This article was published by The Listener on January 28, 2006 and republished online as Linda Clark makes her return to TVNZ as a board member.
Not having had an unbroken night’s sleep for four years and having twin boys who don’t start school till next year would be sufficient reason for many women to quit a relentlessly high-pressure job. But although Linda Clark’s desire to achieve some balance in her life and spend more time with her children are factors in her resignation, they are far from the only ones.
The host of Nine to Noon is disillusioned with journalism, and with Radio New Zealand. And her discontent runs deep.
“I’m over the gig. I’m over journalism and I never ever imagined I would be able to say that,” she says.
For years, Clark has been a part of New Zealand’s public life; as political editor of Television New Zealand, editing Grace magazine (“a debacle”), fronting TV1′s late news and Face the Nation and, for the past four years as host of National Radio’s weekday Nine to Noon show formerly hosted by Kim Hill, and by Sharon Crosbie and Maggie Barry before her.
In the news industry, Clark’s energy and commitment are well-known. Even on the day of this Listener interview, when she has been up three times in the night, after one of her sons was bitten by a spider, she is completely focused. Clark’s version of tired would match many people working at full capacity. She is articulate and incisive. Perhaps because she is so accustomed to asking the questions she is also very good at answering them. She would make a fascinating guest on her own show.
Clark’s big blue eyes are penetrating as she sits on a couch in the recently renovated home she shares with her sons Harper and Arlo, 4, and partner Alan Doak, who is production manager for a multimedia company. If any of her interview subjects were intending to lie, they would be best advised to be interviewed over the phone rather than face to face. It would be hard to dissemble in front of her, not only because of her thorough research and sharp mind, but because of the eyes.
The kinds of jobs Clark has held are not those easily imagined as being done by someone harbouring doubts about journalism but, increasingly, that has been Clark’s secret. She has gone off the very craft in which she has built such a successful career.
“So much of the journalism that I read, so much of what I see, so much of what I hear isn’t very penetrating. It isn’t very contextual. It isn’t very illuminating.
“I’ve begun to think that journalism is a job you do best when you’re twentysomething, strangely. When you’re twenty-something the world is villains and heroes, issues are black and white and that’s how journalism works now. It’s how the media has to see issues a lot of the time. So when you’re 25 and you’re full of energy and your worldview is monochromatic, journalism makes a lot more sense.
“When you get older and nothing is black and white, and you realise that even the people you hound have redeeming features and even the people you really like do terrible things, it becomes so much more complicated.”
For all that Clark increasingly sees public issues as complex, she is remarkably clear about her future. And it doesn’t include journalism. If she stayed in the business there is only one person she thinks of – Judy Bailey.
“When I was doing some analysis of whether this job was worth the hours, I stood back and thought about what would happen if I stayed in journalism, and Judy is what happens.
“She’s an extreme example because of the salary package and the controversy and all the rest of it, but we’re talking about a woman who never made a mistake. She never bagged her employer or anybody else, she never took a misstep on screen, she did precisely what her job and her employer asked of her, she still came out on top when it came to those hideously unscientific polls of what viewers want and what they like, and yet she was publicly humiliated and ditched and replaced with a younger blonde.
“While it’s an extreme example, the media eats its own, unless you happen to be smart enough to sidestep into management. where you are the one doing the eating. And I don’t have an appetite for either end of that equation.”
When Clark considers the careers of peers who have inspired her, and she lists Alistair Morrison, Patricia Herbert, Nikitin Sallee, Leigh Pearson and Pattrick Smellie among them, she notes that none are still journalists.
“They’ve all gone. And they’ve gone to do really interesting things which actually use their brains and where they are treated as grown-ups.
“While there are journalists I still very much admire in the business, I think there’s something odd about a craft where so many of the brightest find themselves in a cul-de-sac at a point which should really be their mid-career. And then what do they do? Either they stay in newsrooms and their salaries plateau, or they have to do something else.”
Clark, it seems, has studied her own prospects with at least the same rigour she tries to bring to her on-air interviews. News management jobs hold no appeal for her and she says that New Zealand columnists are paid so badly that if she became one she would end up living in a bedsit.
“When I look clinically at my skills and my career, it’s been fantastic and I don’t regret a day of it. It has been a gift and I have been very lucky. But I could not be a journalist for another 35 years.”
In an industry renowned for gossip, where it is not unheard of for journalists to learn they have a new job or have lost their old one before they have been officially told themselves, Clark had kept her considerations private until early this month, when she walked into Radio New Zealand and quit. It was not a sudden decision, she says.
“There was not one day last year when I suddenly thought ‘I’ve got to get out’; there were 100 of those days in a year of 365.
“Unexpected things happened. A great friend had a family crisis and she rang in the afternoon and the first thing she said, because it was the afternoon when she knows I’m doing prep, is, ‘I’m really sorry, can I take some of your time?’, and she tells me this terrible thing that’s happened and we talk for an hour, as you do with friends when things happen, and at the end of it she’s apologising to me because she’s taken up my time.
