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ISSUE 77 OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2013 $9.95
WALKLEY
INSIDE THE MEDIA IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
Facts and farce
Journalism and politics in 2013
Patrick Cook • Cathy Harper
Sean Parnell • Peter Fray
Russell Skelton • Matt Liddy
Stand up, start up
Sarah Oakes • James Kirby
Reading between the lines
Stories worth sharing
Deborah Cameron • Catherine Fox
Claire Scobie • Tim Dunlop
Kevin Childs • Hal Crawford
Andrew Hunter
2013 FINALISTS ISSUE – WALKLEY AWARD NOMINEES ANNOUNCED
Q CONTACTS AND SPONSORS
Media, Entertainment
& Arts Alliance
www.alliance.org.au
Federal Secretary
Christopher Warren
Federal President
(Media)
Stuart Washington
Alliance
Membership Centre:
1300 656 513
Alliance Inquiry
Desk (for all
other inquiries):
1300 656 512
FEDERAL OFFICE
and NSW
245 Chalmers Street
REDFERN NSW 2016
PO Box 723
Strawberry Hills
NSW 2012
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P:1300 656 513
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P (08) 8223 6055
The Walkley Foundation and the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance thank the following
organisations for their generous support.
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CELEBRATE WITH US
THIS NOVEMBER!
WALKLEY WEEK EVENTS:
In the lead up to the
Walkley Awards, leading
investigative journalist
Gerard Ryle joins us
for a special series of
workshops and talks.
A four-time Walkley
Award winner and
former Fairfax journalist
of 20 years, Ryle now heads
up the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists newsroom in
Washington D.C.
2013 WALKLEY AWARDS
FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM
Monday, November 25 - SYDNEY:
1-4pm Training workshop with Gerard Ryle
Bookings & enquiries:
[email protected] / 1300 61 61 13
Wednesday, November 27 – BRISBANE:
4.45pm Panel discussion: Platform savvy – the
smart new lessons for journalism in the social
media marketplace with Gerard Ryle and Alf
Hermida, University of British Columbia
Tuesday, November 26 - MELBOURNE:
1-4pm Training workshop with Gerard Ryle
Bookings & enquiries:
[email protected] / 1300 61 61 13
5.30pm Gerard Ryle delivers the MEAA
Centenary Lecture, followed by drinks.
Bookings & enquiries: 1300 61 61 13
[email protected]
6.00pm Gerard Ryle in conversation with
Bill Birnbauer, followed by drinks.
$20/$10 MEAA members
Tickets: www.gerard-ryle.eventbrite.com.au
Thursday, November 28 – BRISBANE:
The 58 th Walkley Awards premiere on
ABC TV and streamed on abc.net.au on
Thursday November 28 at 9pm.
Join us for a special pop-up broadcast event on
Freeview Ch 23 / Foxtel Ch 723 / ABC3
BROADCAST PARTNER
2 THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE
Q CONTENTS
A new Staria is born
45
By Lindsay Foyle
She’s out of the daily papers, but the
bodacious heroine of Roger Fletcher’s
long-running strip may rise again.
Japan’s fatal shore
48
By Deborah Cameron
Mark Willacy’s account of the
Fukushima disaster.
Assassins’ creed
Editorial
Newsbites
4
6
OUR MEDIA
Using the F word
5
By Sarah Oakes
The editor of Daily Life puts feminism front
and centre.
Wednesday night Clive
11
By Sean Parnell
Clive Palmer: rambunctious billionaire,
unpredictable book subject.
The start-up of something big
13
15
26
By Jane Patterson
This twisted tale raised big questions
about intelligence agencies and civil rights
in New Zealand.
Panning for gold
27
42
43
23
38
By Matt Davis
There’s a market for innovative live streaming
of events and news – journalists need to get
in on the action.
Raising a glass to the legends
16
By Cathy Harper
Election Watch dug for policy amid the
campaign spin.
51
By Tim Dunlop
Rethinking the media-audience
relationship may help keep journalism
alive and healthy.
All in a day’s research
52
By Claire Scobie
Forget everything you thought you knew
about research when it comes to your first
book project.
10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW…
54
By Andrew Hunter and Hal Crawford
The Share Wars team has run the numbers
on what makes readers pass on a story to
their online friends.
58th WALKLEY AWARDS
TECHNOLOGY
39
By David Southwell
A taste of old world glamour at the Hong
Kong Foreign Correspondents Club.
And the finalists are….
29
The nominees for the 2013 Walkley Awards
for Excellence in Journalism.
ON THE COVER
The knives are out in Andrew Weldon’s
sharp cover illustration. Weldon’s latest
book is the “Don’t Look Now” series (Allen
& Unwin), a collaboration with children’s
author Paul Jennings.
40
By Ko Htwe
Ethnic groups fight to make their voices
heard in Myanmar.
