LOCAL MATTERS
The newsroom of the Papamoa Post is a quiet place. Outside, late-summer cicadas are making a racket. But inside, there are no clacking keyboards or screams for stories on deadline, no queues for coffee at the espresso machine. There’s a knock at the door, but that turns out to be a man delivering a golf club. “For my husband,” says Ellen Irvine, Papamoa Post editor, reporter, sales rep, distributor, production editor, photographer, layout sub and mother of Penny, aged six.
Irvine, 41, has been a journalist for all her working life, bar spending five years in PR. She began as a cub reporter on the Wairarapa Times-Age, armed with a journalism diploma and a BA with first class honours in French language and literature. Her first bylined story was about a private school’s new auditorium. She also covered the trial of two women charged over the death of Wairarapa toddler Hinewaioriki Karaitiana-Matiaha, nicknamed “Lillybing”, which still ranks as one of New Zealand’s most shocking child killings. Her work caught the eye of metropolitan newspaper editors and landed her a job at the Evening Post and later the Sunday News, where she staked out celebrities and rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. She flew to Sydney to interview Harrison Ford for the News. “Nice man. More pleasant than I had been led to believe,” she says.
It was a heady life for a single woman in her late 20s, but the pursuit of scandals and the hamster wheel of hard news lost its appeal. When she met her future husband, Campbell Irvine, they moved to Tauranga, where Campbell established a golfing business and Ellen joined the Bay of Plenty Times. Award-winning journalist Keri Welham, who was deputy editor at the time, says she was a “rock-solid” journalist, “well-researched and fast”.
The return to a smaller provincial paper reminded Irvine what had drawn her to journalism. “For me, the buzz has always been writing stories about ordinary people who have done something extraordinary, or had something extraordinary happen to them.”
The couple built a home in Papamoa, the Bay of Plenty’s fastest-growing suburb (population 26,000), 15km down the coast from Mt Maunganui. They had a baby and Ellen began
