At 6pm on July 6, Mike McRoberts and Samantha Hayes will read the last ever bulletin. Both have spent the majority of their careers at New Zealand’s first private television network. The studio desk they sit behind was once the domain of other household names like Joanna Paul, Hilary Barry, John Campbell, and Carol Hirschfeld.
By the time McRoberts slid into the presenter’s seat, was no longer the cheeky upstart – but the underdog attitude was still a part of the network’s DNA, the idea of doing more with less seemingly engrained in the minds of reporters and producers. “It made you more inventive and creative about the ways you created stories and often I thought they were the better stories. We didn’t rely on having screeds and screeds of footage to show, we only had two minutes per bulletin, I think, of Olympic footage or Commonwealth games footage to show, so you were actually pushed into telling a much better personal story,” he says.
McRoberts was a spearhead of ’s strategy to send reporters to areas where TVNZ was reluctant to tread. But it came with risks. McRoberts headed into war zones without insurance cover – simply accepting the CEO’s word that his family would be looked after if he didn’t come back.
He says it was a company he was prepared to do anything for. “There was a sense of putting your life on the line for this company, for the coverage, for the story, for my colleagues, and to know that that’s coming to an end is really hard to.