PAYING TRIBUTE
Bill Peach
THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Just the facts ma’am
The week that was…
We need to talk…
…about sharing stories
STORYOLOGY
Myanmar’s different voices
By Chris Rau
A passionate plea to news executives to put
readers above shareholders.
Would you like a policy with that?
21
By Matt Liddy
ABC’s Vote Compass was used by more than
1 million Australians.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
By John Coleman
Remembering some of the colourful
characters from a lifetime in the media.
Mad as hell and not taking it
anymore
20
By Quentin Dempster
What will an Abbott government mean for
our public broadcasters? Lessons from the
past.
The net’s next big thing
By Sara Phillips
The journalist’s role may be shifting from
reporter to curator.
The people you meet
Circle the ABC wagons!
By Stephen Olsen
Lessons, laughs and light-bulb moments
from the Storyology conference.
By Jane Nicholls
Untold stories, data, collaborations –
The Global Mail sharpens its focus.
Come spy with me
18
By Patrick Cook
Some of the best cartoons from this election
involved no politicians at all.
Voters find themselves all over
the map
By James Kirby
A wave of start-ups, both non-profit and
commercial, could point to our media’s future.
On a global mission
Pencils at 20 paces
49
By Catherine Fox
In examining the toppling of Labor
and its leaders, how much blame
should fall on the media?
46
Elisabeth Wynhausen
46
Keith Dunstan
47
BOOKS & REVIEWS
17
By Peter Fray and Russell Skelton
The election was just the beginning for factchecking groups PolitiFact and ABC Fact
Check.
Auckland’s newspaper wars
44
By Kevin Childs
There are some ripping yarns in David
Hastings’ history of Auckland’s early
newspapers.
THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE
3
Q EDITORIAL
Journalism’s new horizon
S
ometimes it’s hard to see past
the job losses, but new tools
and new techniques are giving
journalism the potential to be
more relevant, more immediate, more…
exciting than ever before.
Once we refocus on the craft of
journalism, rather than the business,
we can see there’s a lot of good news
in all the change we’re experiencing. It
presents us with opportunities to use
the new tools of storytelling, to tell our
stories to more people, in more ways, in
more depth than ever before.
Journalism has been freed from the
tyranny of deadlines which shaped our
work through the past 100 years and –
although not always a good thing – all
space restraints. We don’t have to waste
time explaining what other people have
already done – we can just link to it. We
can use video, interactive graphics, show
the research trail, and publish all the
documents as background.
In ways that we are still thinking
through, this is changing what
journalism itself looks like. And
that change is driving a not terribly
useful debate about who is and
Editor: Jacqueline Park [email protected]
Commisioning editor: Clare Fletcher
Assistant editor: Lauren Dixon
Editorial staff: Kate Bice and Mike Dobbie
Subeditor: Jo McKinnon
Cover illustration: Andrew Weldon
Design: Louise Summerton
Production management: Magnesium Media
Solicitors: Minter Ellison Lawyers
Address: Walkley Foundation
Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance
245 Chalmers Street, Redfern, NSW 2016
Visit our website: walkleys.com
Advertising inquiries: Barbara Blackman
[email protected]
To subscribe: visit http://www.walkleys.com/subscribe
or phone 1300 65 65 13
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this magazine are not
necessarily those of The Walkley Foundation or the Media,
Entertainment & Arts Alliance.
CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME
The Walkley Magazine, the only forum for discussion of media and professional
issues by and for journalists, welcomes contributions from journalists, artists
and photographers. To maintain the tradition and be worthy of the Walkleys,
The Walkley Magazine aims to be a pithy, intelligent and challenging read, and to
stand as a record of interesting news in the craft and profession of journalism. It is
published five times a year and guidelines for contributors are available on request.
isn’t a journalist and what is or isn’t
journalism.
Once it was relatively simple – the
structures of individual works of
journalism looked alike. In the 20th
century, about 90 per cent of all
journalism written would have been
pyramid style news stories ranging from
150 to 750 words, with the occasional
feature thrown in.
Once we refocus on the
craft of journalism, we can
see there’s a lot of good
news in all the change
we’re experiencing
In the 21st century, we’ll be telling
our stories in 140 characters or 10,000
words or in live blogs or photo galleries.
And we’ll see some big cultural
changes. Kevin Davis from the
Investigative News Network in the US
says that there were three fundamental
beliefs that shaped the culture of our
craft in the 20th century: we compete,
we don’t co-operate; we don’t promote
ourselves; and we have nothing to do
with the money.
All three of these things, he says, are
profoundly wrong for the journalists of
the 21st century.
A great example of this new culture
at work is the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists, which
networks journalists around the world
to work on big investigations – like their
investigation this past year into offshore
tax shelters. That’s why we’ve asked ICIJ
director, Gerard Ryle, to present this
year’s MEAA Centenary Lecture in the
lead-up to the Walkley Awards.
You can also see some great examples
of 21st century journalism among this
year’s Walkleys finalists.
