OUR KAUPAPA

E-Tangata is an online Sunday magazine run by the Mana Trust, which is dedicated to building a stronger Māori and Pacific presence in the New Zealand media.

The website is not-for-profit and is largely a labour of love by a part-time team of accomplished journalists and writers who want to see, throughout the mainstream media, a more balanced and better informed reflection of New Zealand lives and issues.

We’re doing our part by specialising in stories that get to the heart of what it means to be Māori or Pacific in Aotearoa.

The first five-day introductory journalism course for Māori and Pacific students was held in 1980, at Pendennis Hostel in Thorndon, Wellington. That’s E-T co-editor Gary Wilson, who created and ran the courses, in the back (in the tie and white shirt). Among those who attended the inaugural course is Tapu Misa (E-T’s other co-editor), as well as others who went on to have long careers in the media, including Lois Turei, Sonya Haggie, and Sharon Hawke.

Although E-Tangata was launched in late 2014, our whakapapa goes back to 1980, when Gary Wilson, E-T’s co-founder and co-editor, ran the first of a series of practical, five-day introductory journalism courses for Māori and Pasifika students.

That series, which carried on through much of the 1980s, was backed by the New Zealand Journalists Training Board and the Department of Māori and Pacific Island Affairs, after a national survey showed that less than two percent of Kiwi journalists were Māori or Pacific Islanders. In other words, the industry was seriously white.

The goal of the courses was to make the journalism industry much browner — and better able to cover Māori and Pacific issues fairly and accurately.

Those introductory courses gave more than 200 students a taste of journalism — and led to more than 50 finding their way into television (like Mike McRoberts, Susana Lei’ataua, and Maramena Roderick) or radio (such as Niva Retimanu, Gideon Porter, and Sefita Hao’uli) or print (Nui Te Koha, Lois Turei, and Tapu Misa).

Then, in the early 1990s, Derek Fox, Piripi Whaanga, and Gary set up Mana Māori Media, which began feeding radio news and current affairs stories — in reo Māori and reo Pākehā — to RNZ and to the network of iwi stations. It also launched and, for 10 years, published Mana magazine, which, at its height, had 150,000 readers.

That partnership came to an end in 2004.

But by that time, the Mana Trust had been set up as a charitable organisation with the aim of helping strengthen the Māori and Pacific voices in the media. The Tindall Foundation lent a generous hand to that kaupapa, as it has continued to do.

The trust was chaired by the late Nin Tomas, an associate professor of law at Auckland University — and the other trustees were two senior journalists, Wena Harawira and Tapu Misa, and Maureen Wilson, a significant figure in education. Judy McGregor, a former newspaper editor, media professor, and EEO Commissioner, helped out as an advisory trustee.

After a flurry of projects in the first few years, the trust lay low for a time, before returning to the fray in 2012, with Stacey Morrison, Tapu and Gary as trustees. Later, they were joined by Dale Husband and Moana Maniapoto.

Late in 2014, again with the backing of The Tindall Foundation, the trust embarked on this E-Tangata website project.

OUR FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS

E-Tangata wouldn’t be here without the generosity of its friends and supporters.

The Tindall Foundation funded the launch of the E-Tangata website at the end of 2014, and has continued to support us.

Koha: We’ve been blessed to have many generous friends and kindred spirits who’ve supported the cause by way of koha columns, professional advice, second-hand furniture, and even cash.

Bridget Williams Books: The award-winning Wellington publisher has been an active supporter of our kaupapa. They also published our first collection in April 2017, The Best of e-Tangata.

Radio Waatea and E-Tangata are longtime friends and continue to support each other’s kaupapa.

Our readers: E-Tangata was among the first journalism websites to sign up to PressPatron, a New Zealand crowdfunding platform that makes it easy for readers to support websites like ours with regular and one-off contributions. Currently, our readers provide our greatest source of funding with more than a thousand providing regular monthly and annual contributions, and many others making one-off contributions. 

If you’d like to join in supporting E-Tangata’s kaupapa, just click the “Become a supporter” button at either the bottom or top of the page.