High-profile political journalist Tova O'Brien starts her new role as Breakfast co-host on Monday morning. She talks to Emily Simpson about career missteps, motherhood and why she can't stop smiling.
I love an adrenaline rush and think I get a bit of that from both my parents. I didn’t realise that until after 2020, which was an election year and Covid and probably the biggest, most high-octane reporting I’ll ever see in politics. I got back to work after the summer break and just felt utterly deflated. I was really craving that rush. I don't know if that's healthy, but I think politics gives you that – just in the sense that big things happen consistently.
I was born in Papua New Guinea. Dad was a helicopter pilot from New Zealand and Mum a journalist from the UK. They moved to Central Otago when I was a baby and Mum started working on Rural Report. After they separated, Mum and I moved to Wellington and I’d spend holidays in Port Chalmers with Dad. Mum continued to work at RNZ, so Broadcasting House in Wellington was the newsroom that I grew up in.
My mum is the best person I know, her moral compass points really firmly to the north. She’s an incredibly kind and equitable and fair person, outraged by injustice. I hope I got a bit of that from her. She just flew back to London, where she lives, last night so I'm feeling sad.
Papua New Guinea gave me my name. It’s from the dialect of the village in Rubaul where I was born. But I’ve only been back there once. I went to a Pacific Islands Forum with then Prime Minister John Key, and it was amazing being there. But it was a very different Port Moresby we went into – being shuttled from one barb-wired compound to another – to the relatively stable one that my parents were living in in the early 80s.
The first time I went to university, I dropped out because I just don't think I was quite ready. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was studying psychology and film at Otago and there’s a lot about those subjects that appeals to me, but studying wasn’t for me at that time. I wasn't applying myself.
I didn’t get into the whole toga party version of Otago. I worked at the campus music venue and bar, Refuel – great crew of people – and so I definitely got into the live music Dunedin scene. But not the burning couches on Castle Street scene.
I went overseas and then moved back to Wellington when I was 23, 24, and a lot of my friends were finishing their degrees and moving on with their lives and I thought, I better get on to this! And one day I just had this eureka moment. I think, because Mum had been a journalist, I’d been trying to carve my own path, but I realised journalism made perfect sense, it was everything I loved doing. I started working at RadioActive, then at TV3 while studying journalism at Massey. And it was like night and day, compared to Otago where it felt like a chore. I just loved it.
Some pretty intensive trolling went on during Covid and every second day my name would be trending on Twitter. At first a lot of people's frustration was with the media asking or seeming to ask the same questions over and over again; or asking questions that might seem inane to some, but life-and-death to others. Later the vitriol tended to coalesce around the whole issue of jabs and anti-facts.
I felt a lot of empathy for the hostility, initially, because Covid was the great unifier. We were all freaking out about this enormous thing, and so I understood why people would be frustrated and scared. And then I just used the block button on Twitter a lot.
I live by the principle of never taking criticism from anyone you wouldn't take advice from. Every now and again, there might be a chink in your armour. Tough day, something personal gets said and it might seep through. But I just encourage young reporters and anyone who faces that stuff to live by that principle. I don't know if that’s a bit Pollyanna, but it’s what I try to do.
I went to Ukraine in 2022, about six months after the war began. I was at Today FM and we had a very tenacious young producer, Tom Day, who worked and worked and worked his way through the Ukrainian government until he managed to secure us an interview with Zelensky. I went over with a brilliant camera operator, Simon Morrow, and it was intense. I can’t believe it’s still going on because I look back and people were already living in a state of absolutely heightened trauma.
When I was pregnant in 2024 I took my partner and stepdaughter away to stay at a beach for his birthday. And a couple of things happened that just didn't feel quite right. I got back to Auckland and read the news on the Monday evening and later that night my waters broke. My daughter Ivy was born ten weeks premature.
I always knew she was OK. I look back at photos now and it's quite shocking, she did need a lot of care. But she had this next-level support at Auckland City NICU. I never had any doubt in my mind that she’d be OK.
Motherhood has changed me in that I just feel such immense love. It's like nothing else. She's the absolute centre of my universe. When I'm apart from Ivy, I'm yearning to hang out with her. She's hilarious and ridiculous, so much fun!
What will I bring to Breakfast? Based on the rehearsals, I’ll bring a slapstick element, because I was clipping chairs and tripping over the riser and looking into the wrong cameras. But I'm really looking forward to every element of Breakfast. I love that it can do hard news and also fun and funny stuff. I'm so excited I smile when I walk. I literally grin when I arrive in the morning and swipe my card and walk through the doors. Maybe I won’t do that when I have to start at 3.30am. But at the moment I’m super pumped.
Watch Breakfast on weekdays from 6-9am on TVNZ 1, or on TVNZ+
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