They demonstrate again that, actually,
it’s not hard to distinguish professional
journalism from the rest of the noise.
And they demonstrate that journalism
endures at the centre of our culture and
our democracy.
Christopher Warren
Federal Secretary, MEAA
CEO, The Walkley Foundation
WALKLEY
CONTRIBUTORS
Guy Body
Tim Bowden
Deborah Cameron
Jason Chatfield
Kevin Childs
John Coleman
Patrick Cook
Peter Coster
Hal Crawford
Matt Davidson
Matthew Davis
Quentin Dempster
Tim Dunlop
Stephen Dupont
Tom Dusevic
Anton Emdin
Rod Emmerson
Jeff Fisher
Catherine Fox
Lindsay Foyle
Peter Fray
Cathy Harper
Judy Horacek
Ko Htwe
Andrew Hunter
Connor Hurley
Fiona Katauskas
James Kirby
Jon Kudelka
Glen Le Lievre
Matt Liddy
Eric Löbbecke
Lauren Martin
Neil Matterson
Sharon Murdoch
Gregory Myers
Jane Nicholls
Sarah Oakes
Stephen Olsen
Sean Parnell
Jane Patterson
Sara Phillips
Chris Rau
David Rowe
Claire Scobie
Peter Sheehan
Russell Skelton
David Southwell
Emma Sykes
Phil Thornton
Andrew Weldon
Cathy Wilcox
Thanks to:
Fairfax Photo
The Daily Talk
Q OUR MEDIA
Using the F word
Sarah Oakes put feminism, not fashion,
at the heart of the Daily Life website and is
getting close to a million unique visitors a
month. Cartoon by Gregory Myers
F
or decades, print magazines controlled
the stories and storytellers that reached
large segments of Australian women.
They also perpetuated a very rigid
and repetitive way of looking at women’s lives,
interests and bodies. This has changed as we
have migrated our lives online.
The first online alternatives to thrive as the
internet began to compete with the newsstand
were mummy blogs, food blogs and style blogs.
However in the past five years the kind of sites
jockeying for women’s attention has changed
significantly. These include Fairfax’s Daily Life.
It’s not been the traditional role of
newspaper publishers to specifically court
female audiences – well, not outside of their
‘women’s pages’ (lifestyle sections) and
weekend magazine supplements. In fact,
‘women’s interest’ content has often been
relegated to dusty corners of the paper while
sports and cars are treated like hard news.
The need to appeal to women and the
importance of reaching them has changed
along with the media landscape. Female readers
have become the most powerful demographic
as studies show that they will click more,
comment more and buy more online.
A smart local publisher needed to find
a way to capture their attention by reimagining
the kind of content women want outside of
the niche areas of food, parenting and fashion.
(A smart local publisher might also want to
redress the enormous gender by-line imbalance
across all its mastheads, but that’s an argument
for another time.)
Last year Fairfax was the first news outlet
in Australia to attempt to engage female
readers by creating a website that solely
targeted women. Daily Life (named to provide
a connection to The Sun-Herald’s magazine
Sunday Life) was launched in February 2012.
First seen as an extension of the magazine
it quickly carved out a unique voice – a
female-biased mix of opinion, news analysis
and first-person pieces written by some
of the country’s best female journalists and
emerging writers.
Within six months it was the largest
women’s website in the country, towering
over established magazine brand websites
including Vogue and marie claire and
independents such as Mama Mia and The
Hoopla. Today Daily Life has an audience of
more than 950,000 unique visitors per month
(Nielsen data for the month of August 2013).
Its most important role is to be critical and
questioning of all of the messages directed
at women. As Germaine Greer once said of
Australian women, its role is “to be difficult”
Daily Life got people’s attention by being
unafraid to put feminism at the centre of
every debate. It asked writers to approach
their pieces from a feminist perspective and
not be afraid of using the F word. And despite
warnings to the contrary, it turned out that
it didn’t scare anyone away.
In fact Daily Life’s focus on everyday
sexism helped unify readers and tapped in
to a sense of frustration among Australian
women (that would later be articulated
by Julia Gillard in her misogyny speech).
It quickly became obvious there was an
enormous appetite for challenging and robust
commentary on current events, politics
and lifestyle with a gender-related twist.
The catch-cry from readers who flocked
to the site was “finally content for women
that isn’t condescending.”
Daily Life argued against all of the
tropes that magazines had been serving
up for decades – particularly the tired and
contradictory campaigns dedicated to “body
image” and “body love”.
Daily Life offers readers opinion
pieces from the likes of Anne
Summers and Julia Baird, though it’s
become best known as a place to discover
exciting new voices. For female writers it’s a
place to find their way in to the mainstream
media and paid work. It has enabled exciting
new talent such as Clementine Ford, Alecia
Simmonds and Ruby Hamad to emerge.
The site’s proudest achievement is
the diversity of its pool of female writers,
many who write specifically on the unique
challenges of being a woman of their
particular cultural background.