“Forget about fitting in the kids, and Alan and time for yourself – that’s the juggling act everybody does – but I found myself with no time at all to have anything in the way of balance.”
She is frank that combining a high-pressure job with young children is draining, even for someone who has usually had more energy than anyone else around her.
“The true shock of mothering has been that I am whacked. I get whacked by it. I’ve had really low moments of thinking, what happened to all that stamina, what happened to all that energy? But you get up three times in the night and then have to be up at 5.30am to be at work the next day and you feel like crap.”
She has taken great heart from the number of women who have told her they enjoy Nine to Noon and that it keeps them in touch with the world. But if Clark has been a role model as a working mother, it was unintentional.
“I think women who look like they’re managing to do it all don’t help other women terribly much. For a start, we’re not managing often and, also, it simply increases the expectation that the impossible is possible. And believe me, it’s not.
“All last year I kept mulling over that nonsense that Helen Clark said about getting women out working, and dawn-to-dusk childcare. That was so enraging. We were inundated on the programme with women who were furious about that, but, my God, they didn’t have to go far to find a champion, because I was enraged.
“No one who has had their child in dawn-to-dusk childcare would ever recommend it for anybody. Everybody in the family suffers. Yes, we want to work and have our careers, but workplaces have yet to come to terms with what working and mothering means when they occur side by side.
“I don’t want to go to work at 7.30am and still be working at 10.00pm, which is what I’ve been doing for four years. I don’t think that’s good for anybody.”
Clark says policy-makers always tend to frame the life/work balance problem only in terms of more childcare, “as though that is the solution to the problem, when the real answer will only come from redefining work so that women can feel they are achieving and be perceived as achievers without having their kids parked eternally elsewhere”.
At the age of 42, Clark is intending to enrol part-time at Victoria University this year to pick up stage two law. She did stage one in 1981, but was sidetracked into a BA, and then became a journalist.
She is not studying law out of idle curiosity. Clark and idle don’t fit in the same sentence. And she does not want just a degree, she wants a new career and already is having to stop herself buying the textbooks and reading them.
She has been mulling for several years a return to university. “I always imagined I’d do it when the kids went to school and then you think, ‘Well, why wait for something you really want? What’s the advantage of waiting?’ There is none.”
She is motivated not only by the prospect of law, but also by the very idea of a change of career.
“Without a doubt, the most inspiring people I’ve interviewed doing Nine to Noon have been people who’ve had more than one career. Without exception, they have been inspiring because what those people say is that it is all an adventure, it’s rethinking middle age and beyond.
“There’s been a lot of international law and public law that has come across my desk at Nine to Noon and it’s been fantastically interesting and stimulating, so whereas before my idea of finishing a law degree was unfocused, now I’m really clear I want to specialise in public law. It’s a big cherry to bite. You can’t even imagine the possibilities open to you, but it’s a bringing together of my experience as a political reporter and my understanding of Parliament, and adding to that the discipline of legal thinking and then seeing where that takes me.
“There’s a big common intersection between those disciplines of law, politics and journalism and I’m moving from one side of the axis to the other over a period of time.”
That “period of time” is Clark’s concession to her role as a mother.
“One of the things I’ve learnt and have come to terms with is that I have to move more slowly in my work than I did before my children were born.”
She says that women who say you can have it all are wrong. “You can’t have it all. It’s impossible. You can, however, have a lot and you can have a lot more than you had before you had children, but what you’re talking about are different things and different experiences.”
Clark denies newspaper speculation that her departure has anything to do with feeling that she had insufficient control over Nine to Noon.
“I had heaps of control. And essentially veto of content, so that was never a point of dispute.” She says that she and Morning Report presenter Sean Plunket did discuss the possibility of co-hosting the flagship Morning Report, but says that was never going to happen because both management and listeners were happy with Plunket’s existing co-presenter Geoff Robinson. And anyway, Clark has always felt like a misfit at Radio New Zealand.
“I felt from day one that I never fitted into Radio New Zealand’s culture. I leave almost four years later still with that sense of being a misfit. I don’t understand the culture. I don’t understand why so many people there seem to be so unhappy. I just don’t get it. I am not an unhappy person and I’ve found it very challenging to maintain optimism and, interestingly, a change of chief executive has not changed the culture one bit. It is bigger than anybody.”
Clark says that there is no sense of urgency at Radio New Zealand and she cites her interest in market research about her show as an example.
“I was always interested in knowing about the audience that wasn’t listening to us. They are the people we need to attract in order to grow. It’s only if you grow that you maintain relevance and position.
