JOURNALISM

Tu Tangata, Issue 9, 1 December 1982, Page 21

JOURNALISM

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Lee-Anne Pene, Tourist & Publicity

Being the off-spring of a combined Te Arawa/Ngati Tuwharetoa marriage it wasn’t surprising that I chose a career where I could spend all day talking to people and asking questions. Journalism was the only career I had ever seriously considered, but my plans for achieving this aim were a little hazy. I was very lucky that in my last year of school the New Zealand Journalists Training Board organised the first of the introductory courses for Maori and Pacific Island kids. The week spent getting acquainted with each other and learning the basic skills needed to be a journalist was terrific because it proved to us that journalism was something that we, as Polynesians were fully capable of doing. It also brought home to me the painful lack of Polynesian journalists in New Zealand considering the number of Maoris and Pacific Islanders in this country and the amount of news coming out of these cultures. Meeting and watching the Maori journalists in newspapers, radio and television convinced most of us that more

brown faces were needed in the media to correct the imbalance, After applying and being accepted for the Wellington Polytechnic year-long journalism course I spent the next twelve months learning the finer points of the trade and the essential shorthand/typing. Since leaving the course almost a year ago I have been working for the Information and Press Section of the Tourist and Publicity Department. Working full-time in journalism has provided me with a much wider range of experience than I had at the beginning of this year and has made me more aware of the lack of coverage of things Polynesian. Part of my time is spent trying to make some sense out of the endless reports that government departments are so fond of writing. Trying to compress these nightmares into a straightforward press release that most members of the general public can understand can be harder than it sounds, Apart from this small problem the rest of my time is spent following up in-

teresting and varied stories covering a number of departments from Trade and Industry and Forestry to Foreign Affairs. Being shifted around so much you get to see the different ways departments work making you wonder how some of them survive at all. What is needed is a boost in the number of Polynesian journalists working in this country with the hope that eventually we will be fully represented here.