Matters of life and debt

BY MEGAN NICOL-REED

IT'S LIKE a scab. Pick. Pick. He can't help himself. Bernard Hickey is a man with a compulsion. Debt. It attracts and repels him in equal measure.

Personally, the financial journalist has as little of it as possible.

"I have a mortgage. It's not too much actually, luckily. If you have to take on debt to buy a house, make sure it's not more than two or three times income. Three times is probably about as much as you can handle really.

"I have a credit card but it's always paid off at the end of every month. It's what everyone should do."

Professionally, it's his bread and butter. The co-owner of www.interest.co.nz – a website dealing with everything monetary – Hickey says virtually everything comes back to debt.

"The economy is struggling to recover because there's too much debt. The government is cutting costs in healthcare and education because there's a lot of debt.

"We have relatively high unemployment and it could go even higher because there's a lot of debt.

"The global economy is in a mess, there are tensions between China and America because of debt. Most things, most financial stress, and a lot of economic issues, political issues, come down to debt."

He drags virtually every answer to virtually every question back to debt. What's he reading? A "fantastic story" about the global financial crisis. What does he drive? A 17-year-old "crappy" Toyota because you should "never take on debt to buy a car".

"We're interested in debt. We love debt. And we love talking about debt. Most exciting stories," he says, "start with debt."

It was Hickey who broke the Crafar farm story last year. Why was Hickey interested in a story about dirty dairying? Always on the tail of the banks and finance companies, it had become apparent to Hickey that Crafar, the man behind one of New Zealand's biggest privately owned farms had ... yup, a whole lot of debt.

Then an interest.co.nz reader posted a message online saying he was a neighbour of Crafar's down Te Kuiti way and he had a video showing calves on his property starving to death.

"I said hold still and then I jumped in the car to check it out. This person had gone out to a calf shed, got a video, four minutes, very basic camera, showing these calves starving to death. These calves were bleating, you could see the ribs, it was, you know, compelling. Citizen journalism at its best."

It's interest.co.nz's readers who provide a lot of the site's content. Unlike other websites, which bury reader feedback at the bottom of "proper stories", interest.co.nz promotes what readers have to say on the home page.

"We pick out the gems. To be fair, there's a lot of talkback radio stuff. You know, people going in and saying, `Urggh, that Bernard Hickey doesn't know what he's talking about.' Or, `He's always wrong.' And we allow that stuff, you know, that's good.

"Sometimes I'll go in and I'll respond to people, ask questions, and really as a blogger, as an online publisher, you've got to understand your community. You're as much a community builder as you are a journalist. And so that means we do highlight our communities constantly, we celebrate what they have to say, particularly when it's really interesting.

"Some of the people are really insightful and they challenge us: `You're wrong about this because I've seen tab two and spreadsheet three.' It keeps us honest, it keeps us on our toes." He flicks through some recent postings, his delight growing more audible with each. "We've got one guy who comes on, Wally. He's usually like the first to comment on everything. I don't know what he does. He must, like, live on our site. It's fantastic. We don't pay him a cent.

"I mean look at this, this guy has written this much stuff, almost as much as I wrote, for free.

"I mean this is a conversation. It's fun. They're having a conversation. We're actually creating a platform to have fun, talking about house prices. I mean, who would have thought?"

As well as debt, Hickey talks a lot about "fun".

A farm boy, he was supposed to grow up to be a farmer or an agricultural economist but stumbled into journalism at Massey University and discovered it was fun.

He worked for Reuters in Australia, the UK and Singapore, as the business editor for the Dominion Post, the editor of the Independent.

But what he really enjoyed, what was really fun, were the stints online. A dotcom with the National Times Group in London, Telecom's XtraMSN in New Zealand, and most recently head of digital for Fairfax.

And then it stopped being fun. So 18 months ago he partnered up with David Chaston, who had set up interest.co.nz a decade ago as a rates comparison site. The idea was for Hickey to graft news and analysis on to the dry figures. "We're not a site that's only for policy wonks and bank managers, we're a site for everyone," he says.

