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In her 15-year career in media, Brodie Kane has gone from being a hungover junior producer greeting the prime minister, to bouncing back from a high-profile redundancy by starting her own media company.
Kane shared some of the lessons she had learned on the journey that started out with her as a young reporter wanting to cover politics and be a foreign correspondent.
“When I was a younger journo, it was like hard news. I always wanted to go overseas and be a foreign correspondent and really loved, you know, working in straight news, breaking news, that kind of thing,” she told Simon Bridges on the latest episode of the Generally Famous podcast.
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“I did find a funny story for you. I did actually apply to be a political reporter once for TVNZ, didn’t get it. Which I think I’m absolutely okay with because I feel like it’s a very specific, kind of quite narrow, and you get sucked into a vortex, don’t ya of Wellington, of the Beehive? But I have always been interested in politics.”
While working in her first job at TVNZ as an associate producer on the weekly politics show, Q+A, Kane had a rather memorable meeting with then-prime minister Sir John Key.
“I was very serious…I remember he (Key) was coming in from for an interview in the Auckland TVNZ office, and I was actually quite hungover. It was one of those nights where I was like, ‘I’ll just have a couple more’ and it was silly, foolish.
“I go downstairs to greet him in the lift, and I was like, ‘I actually still think there’s alcohol coming out of my pores’. He walks in, I was like, ‘good morning, prime minister’, and then sort of almost tried to hold my breath. He was just sort of silent, looking, and he was like ‘big night?’”
“I was like, ‘oh, no, no, I can’t lie to you, you run the country’, so that happened. Most of the time, completely professional, couple of slip ups along the way, but he was always a good sport.”
Despite having those ambitions as a “serious” reporter covering hard news, a move to a role with Seven Sharp showcased Kane’s personality.
“It wasn’t actually until I got a job on Seven Sharp, and if you remember, back in the first year of Seven Sharp, I got an absolute flogging. That was the first show where everyone on Twitter was alive and kicking, and everyone chimed in with their opinion on it, because what it was trying to do was kind of be a lighter version of a news show.
“That was a year where a few of my kind of mentors and bosses were like, you actually quite suit a personality style of reporting.
“I grappled with that because I was like, but I want to be taken seriously, but then ultimately, as I sort of developed, you’re like, actually you can do both.”
After taking on the challenge of presenting sport on Breakfast and becoming a star in a role she loved, Kane returned to radio and Christchurch, where she’d grown up.
“I started in radio and have always loved radio, (I) went down there, took the job, took it as a challenge, because the show, the station down there, it was not rating amazingly.
“So the challenge was to get some more listeners and so I worked with Dave Fitzgerald, and … because it was a local show, so it was Canterbury, pushing local, celebrating local.
“We worked really, really hard and loved it … but just before it (Covid) really kicked off in New Zealand, we got made redundant, and it was really out of the blue.”
With lockdown hitting, the redundancy did have Kane questioning what she was going to do.
“Someone said to me very early on, you mustn’t take it personally and that was really good advice.”
“Then you know, lockdown hit, all these other media companies are blowing out and shutting down and people are losing their jobs, it was like, I’m not going to get a job anywhere, no one’s going to leave their jobs voluntarily.”
“I was down in Christchurch. So I just was sort of like, ‘What the hell am I gonna do?’ But, you know, luckily, I had a bit of time on my hands to think about that, at home.”
That led Kane to start Brodie Kane Media in 2020.
“It was like, ‘okay, I’m just gonna give this a crack’. I don’t entirely have a business plan, but I’m going to try and do some of the things that I have a skillset in and see how that goes. So that sort of evolved and I would say, is still evolving,” she said.
Podcasts are at the forefront of the business and its growth.
“The other stuff is still just me at the moment, you know, contracting, freelancing out in radio, television, and I do a bit of social media.”
“Most of the hours I work during the week, I’m just grinding away with the vision that it is all going to work, then I’m really lucky and grateful that another skillset of mine, like MC work, like public speaking, can pay the bills, while I carry on with my vision and my dream.”
As for advice that had helped her in business so far, Kane had two tips.
“One of them is always to ask and seek out help from people that are in either a similar position or you’ve learned from in the past. Because what we like to do is, I often feel this, you have a sense of pride. I’m very competitive, and often we see asking for help is a sign of weakness or failure,” she explained.
“I learned pretty early on that, actually, it’s not and the more you open yourself up to people’s suggestions, constructive criticism, the more you can sort of develop. Particularly in that space, it’s also really good to be vulnerable and people are, like, only too willing to help you.”
The second piece of advice was to guard against spreading yourself too thin.
“For me, when I’m working for myself, I have all these different goals, it can be quite easy to feel like you have to have 20 things on the go at once, because I want to do this podcast, and I want to open this, but I want to pitch this travel show.
“So when you’ve got all these things in your mind, it sort of clouds the main focus that you should be working towards. So I like to go do it properly, one at a time, so that’s what I’ve been trying to learn.
“Now doesn’t mean that you can’t do the other stuff but don’t try and do it all at the same time, because you’ll end up sort of just spreading yourself totally too thin and not doing a good job”.
Brodie Kane would never follow her best friend, her mum, into politics, saying she couldn’t think of anything worse than the thankless task of being a politician.
Simon Bridges quizzed Kane about the special relationship she has with her mum, Jo Kane.
She agreed with the description of her mum being the most important person in her life and her best friend.
That relationship didn’t mean Brodie was above occasionally being told off by Jo Kane, who held a number of local government positions in the Canterbury region over several years including being deputy chairperson of the Canterbury Regional Council.
“I know not to mess with her. Well, I picked my battles eh, but yeah, we have a wonderful relationship. We’re very, very similar and what I’ve watched with her over the years, she’s done some amazing things like swimming the Cook Strait for goodness’ sake,” Brodie Kane said.
Brodie admitted that she didn’t appreciate her mother as much as she would as she reached her 30s.
“I feel like when you’re younger, you’re probably not learning and appreciating as much the type of qualities (she has) and the type of person she is, but what I can reflect on now, which I think is absolutely incredible, is that she’s always been unashamedly herself,” Brodie said.
“She’s always been a really strong woman. But what we’ve seen is, in the late 90s, early 2000s, as she was sort of stepping out herself more in kind of public-facing roles and local government…words like stroppy, outspoken Councillor Jo Kane (were used).”
“She would tell it like it was and not everyone liked that. So quite often, she would be that Jo Kane, but she never wavered. You know, she always stuck to her guns, and she never put up with people’s crap,” Brodie said.
“So when I look at that now and think here’s this woman who has always had people’s best interests in heart, now, you might not agree with it, but you can still at the bottom line, say, I know that at least she’s giving 110% and I might not agree with it, but boy I admire that.
“A classic example is she, you know, she sits to the left of centre, but you know she’d always have great sort of banter and relationships with, like Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce, even though she’d never vote for them.”
With Brodie having joined her mum and competed in endurance sports, Bridges asked if she would ever consider following Jo into politics.
“Oh, God, no, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I’m gonna say I’d rather shit in my hands and clap,” Brodie replied in a forthright manner typical of the Kane whānau.
“I have the utmost respect for people that do it (politics) because I think far too often we forget how hard (it is).
“I’ve given you shit over the years and whatnot and politicians do get a hard time but fundamentally and way more so now with social media and that, but it’s a thankless bloody task, you know, and so it’s hard”.
“You go in there with your ideas, and you’re like, oh, I want to do this, and I want to change this but ultimately, you have to sort of kind of toe the party line. You know what I mean?”
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