Meet the duo delivering your morning news podcast, Newsable

Picture a colleague. You have been thrown together by chance and the whims of an employer. Now, imagine that your relationship with this workmate – or, at least, the public performance of that relationship – makes up a hefty portion of what’s expected of you in return for a paycheque.

Work for long enough, collect enough memories of disagreeable co-workers – and be faced with this prospect – and you will understand the trepidation Emile Donovan felt the day before meeting Imogen Wells, his co-presenter of Stuff’s new daily podcast Newsable.

“I was kind of shitting myself because the interaction with the co-host is the thing that you can’t really learn – that’s the magic stuff, right? Like, it either works or it doesn’t,” Donovan says. “And if we weren’t going to work, that would be a real problem… You only know when you meet someone and riff with them.”

The pair had only communicated in the usual exchange of platitudes you indulge in when you get a new job – “Looking forward to working with you” etc – when Donovan’s phone buzzed the day before their scheduled first meeting. It was a request for a ride from Auckland Airport.

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Early the next morning, he saw Wells striding towards him. In the car, Donovan pulled out his beat-up phone to punch in directions to the Stuff office.

“Imo goes, ‘Is that an iPhone 3? What the f… are you typing those directions into?’ Which kind of set the tone,” says Donovan.

Any concerns they were both harbouring were shot to pieces in the immediate crossfire of their banter.

“It was as if we’d known each other for decades,” says Wells, who is hosting her half of Newsable from Wellington. She had (wrongly, it appears) worried about forming a camaraderie tensile enough to stretch the distance.

In fact Jono Williams, the Newsable producer partly responsible for bringing the two together, says the hosts “have chemistry like I’ve never seen in nearly 20 years in media… From day one, these two were taking the piss out of each other, taking the piss out of me.”

Launched this week, Newsable aims to make the most of that relationship, and the skills found within both its hosts, and the wider newsrooms they work in. Every weekday morning, at 6am, listeners can hear 20-minute episodes of what Donovan calls “refined, elegant, sharp and to-the-point” broadcasting. The podcast will delve into four or five stories every morning, told in a variety of ways.

As Wells puts it, the goal is “giving people some things they should know about or care about, and why… and giving them a bit more to go about their day with.”

While Donovan says Newsable will give its listeners a sense of foundation. “What’s important to know about the society that you’re in, the country that you’re in.”

And while that might sound “highfalutin and noble”, he says the ambition is to make it “fun and to form relationships with people and to make people want to come back”. They talk about imbuing the storytelling with a sense of their own personalities – giving listeners not just news they should listen to, but people they enjoy listening to, as well. Donovan’s analogy is that of a morning coffee group. “Podcasting is very intimate. You know, it’s in your ears. You feel like we’re talking to you – we are talking to you.”

Daily news podcasts are far from a flash in the pan, but they are relatively new ground for New Zealand media. Research conducted by Pew Research Center in 2021 found about a quarter of adults in the US get their news at least sometimes from podcasts. And in 2022 stats from Edison Research, Kiwis proved to be keen podcast fans in general, with 30% of New Zealanders saying they are weekly podcast listeners, outpacing the US, Canada and Australia.

It is a corner of Aotearoa’s media landscape in which Donovan has built a home for himself – but it wasn’t always the plan. He’d originally started Canterbury University’s postgraduate journalism diploma with the idea of becoming a feature writer. The other potential option, spurred by a maternal “kick up the arse” while drinking with his mum in the south of France, was creative writing at Victoria University. But under the sway of a lecturer’s enthusiasm he discovered the potential of broadcast media and podcasting. After stints with Māori Television and Radio New Zealand, he spent several years co-hosting Newsroom/RNZ’s podcast The Detail.

He describes himself as “an accidental journalist” who has never specialised – other than a brief period as RNZ’s business reporter, another as the station’s employment reporter – which has bred in him a strong generalist news sense he hopes to share with listeners. “Anything can be interesting if you think about it or look at it in the right way.”

Wells came to journalism in a different way. After studying drama in London, where she also ran a cafe, her acceptance letter to study communications at AUT arrived while she was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. An early media gig was on meet and greet duty for TVNZ’s Breakfast. It partly involved making coffee for guests, before moving from in front of the coffee machine to in front of the camera. Eventually, she worked across the network’s shows, from Breakfast to the 6pm news. A move to Newshub saw her join the press gallery in Wellington.

In Newsable, she sees the potential to synchronise that past experience – the fast, fun pace of Breakfast, the scope to examine stories from across the news landscape, the harder hitting work that came with working in the press gallery, where she covered the Parliament protests among other big stories.

With an election looming, there’s little doubt it is going to be a busy news year. Wells, fresh from the press gallery, is “fizzing” at the chance to help get people as interested in the political process as she is.

“It’s so, so exciting. I keep saying that with this project, we’re trying to get to a group that might not otherwise be engaged [with the news], and so we’ll be coming up with ways to get people into politics and get people into the election and find funny little stories.”

But, in the wake of the protests and pandemic, she says has never had to justify what she does for a living like she has in the past couple of years, even to family and friends who will now complain of something that this supposedly monolithic entity, “the media”, has done.

“It’s a toxic time and place out there,” she says.

And while launching a new product into that environment brings with it challenges that may have been unheard of even five years ago, the pair will continue to do what journalists, for the most part, have always done.

“I don’t see myself as the sort of white knight running in to rebuild the credibility of my industry necessarily,” says Donovan.

“All that I can do, really, is have my own, and our collective, values and stick to them and not compromise on them.”

The long-running joke in early morning broadcast media, says executive producer Williams, who ran the TVNZ Breakfast team for more than four years, is that “you’ve got to try and guess what’s on the front page tomorrow morning. Sometimes you get it right. And sometimes you get it horrifically wrong.”

Newsable, headquartered 10m away from the people making those front-page decisions, will never have to guess.

The team will be supported by the Stuff machine – a company that employs more journalists than any other in the country – of which it is a small cog. Donovan says those resources the team can call on are a “massive advantage”.

In the practice run I observed in the lead up to the launch earlier this week, that expertise was on display.

Stuff’s political editor Luke Malpass was on hand to dissect the legislative priorities of Chris Hipkins as he assumed the Labour leadership. It was followed by a lengthy lamination from Wells on the rumoured decline of Air New Zealand’s Koru Hour, then by a passionately argued thesis on the ability of wine and cheese to ameliorate even the most tedious Wellington-Auckland commute. Donovan, we learned, usually travels Jetstar.

He described the curatorial approach the pair will take as “light and shade”, and the phrase could almost be stretched to describe the hosts themselves. Wells is effusive and effervescent, and even that sober political interview was punctuated by emphatic hand gestures. Donovan is laconic, self-deprecating, laid-back. And they are both clearly whip-smart. The relationship between the two, it struck me, is something like that of a melody to its baseline. When Williams, as the conductor of this duet, first witnessed the high note of that harmony it meant just one thing: relief.

“It was just a tangible feeling of, ‘Oh my God, we actually got it right’.”

• Join Emile Donovan and Imogen Wells for your daily dose of exclusives, analysis and fresh perspectives on news. The podcast drops each weekday from 6am on newsable.co.nz or listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods.