From sushi lunch to national news

Ever wonder where news stories come from?

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that question, I'd be a thousandaire. The truth is they come from all sorts of places. Sometimes they originate from a media release, a phone call, an email, a court appearance or a public notice.

Other times they come from a press conference, a local government agenda item, an overheard remark on a police scanner, a school newsletter or a new piece of legislation.

They can even start with sushi. That's where the story that graced the front page of this paper last Wednesday started its life. For those of you who missed it, it was about how two minutes of a tune by Nelson-founded band Minuit was used earlier this month in an episode of the hit US medical drama Grey's Anatomy. The day before the tale hit the headlines, I ran into Ryan Beehre, one third of the band, over lunch at Nelson's fabulous Sushi House in Bank Lane.

I first met Ryan and his fellow band members Paul Dodge and Ruth Carr a decade ago when Minuit came into the studio and performed on my radio show.

Over raw fish and rice we covered a range of topics including an incident of cycle rage that I had just been a party to and his plans to move to Auckland to do a degree in counselling. Eventually we got onto the subject of the band and Ryan casually mentioned that one of their songs had been on Grey's Anatomy.

Now if there is one thing I love, it's when people nonchalantly mention things that are actually pretty big news. Like the time I was hanging out with my friend Thorkild Hansen and I asked him if he was working on anything interesting and, in an almost bored way, he said, "um, well, I'm making some rings for that new Peter Jackson film".

Or the time I was having a drink with Deborah Coddington and I asked her what she was up to. In a tone that said "it's-really-no-big-deal" she said she was writing a book that would profile every known paedophile and sex offender in the country. That led to the first and only lead story I'm ever likely to write for the Sunday Star-Times, and proved that sometimes even those of us in the business can miss a great story if we're too close to it.

But back to Minuit; it took all of about 0.27 seconds to figure out that what Ryan had just told me would make a good story. Within half an hour of our chat I was online checking the show's ratings (around 15 million in the US alone). Within an hour Ryan and I were at Nelson Hospital trying to talk the staff into letting me take photos of him dressed as a surgeon in an operating theatre. For obvious reasons that wasn't a goer but clinical nurse manager Lucy Nunns went out of her way to provide us with a bed and a very nice nurse, while camera-shy Dr Frances Moore did a top job rounding up a couple of her colleagues for the photo.

Soon after the story broke, and subsequently appeared on the Stuff website, other media followed up with their own versions of the yarn. TV3 ran a story, articles appeared everywhere from the New Zealand Herald to the Otago Daily Times, and even Woman's Day contacted the band for an upcoming piece.

There are two things I like about the way the story came together. The first is the speed with which you can get things done in a place the size of Nelson. That was helped in no short measure by the great staff at Nelson Hospital – most of whom appear to be big fans of Grey's Anatomy. As the new editor of this paper, Paul McIntyre, said when I told him how I got the photo, "you couldn't do that in Christchurch".

And then there is the thought that were it not for the reliably delicious food at Sushi House, it is quite possible the story might never have been told.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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