Taylor Swift's impact was among Sharon Brettkelly's favourite stories of 2024. Photo: AFP / Angela Weiss
It's the Detail's last episode of 2024 and that means it's time to look back on the highlights, moan about the lowlights and laugh at the just plain weird of the year.
Sharon Brettkelly is a serious journalist, formerly specialising in finance, who beavers away explaining the top news stories of the moment for The Detail.
But her favourite episodes this year, she says, shows how shallow she really is.
"Married at First Sight ...that was a lot of fun ... Shortland Street - one of my idols, Kim Hill, talked about why she loved Shortland Street ... and Taylor Swift.
"But also I think a lot of my favourites were ones where I went out and about, like when I went to a music festival and we got inside a drug-checking tent and really got close up to what was going on there."
Brettkelly went to Samoa this year for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting - and to cover the sinking of the Navy's ship, the Manawanui, on a reef off the coast there.
"It was an amazing experience getting the story about the Manawanui and trying to get it from different angles," she says.
The highlight was talking to the hero of the rescue, Lui Nifo, whose wife Tolopene Lui translated his recount of that night, when he was the first person on the scene.
Kayak hero Lui Nifo and his wife Tolopene Lui. Photo: Susana Leiataua/RNZ
"Really it was a story that I wouldn't have been able to do sitting here in the office in Auckland," she says.
There was a stark contrast between life in their village nearest to the wreck, and the gathering of world leaders including the King on the other side of the island.
Joining The Detail this year were producer/presenter Gwen McClure who joined us from the now-defunct The Project; Davina Zimmer from the New Zealand Broadcasting School; and at the end of the year Amanda Gillies, ex-TV3.
Gillies says it has been a treat to be able to get someone to talk for more than just a 10 second grab for TV, "to get the right person, who knows everything that you want to ask them, who can delve deeper and who can explain it to you, and not [just] give you the ABCs but the XYZs as well ... it's not easy but I think The Detail does an incredible job of it".
The Detail wraps up its sixth year with an all-in look at what the team enjoyed most (and least) about 2024 Photo: Tim Murphy
The year has been bittersweet, with so many of Zimmer's fellow graduates being victims of media industry cuts while The Detail has again received funding from New Zealand on Air and RNZ.
"You want to scream it from the rooftops because you're like 'yay, we're here next year' ... but at the same time you know of all these incredibly talented people who've missed out, or they're going overseas. It's something that I wonder if it's going to have a delayed reaction, of people going to realise maybe in a few years from now, 'oh wait, where's all our news gone?'"
The Detail will be back on 27 January 2025, but until then RNZ will be re-playing some of our best episodes and you can still access them all on the usual podcast platforms.
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