Can you tell us about your role as Chief Legal Officer at Stuff and what are some of the most rewarding aspects?
It is hugely fulfilling working with Stuff’s talented news teams to tell the stories of Aotearoa New Zealand to an audience of 2.4 million Kiwis every month. There is nothing like the buzz of the newsroom breaking news, the release of a carefully planned piece of investigative journalism, or the lifting of name suppression, where I know myself and Charlotte Foster (my learned friend and the other half of the Stuff Legal Team) have worked hard with the team to ensure the story is told in the best way possible for Stuff’s audiences and with legal responsibilities and risks deftly navigated. And it’s also now really cool seeing those stories amplified and adapted every day from stuff.co.nz - NZs largest news website - onto the television airwaves of ThreeNews.
What are the challenges you and your team are facing that keep you awake at night, and how are you planning on tackling it?
I often wake up at 3am pondering a piece of content or a project from a fresh perspective. I have learned over the years to not only note things down in the early hours, but also to trust my gut and not shy from raising a concern or question in the light of day. I do also worry about keeping different generations engaged with trusted news media sources - Tik Tok is really not a great source of information! My teens often tell me “news” they’ve heard through social media which it turns out is blatant mis- or disinformation that we easily fact check through stuff.co.nz. The challenge for news media is to sustain levels of trust and engagement across the generations.
In what ways does your work contribute to the organisation and are there any initiatives or projects you're particularly proud of?
Question one went a way towards answering this one, but of course the work of the Stuff Legal Team goes well beyond supporting the newsrooms - for example; working with our Brand Connections and Event teams on media partnerships - no two are the same, so us lawyers have some leeway to get creative! I’ve been super impressed with how agile and adaptable Stuff is as an independently owned, proud New Zealand business - it’s great how quickly projects can be stood up and progressed. A stand out was the ThreeNews project which I had the fortune of leaping into not long after I started. It was amazing to get the news bulletin produced for Warner Brothers Discovery off the ground in about 8 weeks from Term Sheet and announce to being fully contracted and going live at 6pm on 6 July. How cool is that?!
What is the one piece of technology (either current or yet to be created) that would make your day job easier?
Like many, I’m sure, I know I’m not using AI to its full potential in the in-house legal space and I’m experimenting a bit with that around contracting, workflow and simply being open to using AI as a “thought partner” as I go about my work. I would also love a nice, tidy, logical contract library/management system and I haven’t quite solved that one yet - a work in progress!
Overall I’ve loved joining the team at Stuff. I hadn’t anticipated staying in news media when I decided to finish up after a decade across town at that other media company, but I guess I can’t get enough of the f**king news (as our recent recruit Paddy G would put it).