A lengthy mea culpa, 20 years of history and a reboot?

If you don’t like lengthy deep navel gaz­ing, take this tl:dr and be on your way until the next post: the Wel­ling­tonista web­site has been very neg­lected for a num­ber of years, and I intend to do bet­ter – per­haps you might like to con­trib­ute some­thing too. 

I was 24 when James asked me to write for what was then called the Wel­ling­ton­ist (after the Gotham­ist and SFist – it was meant as a com­pli­ment but they told us off so we added the ‘a’ later). I am nearly 44 now.

A lot has changed over the past twenty years. Back then, Peter Jack­son had­n’t entered his vil­lain error, and one of our first posts was about loc­al upstart Taika Wai­titi get­ting a US$100,000 Oscar nom­in­ee gift bag for his short film.  Then we were mourn­ing the ori­gin­al Bar Bodega as the bypass was built – now the “new” Bodega has been shuttered for a bunch of years (okay I will have to google it because that’s how loose my sense of time is these days. 2016. Bloody hell). ’

There are a whole lotta reas­ons why con­tri­bu­tions to this site have mostly just been theatre reviews over the past… eight years or more (spoil­er alert: it’s me, hi, I’m the prob­lem etc), but first, let’s go back in time to 2005 to see what we were once before we were this. And let’s talk about the we too.

The ‘ista lore

In 2004, our founder James Guthrie out­ted had outed him­self as the actu­al author of Biz­Girl – win­ner of the Best Per­son­al Blog at the Net­guide Awards (remem­ber that – there used to be a PAPER MAGAZINE about the inter­net) and I guess he wanted a new chal­lenge, so he star­ted a web­site about Wel­ling­ton. I knew James through the for­ums on NZmusic.com (remem­ber, spe­cial­ised for­ums? Good times), so I sent him a couple of ideas for stor­ies. In April 2025, he invited me and a couple of oth­er loc­al blog­gers (although I will still to this day tell you that Hubris is an ONLINE JOURNAL, not a blog) Jessie, Llew, Alan and Mike to join him.

“The obvi­ous ques­tion arises. What is the col­lect­ive name and plur­al of ‘wel­ling­ton­ist’?” he asked. I don’t know if we ever answered that ques­tion but we star­ted hav­ing lunches togeth­er any­way, includ­ing one mem­or­able time when Llew brought Dami­an Christie along who could not have entered in a more Auck­land style if he’d tried, talk­ing on a cell­phone and wear­ing a suit. Because of course there was blog circle over­lap. I think it was partly Rus­sell Brown clos­ing down Pub­lic Address offi­cially this week that’s kicked my butt back into Wel­ling­tonista mode.

Lunches became drinks. More mem­bers were added. Oth­er blog­gers came to our meetup drinks. I am dis­trac­ted look­ing at our old site see­ing how we had to use pho­to­buck­et to include images in our posts. A lot of phones did­n’t have cam­er­as in them yet. The iPhone did not exist yet. But we tried to post about upcom­ing gigs, spec­u­lated on where the mys­tery bar of the week that Wel­lUrb­an had writ­ten about could be, wrote about art exhib­i­tion open­ings – atten­ded art exhib­i­tion open­ings. We chal­lenged oth­er blog­gers to write about what they liked about the city.

I should point out that we were all vari­ous ages. Jessie and I were in our early 20s, but the oth­ers were in their 30s or even 40s. Alan, Mike, Martha and James had young kids, Llew had teen­agers. Tom had a fear of kids. But drinks after work were easy to plan on an email thread. I had flat­mates I might not neces­sar­ily want to hang out with but who could feed my cat. Rents wer­en’t ridicu­lous so drinks were more afford­able, espe­cially if I was drink­ing to cov­er anxi­ety I had­n’t been dia­gnosed with yet. Two bottles of bub­bly for $28 at Good Luck? Holy shit! Day jobs wer­en’t that chal­len­ging, provid­ing plenty of time to write blog posts or stare bleakly at the screen with a hangover. Without Tinder or even NZDating.com to deliv­er anonym­ous strangers to my house, going out was the only way to try to get laid.

Look­ing back fondly now I feel like I’m writ­ing the bit in Boo­gie Nights or some Scorsese film where everything is going up and up and will def­in­itely nev­er crash, oh no sir, which is a ridicu­lous com­par­is­on for a little web­site that nev­er made any money, but yet is tied so tightly into my past two dec­ades in Wel­ling­ton that I’ve already writ­ten 700 words and haven’t got any­where near the point yet. And I’m cringing pretty hard at all the pre­ten­tious sledging of the Hutt and oth­er things, but hind­sight is 20/20, right?

So, maybe some actual highlights of the Wellingtonista then?

We star­ted the Wel­ling­tonista Awards in 2006, giv­ing read­ers the chance to vote for their favour­ite places in the city, but also for super vil­lains and things they most wanted to see in the city. The first year of the First Annu­al Wel­ling­tonista Awards for Out­stand­ing Achieve­ment in the Field of Excel­lence, we had the awards at the recently opened Mighty Mighty, sit­ting around the big table. It was mostly just ‘istas them­selves in attend­ance and the res­ults make for some really inter­est­ing read­ing see­ing how many of the win­ners are actu­ally still around.

