Mike McRoberts transcript
Kia ora, I'm Mike McRoberts. I've been a journalist for 30 years, and currently I am the 6 o'clock news presenter for 3 News and also a reporter.
One of the things about telling stories, particularly for television, is that you have this deadline at the end of the day. And so no matter where you are in the world – you might be covering a war in Iraq, or you might be covering a natural disaster in Haiti – you still have to get those pictures, get the interviews, and physically sit down and write the story.
When I was growing up I was never much of a fan of fantasy fiction. I guess that's probably why I ended up in news. But what I did love doing was reading autobiographies. Everything from sports people, to mountaineers like Sir Edmund Hillary, to business people, and finding out what made them tick and how they got to where they got to.
Eventually some years later I ended up writing my own autobiography, and it was hard work. It gave me a whole new appreciation of what it's like to do that. Having to sit down every morning and force myself for an hour or maybe two hours a day to write something, and to put my thoughts into a readable prose. And so I was really thrilled to do that, and wonderful to have accomplished that and achieved that, and it's something that I'll always have, of course. And I can look back and say, that's my book.
“This time there'd be no denying it. Sam was going to prove that there was a monster lurking in the toilet. But as he waited with his sister's smart phone he felt so sleepy, he could feel himself drifting off. That was until the tentacle grabbed him.”