Earlier this year local writer Jenny Noyes
wrote about Daily Life for pop culture website
Junkee: “It’s one of the few sites where you can
find smart, well-written, reasoned critiques,
instead of the exasperatingly old-fashioned
drivel we’re all too often met with in our
encounters with Australian mainstream
media. To that end, it’s the sad, empirical fact
that male voices grossly outnumber those of
women in the mainstream media which has
enabled Daily Life to carve out its niche. Given
this state of affairs, the site has an open agenda:
to redress the balance by privileging women
writers (while still inviting men to the table).”
Daily Life is a new kind of women’s media. It
draws on the traditions of women’s magazines
which blossomed in an era of oppression,
but it addresses the needs of a savvier, better
educated and more discerning audience.
Its most important role is to be critical and
questioning of all of the messages directed
at women. As Germaine Greer once said of
Australian women, its role is “to be difficult”.
The brand undoubtedly owes a debt to
US website Jezebel – a fast-paced, humorous
feminist news service that provided a working
model of a women’s site which created mass
appeal by being equal parts informative,
humorous, hard-hitting and entertaining.
During its short life, Daily Life has struck a
chord with Australian women and its success is
heartening in an era when we are hearing less
good-news publishing stories.
The key take-outs from the past 19 months
aren’t new: never underestimate the reader,
never assume the old way is the right way and
never, ever rule out the use of the F bomb.
The site’s popularity should influence the
way magazines and websites cater for women
and should change Australian publishers’
perception of “what women want”.
Sarah Oakes is the national editor of
Daily Life and the managing editor of digital
step-outs at Fairfax (The Vine, Essential Baby,
Essential Kids and Life & Style)
Gregory Myers is a freelance illustrator;
ww.gregorymyers.me
5
Q NEWSBITES
Time to protest journalist-killers getting away with murder
November 23 is the International Day to End Impunity, a global campaign to protest
over the journalist killings that go unpunished. The Media Alliance will begin a monthlong campaign on October 16, the 38th anniversary of the murder of the Balibo Five
in East Timor. According to the Indonesian government, the five were accidentally
killed when caught in exchanges of fire between Indonesian troops and FRETILIN
forces, however many experts and historians have said the group were most likely
killed to prevent them exposing Indonesian incursions. In November 2007 the killings
were branded a war crime. At an inquest held that same month, NSW Deputy State
Coroner Dorelle Pinch found the five, who were unarmed, were deliberately killed
by special forces soldiers after surrendering to them. The
Alliance continues to demand the Australian Federal Police
commence proceedings to bring to justice those suspected
of killing the Balibo Five.
In 2006 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1738
condemning attacks on journalists, media and associated
personnel in conflict situations, and stating that media
workers were to be considered as civilians and protected.
The International Day to End Impunity (#IDEI, #impunity)
campaign will consist of a program of activities and events
highlighting cases of impunity from across the Asia-Pacific
region. It will culminate on November 23 on the fourth
anniversary of the Ampatuan Massacre in the Philippines
where 58 people, including 32 journalists, were murdered.
Although 103 suspects have been arrested in relation to the
massacre, 93 remain at large – most of them members of
the Philippines National Police. Since the massacre, at least
17 Filipino journalists have been murdered in targeted killings
related to their work.
Mike Dobbie
Greg Shackleton paints the word
“Australia” on the outer wall of the
shop in Balibo, facing the road
to Batugade,October 12, 1975.
Photo courtesy of Fairfax Media
“Dini Coral”,
Brendan
Esposito’s
winning
entry in the
Nikon-Walkley
Portrait Prize.
The picture framers: Nikon-Walkley winners
Brendan Esposito (Fairfax Media) has won the 2013 Nikon-Walkley Portrait Prize for his confronting
image of a Papua New Guinean woman attacked after accusations she was a witch. Showing her scars
from the brutal attack, Dini Coral stands with her husband. Witchcraft and sorcery have long been
practised in Papua New Guinea, but many now oppose the old traditions. Women accused of being
“sanguma”, or witches, are the target of attacks. There have been cases of murder, torture and rape,
and some victims have even been burned alive.
The judges noted that amidst a strong field of often beautiful portraits, Esposito’s work stood
out for its journalistic storytelling and the way it challenges the viewer.
“Someone would never pose like that, with such vulnerability, without great trust in the
photographer,” the judges said. “It’s more than consenting – it’s almost defiant.”
The Cairns Post’s Marc McCormack won the Nikon-Walkley Community/Regional Photography Prize,
with a vibrant and diverse portfolio of work that showed images from his region. The judges praised
McCormack’s skill across action shots, portraits and even a macro shot of a very cute baby turtle.
“It’s a great representation of what a regional photographer has to do on a daily basis,” judges said.
“It shows McCormack is an all-rounder, and gives a sense of the whole spectrum of what’s required
from regional photographers.”
