Being rejected

A random thought by Colin James, 16 May 2011

I muttered something along the lines of my being, if not habituated to rejection, at least experienced at it.

I was first fired -- well, what would now be called constructively dismissed -- by the deputy editor of the Herald in 1973. He had objected to my appearance on a television programme about the upcoming National party conference -- not the appearance per se, for that had been approved, but the degree to which I was quoted and shown on the programme (which I never saw). This is the same deputy editor who had removed, without reference to me, all references to "conservative" from an editorial page analysis I wrote of National in 1972 as "liberal and conservative". He decided it was wrong. When I pointed out that Jack Marshall, the leader, explicitly saw National as liberal and conservative, there was a frosty silence. I responded to his objections about the television appearance with a resignation. The Wool Board promptly offered me a job in London with the International Wool Secretariat (which Brian Talboys, formerly a senior minister and by then a high-ranking opposition MP, then tried, unsuccessfully, to get it to reverse by describing me as a "communist"). An associate editor of the Herald (who later became the editor) wrote me a nice note saying he was sorry I was going because I was a "natural" at political journalism. For a time instead I became a natural in Bloomsbury and Carlton Gardens

My second firing was in 1989. I had in 1988 moved from the National Business Review (NBR), which had been taken over by Barry Colman, to the Auckland Star, an evening paper, thanks to my friend Jim Eagles whom Colman had fired as my successor as editor of NBR (a role I had relinquished without being pushed). I had listened incredulously to a lecture by Mike Robson, then boss of Independent Newspapers which owned the Star, that evening papers would be the future because they would provide background for busy people to read after they had watched the early-evening television news. Robson unmade his own prediction by closing the Star.

But I landed up with the Sunday Star, thanks to Jim Eagles again, who likewise had traded vessels. A year later the Sunday Star fired me, for cost reasons. I limped across to the Sunday Times, having proved to Richard Long, editor of the Dominion and the Sunday Times (its Sunday edition), that I could write material that was not too pointy-headed. I left the Sunday Times to return to NBR before the Sunday Times, too, collapsed -- into the Sunday Star.

My next firing was by the Taranaki Daily News, for which I wrote a weekly column from 1993 to 1997 (in addition to my NBR column). Cost again.

Jim Eagles picked up that slot for the Bay Times in Tauranga. I lasted there only a bit longer than he did.

In July 1998 NBR fired me -- not for cost reasons but because I was too boring. Fair enough. By then I had been awarded three university fellowships of varying sorts, including a brief one at Melbourne University. Clearly, if academia was taking an interest in me, I could not have been much chop as a journalist (and, indeed, I had never won a prize), even though, also clearly, I was not an academic because I lacked the brains, the intellect and the requisite reverence for "the literature" (theory) over experience.

The Herald hired me four days after Colman's letter arrived. That deal lasted 10 years and five months, about five years more than I expected. What may have stayed my execution was that I had won political columnist of the year in 2003 (though it evoked no commendation, or even comment, from the editor) and was told I came out well in a survey of Herald columnists in, I think, 2006.

For a time in the 2000s my Herald columns also appeared in Hawkes Bay Today, where Jim Eagles had moved. But once he moved on from there, it dumped me without even bothering to tell me.

The Herald fired me in stages, first from a fortnightly column in the business pages in 2006 (too boring, yet again), and then, wearily, from the op-ed page in November 2008, effective from the end of the year. The firing was allegedly on grounds of cost but when I offered to do it for a trifling sum the dismissal was reaffirmed, thereby making it clear the reason was not cost. Moreover, as far as I can tell, no other columnist was fired. I was replaced with a lively woman columnist who celebrates her navel, diet and similarly entertaining matters of moment. I don't think the Herald's judgment was wrong. Newspapers are desperately in need of readers and real columnists of her sort reel them in.

What may have confirmed me to the Herald as irredeemably boring was to have been awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by Victoria University in May 2008. The Herald celebrated this event in a line and a-half deep inside a story about an honorary doctorate being awarded to someone else. I was not aggrieved at that; I was not seeking publicity and was mortified to have it referred to several times in a television programme I appeared on; but it was interesting that a paper chose not to make something of one of its columnists winning an award. I figured then that I was on my way out.

The Dominion Post had made overtures to me before the Herald fired me and promptly signed me up before my last Herald column appeared. It sold me on to the Press and the Waikato Times. The Otago Daily Times had been taking my Herald columns and still wanted to and around 700 people, including more than 80 MPs, signed up to take that column by email. A real columnist, of the non-boring sort, would have scooped up 7000 at least.

And today the Dominion Post has fired me, too. It surveyed its readers and they said what I wrote was "not relevant". The Dominion was where I started my political journalism, in 1969. That dismissal starts to close the circle. There are only the Otago Daily Times and Management Magazine to go.

That is not the complete list of my dismissals: I was fired by the Nine-to-noon programme on Radio New Zealand sometime in the early 2000s in favour of two hammer-and-tongs hard-left and hard-right "commentators". Again, my style was just too boring. Television New Zealand early in 2008 came up with a novel twist on my capacity to bore. The Australian head of news and current affairs wrote to me that I had in some way unbalanced the 2005 election night programme -- though not, he hastened to say when I inquired, politically unbalanced it. I was not wanted for the 2008 election night programme, he said. Having done six of them and never really understood my role there, I was less than devastated. I was contemplating firing Television New Zealand and have since sworn off all television. The Australian got in first. Timing is everything.

Compare that list with Cullen's single dismissal. His contempt for me was deserved for he is a brilliantly entertaining chap at his best. He just got the angle wrong.

Is there another dismissal to come? For sure. And that will be the last. I started my journalism on the Otago Daily Times in my university holidays in 1963. Soon that will be 50 years ago.

16 May 2011