“At Radio New Zealand you could never find out anything about those people. A survey is done every year, but you get nothing out of it. I could no more tell you now who my average listener is than I could before I started doing the programme. You have raw data, but total numbers don’t tell you much. You want to know about the people who aren’t listening to you. Why aren’t they listening?
“If you know why, you can make strategic decisions about what might bring them in, or have advertising campaigns that might attract those people who don’t know where you are on the dial. But Radio New Zealand has always been kind of sluggish about all that and I found their level of energy and my level of energy somewhat at odds.
“At the end of the day, you do a job like that because you get something out of it and because you’re committed to the organisation. Yet when I did the cost/ benefit analysis of this job for me personally, I wasn’t getting enough out of it and I wasn’t committed to the direction the organisation is going to warrant that amount of work and that amount of strain on my family and that invasion in the life of the four of us.”
RNZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh says he was aware that Clark “at times felt uncomfortable having come in from outside as opposed to up through the ranks”, but rejects her “unhappy” tag.
“The environment can be challenging, but I wouldn’t describe it as unhappy,” he says. “It’s brim full of enthusiasm and ideas … Linda hasn’t participated in many of the off-site activities since she’s been here and if she had been able to, she would have got to know people better.”
But Clark says Cavanagh has been distant. Although she initially praised him in 2004 for having “revitalised RNZ”, she now says they’ve had just four conversations in his two years in the job.
“I have no sense of him whatsoever. His door is always open, literally, and he works long hours, but I haven’t had a single conversation with him in which I’ve been left with a clear impression about what he thinks of Nine to Noon or where the programme is going. It’s amazing, and I have to say it’s been disappointing.”
Cavanagh insists there have been “a few more” than four conversations. “I’ve been an avowed supporter. Where there’s been significant matters to discuss, we’ve discussed them”. But he adds Clark reported to “a direct manager” and that, as chief executive, he didn’t want to interfere in editorial decisions. Rather, he’s doubled Nine to Noon’s resources.
“Linda’s been given a pretty free hand to run her own show.”
As for Clark’s exhaustion: “I’m sure Linda would be the first to admit she’s a perfectionist and drives herself hard.” Managers were considering changes – such as reducing the panel discussions and longer interviews – to take the pressure off. While excellence is expected in what is “one of the key jobs in New Zealand broadcasting, the programme doesn’t have to be done the same way,” he says. But there’s no bad blood.
“She’s going to be sorely missed by many devoted listeners, and I’ll be one of them,”
One aspect of the show Clark has enjoyed is having time to do in-depth interviews, and staying on a subject for several days if it seems worthwhile.
“That’s an oasis for listeners,” she says, “which is fantastic but, for the person doing the job, you often feel very much out on a limb because it’s not as if you can look around at a whole bunch of peers and compare yourself to them and say, ‘How can I get better, how do they do this?’, because there’s maybe three people in the whole country doing it.
“It’s been incredibly lonely, incredibly lonely, and partly because the pace of the programme is such that you absolutely do not have time to reflect on the work that you’ve done, both good and bad.”
She leaves with enormous gratitude to her show’s producers and is sincere in her praise of them. “They are fantastic. They are world-class.”
One aspect of her new life that Clark looks forward to is losing her public profile. Her face is familiar from her years on television, not because she appears on the covers of the magazines found in doctors’ waiting-rooms.
“I’ve never sold stories about myself to women’s magazines, which is not to say you don’t get tempted from time to time because they pay so bloody well, but they’re just not honest and I can’t get over that. It’s a big hurdle for me.
“They airbrush your face so you look completely creaseless, they give you clothes so you look better dressed for that day than you do when you go to your brother’s 21st, and they write about you as if you’re the mother of the year, whereas when their journalist has left the house you’re screaming at your children just like everybody else.
“It’s the utter dishonesty of that whole package – of celebrity-as-know-it-all, of celebrity-as-authority, celebrity-as-automatic-good-person, until that person falls over, like Kate Moss, and then it’s celebrity-as-slut, celebrity-as-drug-taker, celebrity-as-failure.
“It’s all much kinder in New Zealand in comparison to Britain, but there’s still a fundamental dishonesty in those packages. There is a kernel of truth, of course, but that’s all it is and it’s just not right. It’s never sat well with me and anyway, I’ve never aspired to be like that, to be on all the invite lists and go to all the openings.”
For now, Clark is looking forward, albeit with some apprehension, to being a student again. “I am terrified at the prospect of fronting up with a bunch of 21-year-olds and sitting in a lecture theatre. It’s a frightening concept but exciting and gives me so much freedom to spend time with my children and be more present in the lives of my friends.”
She is also keen to contact some of the people she has interviewed whose community work has inspired her. Until now, because she has been a journalist, she has felt too constrained to participate. She looks forward to greater community engagement.
“I also intend to do some professional work, but not in journalism.
“The rule of thumb from here on in is to work with people who are stimulating and who I feel simpatico with and who are doing something positive and moving forward.”