The next year we put it on with Pub­lic Address and Blam Blam Blam played. Way to scale up! Look­ing at the res­ults, I had for­got­ten that Zeal­and­ia used to be called the Karori Wild­life Sanc­tu­ary. I wrote a good recap of the year which I wish I’d done for the years fol­low­ing because it all gets a bit blurry.

We launched a bowl­ing league, and played against Xero when they had few­er than a dozen employ­ees. Look at them now!

By the Third Annu­al Wel­ling­tonista Awards in 2008, someone even made a video which I had com­pletely for­got­ten about until just now. I guess there were more smart phones by then too.  There was karaoke after the fourth awards and I don’t really even remem­ber the fifth very much. At one stage I think we nom­in­ated Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil’s Richard McCle­an for the good work he did answer­ing ques­tions on our blog and oth­ers, but now our para­so­cial rela­tion­ships (that word did­n’t use to exist either!) go to Simone and Mol­lie on their social media chan­nels.

We asked can­did­ates ques­tions in loc­al elec­tions and Kerry Pren­der­gast was very unhappy that we cut off her answers at 25 words as we said we would do to every can­did­ate.

We reviewed the reviews of a loc­al res­taur­ant crit­ic. He decided that com­ment­ing on them at 1am was a good idea (It was not).

At one stage at least four ‘ista were also writ­ing for Fish­Head magazine. Maybe five?  Dan even edited it, before it became a real estate cata­logue then fol­ded.

Our awards were fun! People got recog­nised for the good things they did! I got to talk to oth­er media about it. We got to dress up! But they were also just so so so much work too, and that’s why the fifth annu­al ones were the last. But just the sheer amount of work was­n’t the only reas­on. The ‘ista itself was past its glory days, for a num­ber of reas­ons.

Some reasons for less site activity

Before I go any fur­ther, I should say that Emma and Nadia and Soph­ie have done abso­lutely stel­lar work over the past couple of years with their theatre reviews, and I know how import­ant those are to the theatre com­munity and I hope they will con­tin­ue! It’s just that in the past couple of years, that’s basic­ally all that’s been pos­ted on the site when we used to have a lot more going on.

Here are some of the obvi­ous reas­ons why vari­ous people’s con­tri­bu­tions changed: Mov­ing away. Chan­ging into jobs where it would be a con­flict of interest. I star­ted a cloth­ing com­pany as well as hav­ing a full time job. Home own­er­ship. Chan­ging fam­il­ies. James wrote some books! Chan­ging bod­ies. The aging pro­cess. Fall­ing out with me for a vari­ety of reas­ons, mostly very val­id (Small inces­tu­ous groups who drank too much togeth­er implod­ing? Who could have seen that one com­ing?). But also, the inter­net changed.

Twit­ter ruined blogs. It became so easy to post your thoughts at any time of the day (first via text and then via smart phones), so why would people both­er with writ­ing long format? Espe­cially when at one stage we had 11,000 people (pos­sibly bots) fol­low­ing us on there and our web stats nev­er got up that high.

The death of Bloglines and Google Read­er ruined blogs. I miss RSS so much.

Ins­tagram ruined blogs. Ugggh, give me a thou­sand words over one pic­ture any day. We stopped get­ting invit­a­tions to food events around the same time that influ­en­cers on Ins­tagram star­ted devel­op­ing fol­low­ers. Of course you would rather have someone who takes pretty pic­tures without writ­ing any­thing crit­ic­al and does­n’t act­ively hate your impact on the envir­on­ment  and your oth­er guests at your events.

Com­ments sec­tions ruined blogs. Love to have 300 com­ment­at­ors on Stuff say­ing I was accus­ing a nice fam­ily man of child rape for say­ing that “Lol­ita Pop­per” was not a good name for a bur­ger.

And my world has closed in a lot, so do I even have the right to write about a city when I’m not out there in it that much? Even before the fear of COVID and the exhaus­tion of Long Cov­id, my house is nicer than oth­er places. There’s not nor­mally any unne­ces­sar­ily loud people here. I can con­trol the music, I have chosen the seat­ing to be com­fort­able for me. Deliver­Easy brings food to me. There’s more on TV to watch than ever before and I don’t have to deal with people. I work from home a lot. I don’t seem to leave Thorndon.

Why now seems like a good time to reboot

But that’s exactly why I think I need to write more – and more import­antly, encour­age oth­ers to con­trib­ute too.  Well that, and six thou­sand oth­er reas­ons, includ­ing:

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to write one post a week. I’m chal­len­ging oth­er people who still have a login to the site to try to do that as well. And I’m ask­ing y’alls now – the people who’ve made it to the end – if you’d like to con­trib­ute too. There is no pay in it, but I bet you’ve got some­thing to say about this city.

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