Samantha Hayes on her life-changing year

Saturday, 6 July 2024

In less than a year, Samantha Hayes’ life has been completely upended. But as she prepares to launch a new 6pm bulletin, all she wants to do, she tells Emily Brookes, is her job.

Sometimes when it hits, it hits at 5 to 6.

“I’ve become very good at parking my emotions, and sometimes never returning to them,” says Samantha Hayes with a sardonic laugh.

“I’m really good at blocking out. I haven't been so good at then allowing myself to feel it. And what I’ve learned in this process is you can do that for so long, but it will catch up with you.”

Recently it caught up with Hayes while she was in a makeup chair at the Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) studios on Flower St, Auckland, having a final touch up in the last minutes before she would sit behind a desk and present Newshub’s 6 o’clock bulletin live.

Enter Mike McRoberts, Hayes’ co-anchor of eight years.

“He knows me well enough not to say ‘Are you ok?’, because that would really tip things over the edge,” Hayes recalls. “He just said ‘Will you be alright?’ And I was like ‘Mmm, I’ll be fine,’ (and) he goes ‘Ok, we’ve got a show to do’.

“And I was like - Yes. I’ve got a show to do.”

The “it” that hit Hayes, 40, wasn’t just the impending end of Newshub, where Hayes has worked for the last 17 years. It was also that, as a result, she was in the process of moving to a new workplace - Stuff - for the first time in her adult life. And that she was going without her “dear, dear friend” McRoberts.

And that only months before the shutdown was announced, she separated from her fiance, Jeroen “Jay” Blaauw, the father of her son Marlow, 4 and daughter Amaya, 2.

“My whole life has changed in the last 12 months to a degree that I could never have conceived of,” she says.

It’s an overcast Wednesday afternoon in Tāmaki Makaurau and Hayes is squeezing me in between jobs.

On Friday morning she was at Stuff, preparing for the launch of ThreeNews, the primetime bulletin that Stuff will produce on contract to WBD and which Hayes will present solo.

But straight after our interview she’s off to Flower St, across the road from the cafe, to present Newshub Live at 6pm with McRoberts. She starts full time at Stuff (which also publishes Your Weekend) on Saturday, the day after Newshub’s final show.

“Back in February when we found out that we were all being made redundant I thought, well I might take a couple of weeks off in July, August,” says Hayes. “My son’s starting school this year. I thought, well, I’ll just have a little bit of breathing room, but that’s not to be. Now it will just be continuous.”

She pauses. “Which is good.”

Throughout this whole tumultuous period, Hayes says the thing that has got her through is what for much of the human population would be the most stressful situation imaginable: presenting live to hundreds of thousands of Kiwis every night, or what Hayes refers to as “doing the news”.

“I love that part,” she says. “I don’t know why! I don’t know why and it’s almost like the more pressure there is, the more I like it, because over time you get used to doing it and the rush goes away.”

The search for that rush made her sign on to cover last year’s election coverage for Newshub, despite never having been a political journalist, and what made her agree to compete in Dancing With the Stars in 2018 (she received good reviews for the former and won the latter).

“I feel completely out of my depth,” she says. “But… I love that challenge.”

Hayes was born in South Africa, but her parents relocated to her father’s native New Zealand when she was a baby. Growing up in small town Milton, Otago, about 50km south of Dunedin, she “never dreamed” she would become one of the most well-known faces in Aotearoa.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately,” she says. She’s not sure as a kid she thought much about what she might do for a job, but as a keen horse rider it probably leaned more towards eventing and dressage than breaking news and high heels.

When Hayes was about 16, an English teacher suggested she go and do a school holidays journalism course. A year later she did some work experience at Three.

“I figured (journalism) was a way to find out about the world out there that I didn’t know about yet, and then one day I would find the thing that I wanted to do and then I would not go back to the newsroom that day. I would just stay and do that.”

Instead, a degree in media - started at Otago, completed at Victoria - and work at both Radio One and Radio Active led straight to a role reporting for now-defunct Nightline in 2006. The following year she started presenting that show, and she’s been “doing the news” ever since.

