Newshub’s Lisette Reymer: ‘We owe it to Kiwis to tell the stories that matter’
Sunday, 3 March 2024
Lisette Reymer is Newshub’s Europe correspondent. Her coverage of the war in Ukraine won a major media award in 2023. This week Warner Bros. Discovery bosses announced it was planning to close the news agency.
OPINION: No, I don’t get danger money.
It's probably something I should have written in black and white long before now, given it’s without doubt the most common question I am asked.
But the follow up to that is inevitably, how do you choose what stories you tell?
There are plenty of assignments in the Europe patch, where the coverage goes without saying; the New Zealand prime minister is in town, the All Blacks are in town, the King gets his crown. They are straightforward and obvious stories to tell.
But there are others that are extraordinarily challenging to make happen. They require huge logistical considerations, security teams, translators, grisly conversations about how to cope with the smell of dead bodies, scary conversations about next of kin phone calls, and always uncomfortable conversations about how much it is all going to cost.
These stories are hard to tell, so fewer tell them; despite usually being the most urgent or pressing. They are the stories where journalists give a megaphone, or at least a microphone, to the most isolated, desperate voices. They are also stories that have global ramifications, and while New Zealand is at the bottom of the world, we are not exempt from those impacts.
In October 2023, we were boarding the train to Paris for the Rugby World Cup when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in Israel. We bailed from the boarding queue, raced to Heathrow to fly to Jordan, planning to cross the border and drive to Tel Aviv, to be live on air with the latest by the time New Zealanders woke up.
I rang my good friend, and rugby reporter, Ollie Ritchie, to let him know the change in plan.
“We’re on our way to Israel.”
“Of course you are,” he replied.
The taxi driver was slightly more shocked by the conversation he was eavesdropping on.
But he didn’t know Newshub.
At Newshub we have always tried to tell the right story, not the easy one.
In fact, on the list of pros and cons – ‘ease’ has rarely featured. I have often said that our live crosses should have a special graphic plastered over top, listing the temperature, number of near-death experiences that day, hours of sleep we’ve had and where we slept (crammed into a car or a concrete bomb shelter… neither of which are one-off examples); because if my bleary eyes or beanie pulled down overtop of unwashed, unbrushed hair wasn’t making it obvious enough to the viewer… there’s often more than a lot being juggled behind the scenes.
Together with two brilliant camera operators, firstly with Daniel Pannett and now with Alex Parsons, and the support of a large and dedicated team at home, we have made the journey to Ukraine eight times to cover the war. Our commitment to the story has become personal and not just because I’ve been sanctioned by Putin.
The children we have interviewed about experiences beyond their years, the flattened villages we’ve filmed, the families we’ve met recovering from months of Russian occupation and torture– we want New Zealand to keep hearing those stories and caring about them. I wonder regularly about what happened to the man we met in the catacombs of Odesa, preparing a blow-up mattress for his wife to give birth on underground that month. I hope like hell that baby just celebrated its second birthday above ground.
It’s not just about telling the story for the sake of those at the heart of it, but also because we owe it to Kiwis to tell the stories that matter. New Zealand has links and connections all over the world, and is also bursting with people who want to be informed fully about what is happening around the globe. From the earthquake epicentre in Turkey, the Syrian refugee crisis, the West Bank and Israel, and of course, Ukraine, having a Kiwi journalist on the ground, hearing the Kiwi accent, brings the story closer to home, even if it’s thousands of kilometres away.
We had just crossed the border to Poland from Kyiv when we got the news about the future of Newshub. The camera was filled with footage of incredible Kiwis we’d met there; some delivering aid to the frontline and evacuating the elderly from hotspots, others were facilitating the production of hot water boilers that will provide lifesaving heat to displaced families living in tents or bombed out homes.
When someone asks us through tears in a warzone to share their story with the world – to not forget about them – I have always taken the promises I offer them in return very seriously.
Newshub might only have a few more months left, but those stories will always need telling.