"You know there are over two million people in New Zealand who have mortgages, term deposits, credit cards. I'm in this game to make what seems unpopular and niche into popular.

"I'd encourage anyone who's part of a major media organisation that thinks they want to have a go at it to get out there because the future of journalism and news I don't think is institutional, I think it's entrepreneurial."

Any time there's a news story about the economy requiring soundbites the public will understand, it's Bernard Hickey who pops up. TV, radio, print: he's become the media's money go-to-man.

DOESN'T HE fear overexposure? Oh no, says Hickey, it's a deliberate strategy. Aparently for every $20 a newspaper earns from an ad, you're lucky to earn $1 online.

"So how do you make money online? Well, there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can have extremely expensive advertising or you have extremely low costs. So you get other people to produce your content for you and you don't spend anything on anything. And how do you make yourself known, how do you market yourself and your product when you can't buy billboards or sides of buses or ads on TV? We know we have no money for marketing, we make a point of not spending a cent on marketing. So we use our content and ourselves.

"We're ruthlessly using other media platforms to promote ourselves and save ourselves money. It's free. And that's what we like. We like it free."

The first part of this interview is conducted in a cafe on Auckland's Jervois Rd, downstairs from the interest.co.nz offices. Hickey pulls out his wallet to pay, but is as happy as a pig in muck when the Sunday Star-Times insists his espresso is on us.

"We don't spend any money on corporate entertainment. The most we'll do is buy coffee for someone. It's amazing what you'll get for a coffee.

"Today we had Bill English, the finance minister, come in and I bought him a coffee. We have a thing we call the double shot interview, where you sit down with a minister or a CEO or whatever, in front of our cameras, and I ask them questions for 10 minutes.

"We don't do any editing and we put that video up on YouTube, then we embed it into our stories. And I've got the interview, I've got the content, I paid a cup of coffee for it. I've asked questions our audience are interested in and I put it up online for free."

Is Hickey always this sensible with money? Doesn't he ever have a blow out? He racks his brains. The most he can come up with is an addiction to caffeine.

The one discordant note on the 43-year-old's financially blemish-free record is that over the last year he has lost 55kg after a gastric bypass. There's something incongruous about an instinctively frugal man being obese. How did he get so fat? For the first time in the interview he looks a little stumped. "Well... I would eat too much because it was nice. I don't eat too much now."

Since the operation he can't eat more than about a handful of food at any one time, no bread, nothing too sugary or fatty. He decided to have the surgery after his doctor told him he was a perfect candidate for diabetes.

"I was absolutely determined not to get type-2 diabetes. And apart from anything else, economically it's a really bad thing. When you're losing fingers and toes, you're getting infections, you're much more prone to heart attack, cancer, all these things, you basically spend the last few years of your life in and out of hospitals, costing people lots of money.

"We pay millions of dollars for people who have type-2 diabetes. I thought, sod that, and decided to do something pretty drastic about this."

Married with two daughters, his wife Lynn Grieveson, whom he met at journalism school in Wellington, is equally entrepreneurial. She has carved out a lucrative career creating digital scrapbooking designs which she sells through an American website.

She has her own blogging website called notes from the side of a volcano – they live on the edge of Mt Eden. There are many photos of the couple's eight-year-old daughter, and it is evident she has Asperger's syndrome. Hickey talks happily and lovingly about his family when interviewed but never mentions this. In Grieveson's blog she recounts a tale about her  freaking out during swimming lessons and Hickey stripping off and diving in to save her. He posted a message in response.

Hubby here,

Hopefully the good folk at the aquatic centre weren't too traumatised at the sight of me (without) my boxers in the correct position for swimming ...

You should have stripped too Lynn. Then the headline would have truly backed up the story.

A lovely morning though. Daughter number 2 a complete megastar,

Love DH

He confirms it in a later email. "Yep. My daughter has Asperger's. A complete and utter joy to have around. We're very lucky." Verging on the nerdish in his enthusiasms, Hickey undoubtedly finds it fun.

- © Fairfax NZ News