For the first time, the Walkley judges also selected the Photo of the Year. Selected from all entries,
this image by Barat Ali Batoor represents the year in news.
Turn to page 29 to see the very first Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year.
Hello world! Marc McCormack of The Cairns
Post won the Nikon-Walkley Community/
Regional Photography Prize with a portfolio
including this, one of his favourite shots of
the year. The two-day-old Krefft’s turtle, no
bigger than a 50 cent piece, took some
coaxing to come out of his shell.
Will new AG be a shield agent?
The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance continues to
campaign for uniform national shield laws that recognise
journalist privilege for confidential sources. It has sought
an urgent meeting with the new federal attorney-general,
George Brandis. Senator Brandis was instrumental
in creating the original bill for federal shield laws that
subsequently became law, with amendments, in 2011.
The Australian federal laws acknowledged the need
for journalists to comply with their ethical duty to protect
their sources without the threat of a criminal conviction,
fines or jail terms. Several states followed the federal
example but the laws are not uniform across the nation.
There are discrepancies across jurisdictions over
recognising journalist privilege and defining “journalist”,
“media outlet” and even “news”. This has
led to jurisdiction shopping by powerful interests.
There has also been an increase in investigatory
bodies being granted powers that override shield laws
and compel journalists to appear (often in secret) to
hand over records and documents and name sources.
And some jurisdictions have refused point blank
to even consider the concept of privilege and a legal
shield for journalists.
So rather than alleviating the threat to journalists,
there has been an escalation in court actions against
them. An unprecedented number of Alliance members
currently face subpoenas and court orders to reveal
sources. The court actions result in enormous stress for
the journalist and immense expense as journalists must
defend themselves for months or even years before the
shield can possibly come into effect.
On May 3, 2013, World Press Freedom Day, the
Alliance raised the issue of uniform national shield laws
with federal, state and territory attorneys-general. The
former federal attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, placed
the issue on the agenda for the next meeting of the
Standing Committee on Law and Justice (SCLJ).
Aside from shield laws, the Alliance also intends
to raise its concerns about the implications recent
revelations about data surveillance have for journalists
and the protection of whistleblowers. The Australian Law
Reform Commission (ALRC) inquiry “Invasions of Privacy”
is set to examine the extent and application of existing
privacy statutes, relevant international standards and the
desirability of consistency in laws affecting national and
transnational data flows.
The Alliance’s concern about the issue of data
surveillance has been triggered by whistleblower Edward
Snowden’s revelations about US and British government
mass surveillance, and the detention of David Miranda
[the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald] at
Heathrow Airport and the seizure of materials he was
holding. The Alliance believes data surveillance provides
opportunities for the state to undermine freedom
of expression and to covertly monitor the work of
journalists, including identifying confidential sources.
In its meeting with Brandis, the Alliance will discuss
how shield laws can be made uniform and adapted
to ensure they protect freedom of expression and
the rights of journalists. It will also seek to have the
ALRC inquiry’s terms of reference altered to examine
the role of the state and data aggregators in invasions
of privacy.
Mike Dobbie
7
Q NEWSBITES
Investigative journalism comes out on top as exposés dominate Qld, Northern NSW, NT Awards
Mark Solomons and Kelmeny Fraser from The Courier-Mail (right, with Chris Warren)
were named Queensland’s 2013 Journalists of the Year for their investigative reporting
on MP Scott Driscoll. Solomons and Fraser also won the investigative category with
their exposé of the Redcliffe MP’s questionable business affairs. The judges praised
their careful research and questioning, and their measured approach in an era of 24hour news cycle pressure. “Their work will be viewed by politicians of all stripes as a
warning that the fourth estate is still vital – and watching.”
It was a bumper year for Queensland journalism, and the judges were impressed
with the high quality of the record 480 entries, particularly in the investigative sphere.
Paul Reid, chief of staff at Nine Network Brisbane, won the Clarion award for
Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. The judges said, “For the past 44 years,
he has been a true believer. A devotee of a school of journalism that will never go out
of fashion – quite simply to chase, question and then chase some more. It was this
thirst for news that drove his career. It also shaped nightly bulletins… and the careers
of hundreds of young reporters, producers and interns who had the fortune of being
able to absorb his advice.”
More on the 2013 Clarions: clarions.org/awards
The Newcastle Herald’s Joanne McCarthy was named the stand-out Journalist of the
Year at the 46th Northern NSW Journalism Awards (the PRODIs) for her reporting
on child abuse within the Catholic diocese of the Hunter Valley. The judges were
unanimous in their decision, recognising McCarthy’s work as leading to the NSW Royal
Commission into the abuse.
It’s another feather in the cap for McCarthy, who received a letter from Julia Gillard,
signed in her last 10 minutes as prime minister, thanking her for her work. McCarthy’s
“Shining the Light” series has also been nominated for two Walkley Awards – see
pages 29-36.
