My Interview with Thomas Coughlan

Kia Ora all,

I hope you are all having a wonderful day, today I will be talking about my interview with Thomas Coughlan. He is the Senior Political Reporter for New Zealand Herald, he is formally of stuff and Newsroom. I want to start by saying thank you to Thomas, he was really kind enough to do an interview with me and take me and my friend Charlotte on a tour around Parliament. It was really interesting to hear someone from the press gallery's view on everything that does with politics.

I started off with the question I ask everyone that I interview, what is three things no one knows about you, The first thing Thomas said was that he worked in a call centre for a good amount of time, “it's a good skill for journalists to have” he spoke about how in a call centre you have to keep people on the phone and keep them interested. So that's a good skill for journalists to have to write articles. The second thing Thomas said is that he is obsessed with sex and the city the tv show, he's not sure why but really enjoys watching it. The third thing is he worked with Ana Scotney that's his claim to fame. He also said that he signed a petition to save the Wellington library because he thinks it's a beautiful building.

The next thing I asked Thomas was why he became a journalist, he said he's always been interested in politics and he also likes digging for stuff, being proved wrong and proving others wrong. So he thought journalism was a cool job. He was born in Christchurch, so he moved to Wellington to study at Victora Uni where he studied journalism when he was studying he went to the USA for a year where he was a film editor, he interviewed a whole lot of celebrities he then spoke about how the MPs are like our celebrities.

I asked Thomas what some of his highlights of being a journalist have been, he said one was covering Jamie Lee Ross story, he also enjoyed covering covid at first but finds it a bit boring and said once the covid-19 press conferences are over, it will be the best day of his work life. The thing he loves about his job is that you never know what will happen every day you wake up. The next thing I asked Thomas about was the voting age and his thoughts on it being lowered, he agrees with the voting age being lowered to 16 even younger.

One question I wanted to ask Thomas was how he deals with the hate that he gets. He started by saying that the press gallery has always dealt with hate, a few times people have mailed him letters saying how much they hated him, which he found funny because these people wrote him a letter which they paid to get sent just to tell him that they didn't like him. Overall he doesn't let the hate get to him, he just laughs it off. His piece of advice is “don't live by what sad lonely people say about you”

The final question I asked Thomas was if he got to pick a ministerial portfolio to have, what would it be, he said Arts, Culture and Heritage straight away because you can free tickets to different events, he also said Forgen Affairs would be cool because you get to travel a lot.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post, also another thank you to Thomas for taking the time to do an interview with me. I hope you all have a lovely day!