Lisette Reymer, left, and Carey Church
The very un-glamorous world of a war correspondent, complete with the mix of terror and guilt it often inspires, was laid bare last week when award-winning journalist Lisette Reymer spoke in the town where she grew up.
Lisette Reymer and cameraman Daniel Pannett reporting from Ukraine.
Reymer’s guest spot at Cambridge U3A (University of the Third Age) netted one of the group’s biggest turnouts and led in part to a decision being taken by the U3A Cambridge team to announce capacity limits for future meetings.
Now working as senior correspondent with Three News, Reymer described her decision to accept the speaking invitation here as a ‘complete no brainer’. She grew up on parents’ Garry and Marie-Jose Reymer’s dairy farm, the youngest of five who always wanted to be a journalist. That is something she attributes to her family’s fix on the 6pm new bulletins … “probably the only thing we were allowed to watch as kids”.
From there, it was on to broadcasting school in Christchurch, then into the big smoke to join TVNZ in Auckland before switching to TV3. “The industry is so small in New Zealand you have to move through newsrooms”.
At just 26, she was given the job of Newshub’s Europe correspondent. “I had no idea what was coming … I thought there’d be politics, Brexit was big at the time, maybe do some coverage of the royals. Then I ended up on the frontline of the war in Ukraine.”
Journalist Lisette Reymer pictured with cameraman Alex Parsons covering the 2025 Paris riots.
Those nightly broadcasts on Kiwi screens made her a familiar and trusted face as she delivered the news from deep inside Ukraine. She went into the war-torn country eight times, and in between managed to cover Queen Elizabeth’s death and King Charles’ coronation, the conflict in Gaza, Donald Trump’s indictment in New York, earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, hunger in Ethiopia, World Cup rugby and boxing.
“I could never have imagined I’d be doing any of that when I got into the industry.”
It was a whirlwind of stops and starts, meeting the demands of her employers who wanted her and her cameramen as protected as possible. That meant starting with a hostile environment training course in Kent in the UK, finding security personnel, and having at least US$10,000 on hand in cash when heading into active war zones, both to buy them out of trouble should it arise, and to pay for essentials when nothing else worked.
“We stashed it in the glove box of the car… counted it out each night,” she said. “We felt like drug runners.”
There was the matter of the ‘security guard’ who had given Polish documents to her employers, but who was actually Belarusian, and subsequently ‘removed’. Then the alcoholic in Reymer’s hotel in Kiev, who sparked panic by setting fire to her floor, the ease with which she ended up using the bomb shelter kettle as a mirror to do her make-up before doing a live cross, and the couple who died in an accident when Lisette’s heavy security vehicle slammed into it.
“That was life-changing for us. We felt the weight of it … it motivated us to get the best possible story to justify our being there that day.”
At the end of it all, she is changed. There were refugee camps where she felt ‘devoid of all hope’, solemnity and joy in equal measure around the British royals, always the need to pitch another story.
“The biggest lesson I have learned is that to be miserable is a privilege … to wallow is a privilege,” she said, simply because so many others don’t even get to survive.
See: Bringing the news from Ukraine
See: Cambridge journos win awards
Lisette Reymer, left, pictured with Cambridge U3A’s Carey Church last week. Photo: Viv Posselt
