As the former anchor of TVNZ's flagship 1 News, Wendy Petrie is a highly recognisable and popular face of New Zealand television.
Viewers and audiences love Wendy's down to earth, professional approach. With a vast experience of covering big events, Wendy has earnt respect and high praise for the way she connects with the people she interviews for news stories and as an MC she brings this same warmth and humour to the role. For any hosting job she dedicates time to researching the event to ensure she's fully prepared and makes sure it runs smoothly and to time!
After losing her job very publicly in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Wendy has been called on to host or chair motivational summits that focus on building resilience and adaptability.
Background
For fourteen years, Wendy anchored the most watched television news bulletin in New Zealand, TVNZ's 1News at 6pm. Now she fills in at the network on a variety of shows from Breakfast, Seven Sharp and Tonight enjoying more freedom to show more of her personality.
She is an experienced journalist who has travelled to big events to deliver news stories such as Gallipoli to cover the one hundred year commemorations of World War One. One of her favourite assignments was the Royal Wedding in London of Prince William and Duchess Kate.
Back home, Wendy travelled to Christchurch following the devastating Christchurch earthquake anchoring the coverage and filing stories on the rescue and recovery operation.
She has experience in radio news, filling in for the Mike Hosking Breakfast on Newstalk ZB.
Before taking over the reins of One News, Wendy worked in Toronto, Canada as an anchor for CTV, on a national 24 hour news channel. As a correspondent for New Zealand in Canada, Wendy travelled to New York when terror struck on September 11, reporting live in the hours following the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Current work
Wendy is a passionate advocate for South Auckland, growing up in Manurewa. She sits on the board of the Field of Dreams Foundation, created by Sir John Walker helping to support young people in Auckland's areas of greatest need.
For a challenge, Wendy has completed two marathons and can often be seen pounding the pavement. She says running is for her mind and loves the feeling of achievement and pushing herself.
To raise money for leukaemia, Wendy joined 850 firefighters in climbing the Sky Tower in full firefighting gear, weighing 25kgs!
As the mum of three children heavily involved in the sport of rowing and swimming, she is passionate about athletes and helping kids achieve their best in sport.
Wendy was wonderful to work with. She was happy to meet with me prior to the event to ensure she understood the event. She arrived promptly and her speech was exactly what we had asked of ... keep reading The University of Auckland
Wendy did an amazing job and fitted our event perfectly. She was very professional, funny, down to earth and approachable. I received lots of positive feed back from my client and colleagues.
Wendy was a fabulous keynote, extremely relatable. The attendees enjoyed the fact that she stayed afterward to chat and engage with them.
Wendy is a superstar with everything in relation to our event! We have had her back for multiple Westpac NZ Franchise Awards now as our MC and they way she remembers things year after year, engages with our audience and even mingles with them for some time before and afterwards is a breath of fresh air. I would absolutely recommend Wendy to anyone who needed a fun but professional MC who knows exactly how to keep the evening on track and speed up or slow down depending on your timings.
Wendy was easy to work with. Professional, humorous and engaged well with the audience.
You were a fantastic part of our congress, so glamorous, curious, so knowledgeable, so able to connect with our audience. We really appreciate how your role as MC lifted the whole congress delivery.
We really enjoyed having Wendy as a part of our conference, she took the time to speak to Delegates who wanted to say hi, and she was very easy to work with.
Wendy was a fantastic choice of MC for our female founder TechWeek panel. She was warm and welcoming and added just the right amount of humour and personal experience throughout her moderating. We'd put Wendy right at the top of our list for future MCs for our events.