Cath Bowen, chief of staff and chief photographer at the Maitland Mercury, was
recognised for her Outstanding Contribution to Journalism in 30 years working in the
region. The Maitland Mercury this year celebrates its 170th anniversary, making it
mainland Australia’s oldest regional daily and the second oldest newspaper in NSW
after The Sydney Morning Herald. Mercury editor Liz Tickner nominated Bowen,
Women’s Weekly still going strong at 80
The Australian Women’s Weekly is looking pretty spry for an 80 year old. The magazine
celebrated its milestone in late September with a lunch in Sydney, attended by media
luminaries including Leigh Sales,
Sandra Sully, Tracy Grimshaw
and Jennifer Byrne. GovernorGeneral Quentin Bryce announced
the winners of the Weekly’s new
scholarship program for highachieving young women.
Editor Helen McCabe has been
in charge of the Weekly for four
years, and recently signed on
for two more years. While not
immune to the circulation drops
of the industry, the Weekly has
held relatively strong – now at
460,000 compared to 490,000
when McCabe took the helm. The
next challenge will be to grow
the Weekly’s online presence.
McCabe told Mumbrella.com.au:
“It has incredible potential. We
own women in this country and
we need to do so online. We’re
not there yet.”
well-known in the community as “Mrs Mercury”, for her tireless reporting and generous
mentorship in the newsroom.
More on the 2013 Northern NSW Journalism Awards: prodis.alliance.org.au
In Darwin, the ABC’s Clare Rawlinson was named NT Journalist of the Year, scooping
the categories for Best Online Coverage and Best Current Affairs or Feature for
“Territorians from all walks of life: Discovering their stories”.
In a year of record entries, the NT Media Awards saw a number of new faces
entering the awards for the first time. The NT News’ Nicole Mills was named
Marchbanks Young Journalist of the Year in what the judges said was an exceptionally
strong year for young reporters.
More on the NT Media Awards: ntmediaawards.org.au
New faces in the glossy posse
Expect some fresh faces on the newsstands: Bauer Media has
launched Elle Australia and News Life Media has extended the
Vogue brand to younger fashionistas with Miss Vogue.
Elle’s September launch has been two years in the making:
the world’s best-selling fashion magazine first announced its
return to the Aussie market in 2011. Former Shop Til You Drop
editor Justine Cullen has taken the helm of the joint venture
between Bauer Media and international mag giant Hearst.
Already some insiders are predicting a rivalry between Cullen’s
Elle and Pacific Magazines’ marie claire, where editor Jackie
Frank has ruled for 18 years. Frank told The Australian that
marie claire is up to the challenge.
“Bauer, previously ACP, has always launched products against
us. We had InStyle. Then [they] had Madison. Then they wanted
to chip away at us with Grazia. In fact, before we even launched,
ACP tried to make She into a marie claire. Everybody’s always
challenging. That is the difficult thing about being the leader.”
Meanwhile, Miss Vogue has expanded from a digital-only
brand to a “collectable keepsake” print edition released twice
a year. Despite the tech-savvy reading habits of young women,
Vogue editor in chief Edwina McCann reckons there’s still a
hunger for old-school formats.
“It’s almost like the nostalgia for vinyl,” McCann says. “They
still want it on the coffee table because it says something about
them. It’s more that their habits have changed – they’re just not
visiting newsagents as frequently.”
9
Q NEWSBITES
Chalk up a success in Liberia
Degrees of separation
The divide between journalism academics and industry professionals showed up
clearly in a recently published study from Poynter in the US. While 96 per cent of
journalism academics responded that they believe a journalism degree is important
in understanding the value of journalism, only 57 per cent of industry professionals
agreed. The study also found that more than 80 per cent of academics see a
journalism degree as important in learning news-gathering skills, compared to just
25 per cent of media professionals.
Still, the number of students enrolled in journalism related degrees in Australia has
almost doubled in the last 10 years. The Alliance estimates that more than 4000
undergraduate students were enrolled in journalism in Australia in 2012; the same
year that more than 1000 journalists’ jobs were axed across the country.
There’s an obvious disconnect between the number of journalism students and
the number of jobs available, and some observers believe that journalism academics
are also out of touch with the current state of the industry. Rachel Buchanan from
The Age suggests that some see journalism simply as the default humanities degree,
as current streams focus on a critique of the industry as opposed to teaching the
essential skills of news reporting.
Dr Emma Jane, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales who
recently completed her PhD after 25 years as a working journalist, observes:
“Many of the skills I learned working in newsrooms, I simply could not have picked
up any other way.”
The decreasing value placed on a journalism degree by industry professionals
seems to reflect the widening gap between educators and working journalists.
Since they operate within different fields, “Perhaps journalism academics and media
practitioners don’t always see eye-to-eye on this topic because they don’t fully
understand – and therefore value – what the other is doing,” observes Dr Jane.
