasn’t about to fall for that laughably lame trick. “I don’t have strong politics for one party or another.” Stuff, like every media outlet, gets complaints about being too Left or too Right, and they are complaints about the same article. “It’s not our job to go down a path. We’re not trying to tell people who to vote for.”
She stood down from being chief executive and is now Stuff’s executive chair and publisher. “Being publisher allows me that role of more overall responsibility for the editorial output.” I don’t actually know what a publisher does. “That’s one of great things about owning your own company. You can think about: ‘What is my dream role’. I guess I’d say more of an overall view of our longer-term direction, particularly focused on the content. Whereas the chief executive is definitely more taking leadership.
“I’m not running the business day-to-day. So, it lets me lean a bit more into my journalistic roots, rather than being on the commercial side of the business.” I do know what publishers are supposed not to do, which is to meddle in the editorial side of things. “I try and refrain from bothering the newsroom.” Note that “try”. It is hard to stop being a sticky beak when your entire career has been based on being a born sticky beak. “We’ve got a news tip line. I’m probably quite a frequent contributor. ‘I’ve seen this house on fire. Do with it what you will.’”
She began as a reporter at the Press and had a meteoric rise, eventually ending up in what was “a broom cupboard”, attempting to evolve then-owner Fairfax’s digital team, which was essentially the poor cousin of the print editions, into something people actually clicked on.
And then she was the chief executive of her own company. How, by the way, did she even know how to be a chief executive? In other words, how do you go from being a hack to being a chief executive? By using her journalism skills, she says. She looked and observed and asked questions. She certainly had no background in finance. “But what you know is that there are people who do that, right? It’s the finance department.”
She is no mogul, then. She is, I think, a bit of a Pollyanna. Is that a bad thing in an industry inhabited by prophets of doom and gloom and previously inhabited by grumpy cynics in their crumpled raincoats? Quite possibly not.