Every Second Counts : Charlotte Glennie's Life in Journalism

There was a moment early in Charlotte Glennie's career as a foreign correspondent when the scale of what she had taken on became fully apparent. She was the sole New Zealand journalist covering Asia — a region that accounts for roughly 60 percent of the world's population. "I felt immensely grateful that I was there doing it," she says. "I definitely could have done with some colleagues!"

That mix of gratitude and loneliness, of exhilaration and exhaustion, runs like a current through Every Second Counts, Glennie's memoir just published by Moa Press. The book is a vivid account of more than two decades spent as New Zealand's only permanent foreign correspondent in Asia — a career that took her from the chaos of monumental natural disasters to the quiet courage of dissidents, from the newsrooms of IRN, TVNZ and the BBC, to ABC Australia.

Photo: Charlotte(R) with former TVNZ Political Editor Linda Clark, at an "Asia After 5" event recently / Image AMC

Pitching the Bureau

The journey began with a proposal. Glennie pitched TVNZ’s news boss Bill Ralston on the idea of setting up an Asian news bureau — a one-woman operation working from home, hiring freelance camera crews, covering the region on a shoestring. She wasn't entirely sure it would fly. "It was short," she recalls of her proposal, "but it had the bones of what I was proposing." Bill Ralston said yes.

What followed was, by her own description, largely improvised. There were no established contacts to inherit, no template to follow. "I was making it up as I went along," she says. "That was really exciting. Challenging too." She learned quickly that survival in the field depended on resourcefulness, flexibility and the generosity of fellow journalists. Camera crews who worked with the BBC shared resources with her in disaster zones. A spare seat on a plane into an earthquake zone appeared at just the right moment. "Journalists want to see other journalists succeed in that environment," she says. "They all want to see the story get out."

The Tsunami and Tiananmen

Every Second Counts doesn't shy away from the weight of what Glennie witnessed. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — for which she received both New Zealand's Supreme Award for TV Journalism and a government Special Service Medal — was among the most confronting experiences of her career. She was in Thailand in those first raw days, before most international news organisations had mobilised, when bodies lay uncovered on the ground and families wandered through carrying photographs of the missing. Indonesia, where she also reported, lost around 170,000 people. "I had never seen anything like the devastation," she says. "And will hopefully never see anything like that again."

Tsunami damage on the Leupang coast, Aceh Province. Official figures estimate around 170,000 people were killed in the province/ Image: AusAid

The chaos and horror of the tsunami aftermath saw Charlotte on NZ screens many times as 2004 ticked over to a new year. She was also a correspondent for RNZ, and private radio. But it is a quieter encounter that she identifies as perhaps the most personally significant: her 2008 interview with Ding Zilin, the Chinese philosophy professor who lost her 17-year-old son in the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. Ding had spent years pursuing justice, losing her university post in the process. "She had so much grace and persistence," Glennie says. "What could be more difficult than standing up to the Chinese Communist Party?"

The interview was possible only because of the unusual freedoms journalists enjoyed in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics — a window, she believes, that is unlikely to open again. "The time when I was there was a very unique time in history," she writes. Journalists can no longer easily access Tibet, Xinjiang, or the stories of dissidents. That sense of a closing world is part of what drove her to write the book. "Only foreign journalists can keep that history alive," she says, "because Chinese people are not allowed to talk about it within China."

The Parachute Problem

One of the sharpest arguments in both the book and Glennie's recent conversations is the distinction between embedded journalism and what she calls "parachute journalism" — flying in for a story and flying out again. The latter has its place, but Charlotte believes it cannot replicate the understanding you develop when you are truly immersed in a place. Sadly for most in the New Zealand media, it remains the only option when covering Asia. 

On a recent visit to China, she dipped into a network built over many years and came away with conversations and perspectives no brief trip could have generated. "You don't know what you don't know until you see it right in front of you," she says.

As Charlotte sees it, New Zealand audiences are currently operating with a significant blind spot. Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, maintains five correspondents across Asia. New Zealand has none. Many New Zealand media outlets, squeezed by advertising revenue haemorrhaging to big tech, have retreated from the foreign desk and re-hash coverage from international news agencies, or public broadcasters like the BBC. The New Zealand-specific media lens on Asia — the one that asks what these stories mean for a small trading nation with deep regional ties — has reduced dramatically, leaving on-line services (like the Asia Media Centre) to pick up the pieces.

If she were designing New Zealand's Asia journalism infrastructure from scratch, Charlotte says she would base a correspondent in Beijing, potentially working out of another organisation's bureau, operating as a reporter-editor with the ability to shoot their own stories. "You could do it quite cheaply," she says. "But you still need someone else in that environment to rely on."

Charlotte spoke to the AMC's 'Asia Insight" podcast about the book, and her life in Asia / Image CG FB

Still Watching

Now based in Sydney, Charlotte returned to China at Christmas with her family — her first visit in some time. A robot made coffee on the streets of Shanghai. Electric vehicles had transformed the air quality in cities she once covered through a haze of pollution

China, she notes, now positions itself as a force for global stability even as it seeks to lead the world in technology within five years. Meanwhile the rapid growth of the Chinese military is viewed by some as a challenge to the existing security balance in the Indo-Pacific.

The stories, in other words, have not stopped. If anything, they have multiplied. And New Zealand, without a correspondent on the ground, is largely missing them, or picking up a diet of content filtered through foreign news agencies with their own priorities and agendas.

"The world is a better place when we care about each other and understand one another better," Glennie writes in Every Second Counts. It is a humanist argument for journalism — for person-to-person relationships, for the kind of understanding that only comes from being there.

Every Second Counts by Charlotte Glennie is published by Moa Press.

Asia Media Centre