One of the things she loves about her job, Hayes says, is the collaboration. “It’s kind of like an orchestra working, it’s so nice. And everyone’s very good at what they do. I think I have one of the easier jobs in the whole organisation actually.”

It’s in the control room where all the action is, she insists, although: “Mike always says that it goes easy until it goes wrong.”

Go wrong it has. Hayes recalls one night when an over-zealous staffer accidentally archived that evening’s script early, meaning at 6pm there was nothing on the autocues or the anchors’ laptops.

“Not even the director knew what was supposed to be next. Luckily Mike and I had our printouts in order so we just went with that.”

Then there was the time when Hayes was co-anchoring from London during Newshub’s coverage of the Queen’s funeral and she lost all communications with the Auckland newsroom.

“I did a live cross with Paddy (Gower) without hearing him,” she laughs. “In fact at one point he was talking for such a long time I thought they must have just lost us entirely, because this can’t still be the live cross.”

It was, and when the producer called Hayes later he congratulated her on a great show.

“That was fun,” she says without a single shred of irony.

Doing the news is what Hayes knows and what she loves, so when it looked like it might go away, she wasn’t sure what might take its place.

“I thought about opening a bookstore - and a florist at the same time. I considered selling up my Auckland house and moving back to South Otago,” she says.

“There were weeks and months where I didn’t know the answer to the question, What am I going to do? And that was a confronting time.”

There are many people in Aotearoa going through the same thing who will know “how terrifying it can be,” Hayes says.

“There were a lot of well-meaning people who would say to me, ‘You’re going to be fine!’ But you don’t know that you’re going to be fine… . And like any other Kiwi going through it I’ve still got to support my children, I’ve got to pay the mortgage, do the groceries, do the laundry find time to vacuum the house and stay sane through that process, and” - in Hayes’ case anyway - “be on television every night”.

That means going through all of this in public.

“When I go to the supermarket people will come and talk to me, bless them, about a story they think I should do or what happened on the news last night,” Hayes says. “When news hit of the shutdown I couldn't go anywhere without people wanting to talk to me about it and yet I was still processing it, and that was really confronting and hard.”

Looking for ways to address her parked emotions, Hayes turned to her kids’ daycare. “They do pyjama days… and lately I’ve been allowing myself to have my own pyjama days and just have nothing in my diary. It seems ridiculous in a way to have to schedule in time to breathe or process what is going on, but it’s just been the only way I can really manage it. Park it until after 7 o’clock or at a time when I can just let myself wallow a little bit.”

Newshub’s closure is only part of a catastrophic few months for television news and current affairs in early 2024, which also saw TVNZ cancel popular and long-running shows Sunday and Fair Go, as well as its evening and midday bulletins.

In the dire wake, McRoberts decided to step away from TV entirely and take a role at digital outlet NBR.

Hayes is also going to a digital outlet - while staying on TV.

She says she “knows” Stuff’s bulletin, ThreeNews, will work.

“I don't think it's fair to look at Newshub's closure as a failure,” she says. People are still watching her show - it’s consistently the highest rated on the network - and Stuff, she thinks, might be better placed to meet the demands of a changing media landscape than traditional TV.

“It’s combining the power of Stuff’s newsrooms and journalists that are already there and using that to put the bulletin together, so that makes sense to me,” she says. “Stuff is a massive news organisation and it’s going to super charge the way we make TV news.”

Hayes is excited, but there’s sadness to come. “I know that the last day at Newshub is going to be extremely sad and emotional, and there will be a lot of tears, and a lot of hugs, and a lot of speeches,” she says.

“But the challenging thing for me is that I want to be there and I want to be part of it but I also need to get into the new show. I’m going to have to be on my game for the start of the next chapter, and that’s what it is, it’s a new challenge, the next chapter.”

Hayes finishes her tea, stands up, shrugs on a jacket that turns her grey check pants into a suit.

“Right,” she says, heading for the studio. “Time to do the news.”