They had to follow all the latest developments as the talks took place behind locked doors, and there weren't any, so were forced to do awkward colour pieces about the interminable wait, spending days and weeks hanging about in hallways, trying to catch a whiff of anything newsworthy.
They couldn't even see who was even going into these meetings, and were forced into undignified positions, peeking around doors and over fences to get any kind of clue to what was happening.
The parties involved were all keeping a cone of silence over the whole thing (although it probably helped the big parties that they seemed to have genuinely no idea which way Peters was going to go until he went up there and told the whole world). But there was also the possibility of some big, big news coming out at any moment, and staff needed to be on standby for that moment. It might be weeks away, or could have been in the next hour, but it was definitely coming, and reporters and camera-people needed to be ready for it.
So every day, the TV reporters went live to the studio to reassure the presenters that no, nothing was still happening, and the only copy coming out of the gallery were light colour pieces about the waiting period, or desperate predictions based on the very flimsiest of evidence.
Naturally, this lead to the usual snide commentary and mean tweets from all the usual suspects, wondering why the press gallery were wasting their time, and maybe they should just bugger off and wait for an pronouncement. The politicians should just be left alone, they argued, and things would go a lot faster if those pesky media scum stopped asking impertinent questions.
Fortunately, that's not how journalism works, and asking questions is what we fucking do, and the question of 'do we have a bloody government yet?' had to be asked over and over again, every fucking day
The reporters knew they would take shit either way so, amazingly, they got on with doing their fucking jobs. Even the puff pieces about how many tiles there are on the floor served a purpose - they showed that there was someone there for when the shit did hit the fan, reassuring the readers, viewers and listeners that any big developments would be swiftly and fully covered.
Of course, the reporters were accused of being lazy, because they were just sitting around all day, but those accusations invariably came from people who don't work in daily journalism and seemed to have no idea that it's actually a tough fucking gig, covering that shit day after day.
The ability to wait - for a story, for a contact or even a goddamn phone call - is an indispensable part of being a journalist - they should really teach more about this skill at j-school. It's part of the job, and even with nothing happening, it can be incredibly stressful. Especially when you're dealing with the political future of the whole goddamn nation.
The press gallery at Parliament worked their fucking arses off this year, and it didn't stop after the election. Some of them cancelled much-needed holidays to wait it out, and some got gushing nosebleeds from the stress. There was no fucking lazinesss there.
We can only hope the inevitable pay-off, when Mr Peters finally stepped up to the podium and revealed he was going with Labout, was all the more sweeter because of it. Most of us in the news game live for moments like that, even if it feels like our whole lives are ticking away while we wait.
- Ron Troupe
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