Shayne Currie

For the American football player, see Shane Curry.

Shayne Currie
Born	(1971-04-01) 1 April 1971
Ethnicity	New Zealand European, Pākehā
Occupation	Journalist

The New Zealand journalist Shayne Currie (born 1 April 1971) is editor of the New Zealand Herald newspaper, an Auckland-based newspaper with the highest circulation of any newspaper in the country.

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 9 May 2008 Currie accepted the Qantas Award for Newspaper of the Year for the Herald on Sunday. In 2015, Currie accepted an expanded editorial role across all New Zealand Herald brands.

Currie has been criticised for the tabloidisation of the New Zealand Herald and for several ethics incidents.

Ethics incidents

Amie Richardson

During his time as acting editor of The Sunday Star-Times, Currie defended one of his journalists, Amie Richardson, who was charged with the theft of a videotape while reporting on a story about Auckland teacher David Arthur who was later convicted of supplying illegal drugs to high school students. In September 2003 Richardson took a group of high school students to dinner. Later in the night two of the male youths went and took the video from the teacher after at least one of them performed oral sex on the teacher, a court heard. Richardson used quotes from the video tape in her story. Currie said that the Sunday Star-Times had acted properly. "The newspaper at all times was acting in good faith in a matter of extreme public interest [...] As a result of the newspaper's work, a teacher has been charged with supplying teenagers a class A drug [...] We believe we have done everything right in this matter – we handed the videotape to police before we published anything so that they could carry out their own investigation."

John Manukia

Later 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.

Stephen Cook allegations of spying

In 2009 Currie was sued by a former assistant editor of the Herald on Sunday for unjustified dismissal. Reporter Stephen Cook, who helped Currie launch the tabloid, was sacked in 2008 after two drug squad detectives visited the Herald on Sunday offices looking for him. Cook had reportedly been seen at an address, which was under police surveillance. On the day the case commenced Currie faced further scrutiny when the New Zealand Herald revealed examples of industrial espionage, including allegations he sent a reporter to the rival Sunday Star-Times' print site to obtain advanced copies in a bid to get stories for his own paper. The allegations were again reported in the Sunday News and Sunday Star-Times branded "unprecedented spying". Currie, and APN, won the employment case after the court found Cook's dismissal was justified because he could not adequately explain why he was at the address under surveillance.

Rachel Glucina

In July 2015, the New Zealand Press Council ruled that Herald columnist Rachel Glucina had failed to properly represent herself as a journalist when seeking comment from Amanda Bailey on a complaint she had made about Prime Minister John Key repeatedly tugging her ponytail when he was a customer at the cafe where she worked. The Herald published Bailey's name, photo, and comments after she had retracted permission for Glucina to do so. The council said there was an “element of subterfuge” in Glucina's actions and that there was not enough public interest to justify her behaviour. In its ruling the council said that, “The NZ Herald has fallen sadly short of those standards in this case.” The Herald's editor denied the accusations of subterfuge. Glucina subsequently resigned from the newspaper.