Connor Hurley
Photo: Chris Guillebeau, The Daily Talk
A decade on from the devastating civil war in Liberia, one man has created
a journalism start-up with a difference. Alfred J Sirleaf is the executive
director and managing editor of The Daily Talk, a newspaper he started in
the Liberian capital Monrovia with chalk and a blackboard.
Sirleaf told Victoria Strobl from Al Jazeera that just because the people
of his city can’t afford to buy a newspaper doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be
informed about what’s happening.
“The legacy of the war created poverty, hardship. It was the war that
prompted... the creation of The Daily Talk. I saw the need of people wanting
to be informed but there was no means of getting information. So the idea
of the board came to me… and something clicked – I thought, hey! You can
start it with just a blackboard.”
The Daily Talk includes symbols to help even illiterate Monrovians keep
up with the news, like hanging a hubcap to represent President Ellen Sirleaf,
AKA the “iron lady”.
Alfred Sirleaf has plans to expand his media empire with newsboards
across Liberia and into West Africa, and hopes his daughters will carry on
The Daily Talk.
Seoul mates: Australia-Korea journalist exchange
Three Australian journalists will travel to South Korea in October as the
first participants in the Australia-Korea Journalist Exchange Program – a
partnership between the Walkley Foundation and the Australia-Korea
Foundation.
Jason Whittaker, editor of Crikey, Michael Janda, a business reporter
at the ABC, and Alexandra Lee, a producer for ABC News 24, were chosen
for their skills and their impressive ideas about stories to cover in Korea.
Hosted by the Korea Press Foundation, the trio plans to visit government
institutions including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, research institutes on
North Korea, unification and economic issues, and major companies with
significant interests in Australia, as well as the Korean demilitarised zone.
The trio will share their experiences and insights through reports for their
own media outlets as well as at a series of Walkley Foundation public events
on their return.
“This is the first of what we hope will be many journalistic and cultural
exchanges between Australia and Korea, to increase understanding between
our citizens and ensure that Korea is given the coverage and recognition it
deserves in Australia,” says Walkley Foundation CEO Chris Warren.
In March/April, the Korean delegation will meet journalists and editorial
staff from a range of media organisations and government institutions in
Australia and participate in the annual Press Freedom Media Dinner, as well
as engage in activities aimed at increasing their understanding of Australian
culture.
The Australia-Korea Journalist Exchange Program is supported by the
Australian government through the Australia-Korea Foundation (dfat.gov.au/
akf) of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
See Alexandra Lee and Michael Janda discuss their Korea visit in
Sydney on November 12: details at walkleys.com
Listen to Walkley Talks – download our podcasts
“For us more traditional media like the BBC, we no longer
expect you to just sit there and watch and listen to us, we want
you to engage, we want you to answer back, to tell us your
stories, to send us your comments or send us your complaints.
Because it reminds us that the beauty and the power of a story,
is that it must be told.”
BBC correspondent Lyce Doucet’s moving talk from
10 T H E W A L K L E Y M A G A Z I N E
Storyology is now available for your listening pleasure via the
WalkleyTalks podcast series. Other podcasts include Bob Carr
in conversation with Peter Hartcher, British medical writer
Dr Michael Mosley, and a panel discussion on sports journalism.
Subscribe to WalkleyTalks on iTunes or head to walkleys.
com/walkleytalks
For more about Storyology, turn to page 23
Q OUR MEDIA
*A recount for the seat of Fairfax was continuing as we went to press.
Wednesday night Clive
Billionaire Clive Palmer and the power of parliamentary privilege is
a bewitching concept, and Sean Parnell has been watching the
almost* elected MP for years. Illustration by Anton Emdin
T
he irony wasn’t lost on me. Here was the newly appointed
health editor at The Australian, resplendent in suit and
tie, scoffing down a burger meal at a McDonald’s on the
Gold Coast. It was a large meal, too, and I was eating it
with uncustomary fury.
My Wednesday off was never meant to end this way. Three hours
earlier, I had driven from Brisbane for a pre-arranged interview
at one of Clive Palmer’s offices – housed in a former wedding
reception venue. For reasons I had come to question myself, I had
chosen the larger-than-life Queenslander for my first biography,
and publisher HarperCollins wanted me to complete a 70,000word manuscript in six months so it could hit the shelves in time
for the federal election.
For this full-time Freedom of Information (FoI) editor, who
then took on the additional health round, that inevitably meant
many late nights and weekends away from my family. And it was
never going to be a straightforward exercise.
Palmer was initially underwhelmed by the idea – he responded
with a text message saying he was too busy – and then the mining
billionaire warmed to it, promising to provide me with
some access to his life. Surprisingly, he never once
asked what I would write, although for someone so
litigious I imagine he had a fallback plan.
As I pulled together the final draft,
I still had numerous loose ends, not to
mention those contradictions where
we would have to agree to disagree, or
leave it to the lawyers to decide the way
forward. I still wanted everything on
the table before we went to print, so
X
I arranged for one final interview.
