Stewart Sowman-Lund spends a morning in the studio with the Today FM breakfast host – a role she’s come to realise is her ‘dream job’.
It’s 6.20am on a crisp Tuesday morning and Tova O’Brien is looking through her notes. It’s exactly five months since her first day as host of Today FM’s breakfast show, which followed a delayed start triggered by legal drama with her former employer, Newshub. She’s got half a bottle of V left which she offers to me since she’s rushing about and too busy to show me where the coffee machine is. I decline – I don’t have a radio show to host.
The road to Today FM wasn’t a smooth one for O’Brien. The station, with her self-titled breakfast show as the flagship, was meant to launch at the start of 2022. Born out of the ashes of Magic Talk, which had suffered well documented host departures, BSA rulings and race rows, Today FM was intended to represent a stark contrast to its predecessor. Except, it couldn’t launch until March after Discovery, the owners of Newshub, enforced a restraint of trade clause against O’Brien.
That meant the network missed the start of the political year, and what eventually became one of the biggest news events in recent memory: the parliamentary occupation. If that had happened a year earlier, O’Brien would have been shepherding Newshub’s coverage of the monumental news event. Instead, she was in what she describes as “purgatory”. She’s moved on from that now – almost. “As Dallas Gurney [Mediaworks’ director of news...
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