Shayne Currie

Infobox journalist


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occupation = Journalist
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ethnic = New Zealand European, Pākehā
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The New Zealand journalist Shayne Currie (born 1 April 1971) is editor of the Herald on Sunday newspaper, an Auckland-based compact newspaper with the third-highest circulation of any newspaper in the country.fact|date=September 2008

Previous career

Currie began his journalistic career as a teenager at The Evening Post in Wellington, where he won the national award for crime reporting. He subsequently worked on newspapers including The Christchurch Press and The Sunday Star-Times, which were all part of the same media group, Independent Newspaper Limited (INL), ultimately owned by Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch. Currie was at The Sunday Star-Times when Murdoch sold his New Zealand newspaper holdings to John Fairfax Holdings, another Australian newspaper publishing company.

Currie rose to deputy editor at the Star-Times, then New Zealand's highest-circulating paper. After Suzanne Chetwin resigned as Star-Times editor in 2003, Currie led the newspaper in an acting capacity until the appointment of Cate Brett as editor. He has won numerous journalism awards.

In July 2004 he resigned from the Star-Times to work on a special project for APN News & Media, a rival media group that owned the New Zealand Herald and a range of provincial newspapers, magazines and radio stations. That special project was subsequently revealed as the Herald on Sunday, another Sunday newspaper. Currie was appointed deputy editor to Suzanne Chetwin.

Editorship

Currie took up the editorship of the Herald on Sunday on 1 February 2005, again succeeding Chetwin.

On 8 August 2005 he addressed the 2005 PANPA annual conference in Cairns, Australia, on how launching a newspaper can change an entire market. He spoke shortly after Kevin Rudd, subsequently elected prime minister of Australia. [http://www.printnet.com.au/verve/_resources/2005PANPA_Program.pdf]

Under his leadership, the Herald on Sunday has been the only major newspaper in New Zealand to consistently increase its circulation, selling 93,665 papers each week in the audit period ended June 2008. [http://www.abc.org.nz/audit/press.html]

When the figures were published, Currie said: "In the three years since the launch of the Herald on Sunday, the newspaper has found its voice, attracting new Sunday newspaper buyers to what is the most competitive newspaper market in the country. We owe a huge debt to those who stuck with us in our early days, and to those readers who have picked us up for the first time, or more frequently, over the past 12 months. We've listened to what readers liked - and didn't like - and evolved accordingly." [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10513708]

On 9 May 2008 Currie accepted the Qantas Award for Newspaper of the Year for the Herald on Sunday. The judges said the award was an extraordinary achievement for a paper that had been launched only four years' earlier. [http://www.qantasmediaawards.co.nz/newspapers.html]

In August 2008 the Nielsen Media Research National Readership Survey showed the Herald on Sunday had increased its readership by 64,000 to 390,000 - a 19.6 per cent jump in the 12 months to June 30, 2008. [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=289&objectid=10527464]

Currie has gained a strong reputation as an advocate of open and transparent media, and as a critic of the cash bidding wars that can characterise popular newspaper and magazine journalism elsewhere in the New Zealand media and overseas. [http://www.publicaddress.net/system/topic,1066,hard_news_case_studied.sm?p=48653]

Controversy

In October 2005, as editor of the Herald on Sunday, Currie discovered that once of his staff reporters, John Manukia, 38, had fabricated an interview with former south Auckland police officer Anthony Solomona. Currie dismissed Manukia and gave an upfront public apology. Further investigations revealed that Manukia had fabricated other material at the Herald on Sunday and as a reporter at another newspaper, the Fairfax-owned Sunday News.

Currie wrote a candid first-person article in the Herald on Sunday of 23 October 2005, explaining what had happened and expressing his regret to readers. He drew comparisons with the actions of reporters Jayson Blair at The New York Times, and Stephen Glass at The New Republic. [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10351626]

References