David Hastings was born in 1952 in Belize City, in what was then British Honduras, South America, of English parents. His father was in the colonial service and the family moved next to Gibraltar and then to Australia. Now based on Auckland's North Shore, Hastings has lived in New Zealand since 1987 and vividly remembers arriving there on a Saturday in October to find the crash of '87 had plunged the country into a terrible gloom. Hastings has worked as a journalist since 1970, having been a reporter, sub-editor, television news producer, coverage officer, foreign editor, news editor and editor. In Australia he worked at the Melbourne Sun, AAP, ABC radio and ABC TV, where he was the day editor in Melbourne, before moving to New Zealand. He is currently the Editor of the Weekend Herald, having been deputy editor of the NZ Herald for a decade from 2001 to 2011. Hastings has an MA(Hons) in History from The University of Auckland. His first book, Over the Mountains of the Sea: Life on the Migrant Ships, 1870-1885 (2006), was based on the research he did for his MA thesis, 'The Voyage Out: A Study in Power and Knowledge 1870-1885'. His second book Extra! Extra! How the People Made the News (2013) emerges from a combination of his interests in history and in journalism, being a study of nineteenth-century newspapers to see if the perspective of someone who has actually worked in the industry would have anything to add to theoretical ideas about what has made newspapers what they are.