Mike White | |
|---|---|
 White, 2016 | |
| Occupation | Investigative journalist |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
Mike White is a New Zealand investigative journalist, photographer and author, and former foreign correspondent (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq). He has written two books and has won awards for his magazine articles on themes of justice within New Zealand.[1] He is also an awarded travel writer. White has won New Zealand Feature Writer of the Year (Qantas / Canon / Voyager Media Awards) three times, and a Wolfson Fellowship to the University of Cambridge. He has also won the Cathay Pacific New Zealand Travel Writer of the Year title three times.
White grew up near Blenheim, and graduated with a political science and history degree from the University of Canterbury in the mid-80s.[2] In 1996, he graduated from the Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) School of Journalism.
After six years working as reporter and chief reporter for the Marlborough Express in Blenheim,[3] he left to work as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.[2][4]
In 2003 White returned to New Zealand to write full-time for North & South, a current affairs monthly magazine, becoming a senior staff writer. He is now a senior writer for Stuff, [5] and is based in Wellington.[2] [6]
In an eight-page North & South article in 2015 (Long Walk to Justice)[7] White asked if New Zealand's justice system should establish an independent commission to investigate wrongful convictions. White researched this story in the UK during his Wolfson Press Fellowship to the University of Cambridge.[7] [6]
White covered the Ben Smart and Olivia Hope/Scott Watson case as a reporter on the Marlborough Express from 1998;[8] he revisited the case for North & South in December 2007. In 2014 Scott Watson invited White to interview him in prison, having maintained his innocence for 18 years. The Department of Corrections sought to prevent that meeting. It took more than a year and a hearing in the High Court to overturn that decision.[1] White described the widely reported verdict[9][10] as a "win for journalism."[11][12]
"The judge has realised that journalists have a special role in investigating cases of potential miscarriage of justice and has enforced that role. In certain circumstances, journalists do have a responsibility to investigate these cases and the best way to do that is by talking to the people who have been convicted and imprisoned."[12]
White's story on the interview with Watson in Rolleston Prison was published in North & South in December 2015.[13] In November 2016, after again taking the Corrections Department to the High Court, he covered the first meeting between Scott Watson and Olivia's father, Gerald Hope, also held in Rolleston Prison.[14]
White has also written extensively on the Lundy case.[15] In 2015 he spent two months in Courtroom One at Wellington’s High Court, covering the retrial of Mark Lundy for North & South. It’s a case he had been following for seven years.[16] His 18-page story: The Lundy Murders: What the Jury Didn’t Hear, in North & South’s February 2009 issue, led to international lawyers and experts joining Lundy’s team and eventually having his conviction quashed by the Privy Council in 2013.[17] White’s story on Lundy’s trial and reconviction in May 2015 [18] examined whether the justice system was able to cope with such a complex case, and whether the verdict was correct.
In 2016 White and his long time partner, Wellington journalist Nikki Macdonald, took over the editing of long-form journalism website Featured.[19]
