Upfront
Russell Brown
by Mark Revington
Russell Brown began his Hard News radio rant on Auckland student station 95bFM in 1991 because he felt there weren’t enough voices like his in the media. Now you can find Brown’s voice all over the place, from Mediawatch on National Radio to his columns for several magazines, including Wide Area News in the Listener. And he masterminded the Public Address weblog, where he and a number of other erudite commentators feature, along with something called the Great New Zealand Argument, which so far contains a transcript of David Lange’s legendary address at the 1985 Oxford Union debate. Just don’t call him a “self-styled social commentator”, as the National Business Review did recently.
You’re not a social commentator? Certainly not self-styled. I’ve never used that description.
Web entrepreneur, mediaphile … how would you describe yourself? “Journalist” mostly does it. Obviously, I’m a blogger as well. I still like “journalist”.
Do people get the distinction between journalism blogs and blogs as personal diary? Mine is a personal diary as well. I might occasionally write about what I had for dinner or whether I’ve got gout. That’s the joy of it. The defining characteristic of a blog, if it’s done properly, is that you point people to other places. I really liked the idea of being able to direct people to source material. Not just to tell them things, but also to say, “Look, you go and work it out for yourself.”
How would you describe Public Address to somebody who hadn’t come across it before? We’d call it a community of weblogs. As blogs, they are more like columns than some blogs are. No one does more than one post a day, whereas the classic blog has one or two paragraph posts throughout the day from someone who obviously doesn’t have a proper job. So, ours tend to be of greater length and more like conventional columns. But still with the links. They are really important.
How did Public Address evolve? I’d been doing Hard News as a Friday morning radio rant from 1991 to 2002 and I’d really run out of steam with it. I was very busy with Mediawatch on Friday mornings, so it was just getting too hard to do. Oddly enough, virtually as soon as it became a weblog, I was writing far more than I had been, but I could manage my time better, so it’s still not that hard to crank out a thousand words for the weblog a day.
Who is the audience? Thirty percent of our readers earn over $100,000 a year and 60 percent earn over $50,000. They tend to be university-qualified. There are quite a few people working in the public sector. Ah … professionals rather than managers. And … I was amused when the NBR leapt on my quip that they were chardonnay socialists, but it’s probably not that far from the truth. One other thing worth noting about the audience is that a lot of them have been with me for a very long time – there are 5500 people on the mailing list and a lot of those people have been on there from when the text of Hard News as a radio bulletin used to go out.
Right. So, the Great NZ Argument. You began with the Lange transcript, which apparently hadn’t been online before, and got a fair bit of attention. How did it come about? I was visiting my mum in Paraparaumu and went to the secondhand bookshop at Raumati Beach and found an old stand-alone essay published as a book by A R D Fairburn, called We New Zealanders. I enquired about the right to put it online and we will probably be able to do it. That got me thinking. It’s funny and trenchant and the kind of thing that people should read.
The next piece to be posted will be Bill Pearson’s “Fretful Sleepers”. What’s that about? It’s an extended complaint about New Zealanders, which he qualifies in the end by admitting that he hasn’t mentioned all the positive elements of New Zealand culture. It is a landmark essay and it’s the kind of thing that, once it’s up, everyone can have access to. I believe that in general the best way of archiving something is to publish it on the Internet. I was delighted to see what happened with the Lange speech. I put it up on the Friday, said, “Link to it, go and visit, tell your friends”, and by the following Tuesday if you typed “Lange Oxford Union Speech” into Google, our page came up as the top result.
So, you’re creating an online dialogue about New Zealand? Yeah. I hadn’t studied any of this stuff, but I had developed an interest in discussions of New Zealand identity and certainly people like Fairburn and Allen Curnow, that sort of thing. I’m also an editorials nerd, because I have a passion to editorialise. What I’ve ended up specialising in is writing opinion and people seem to like it.
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