He is far more strategic
and calculated than most
would appreciate
11
Q OUR MEDIA
X
But Palmer was a no-show. He had
earlier been interviewed by Ray Martin for a
glowing 60 Minutes profile but I knew they had
parted company hours earlier. Phone calls, text
messages and emails went without reply, and
even his office staff had no idea where he was.
As I perused the eclectic collection of artworks,
old magazines and photocopied personal
photos, I knew all too well I should have
anticipated this.
When I’d called on the Monday afternoon,
Palmer had said he was unavailable and could
only meet me on Monday afternoons. When
I pointed out it was a Monday afternoon,
he hastily suggested he had meant to say
Wednesday afternoon and, under pressure,
reluctantly committed to a 5pm interview.
As the hours passed, and I was politely kicked
out so the staff could finally go home, my wife
convinced me to remain on the Gold Coast,
where Palmer lives, and hold out for a response.
That led me to the nearby golden arches, on the
edge of an industrial estate, where I would wait.
As I sat in my car, full-bellied and ashamed
of my emotional eating, a text message finally lit
up my mobile phone at 7.27pm: “Call me ASAP
Clive”. I called the man and, dismissing his
alibi and claim it was too late for an interview,
arranged to join him for dinner at a restaurant
near his home at Paradise Point.
As I arrived, he was squeezing out of his
Mercedes convertible with a laptop and a
Titanic II brochure, which he duly showed me
at the back of the restaurant. He ordered the
fish and, not wanting to appear rude, so did I,
even though it was my second meal in as many
hours. I had shared a couple of meals with
Clive, most recently at his Coolum resort
with his second wife, Anna, and their five-yearold daughter, Mary, on whose instruction
we all drank red lemonade and ate a rich
chocolate dessert.
After an hour or so, the meals were cleared,
my questions were answered – alas, in a
parliamentary style where Palmer responded as
he saw fit – and we prepared to part ways.
When the bill came, I found myself
instinctively offering to pay, perhaps the most
insincere words I have ever uttered given Palmer
It still felt inappropriate to attempt to
pigeonhole someone as unique as Clive
Palmer, whether you love, hate, mock or
despise the man
claims to be a multi-billionaire and that he had
kept me waiting for two and a half hours. But as
he shuffled out to the street, with his brochure
and laptop under his arm, I realised my offer
had been accepted. Such is Clive.
Now that my biography is in bookstores,
and the election has finally shone a spotlight
on Palmer and his methods, memories of the
research and writing process come flooding
back. The difficulty getting hold of him, let
alone getting to the bottom of various tales.
The way he would end sentences with “right?”
as if checking I was still following or, perhaps,
that he was still believable. The pile of personal
photos he belatedly pulled together, nominating
the best as a kitsch photo of his first wife and
kids in a cable car, and a partly obscured shot of
him at the back of a festive lunch in a Santa hat.
His constant search for a memorable one-liner,
or motherhood statement, and his inability or
unwillingness to focus on the bare facts.
When I first profiled Palmer for The Weekend
Australian magazine in 2009, I suggested we
play it straight, leaving the reader to decide
whether he was closer to a genius or a charlatan.
Investing in quality journalism
THEMONTHLY.COM.AU
One of my editors declared the piece would
not run if it was anything like the latter and we
should focus on his positive traits. But to me, it
still felt inappropriate to attempt to pigeonhole
someone as unique as Clive Palmer, whether you
love, hate, mock or despise the man.
When my colleague in The Australian’s
Brisbane bureau, Hedley Thomas, sat down
with me for a couple of minutes one day in
June – before launching a series of front-page
critiques of Palmer – he appeared genuinely
surprised that the would-be PM may not have
been all he claimed to be. Of course, those
journalists who’d had more to do with Palmer
over the years already knew that. Some had
written as much and been abused or sued by
him for their efforts.
An experienced media operator, Palmer gets
the best and worst out of journalists – even
using negative scrutiny to his ultimate advantage
– and the fact he still has such a high profile
speaks volumes about our industry and the state
of Australian politics, if not society as a whole.
Now the election is over, I imagine many
people have come to realise that Palmer
embellishes and exaggerates many things. But
he is far more strategic and calculated than
most would appreciate.
The possible new MP for Fairfax [the
recount continued as we went to press] and the
head of his own Palmer United Party is selfcentred but selectively generous. Overblown
but with the ability to connect with people.
A life-long schemer with enough successes
to justify his riches. A bully who nonetheless
exposes weaknesses in others, and someone as
tempestuous as he is tactical.
All this makes for fascinating reading but
quite difficult writing – perhaps for my next
book I should choose Ronald McDonald?
Sean Parnell is the author of Clive: The Story of
Clive Palmer (HarperCollins, RRP$39.99) and is
health editor and FoI editor at The Australian
Anton Emdin draws cover art, illustrations and
cartoons for publications such as MAD Magazine,
The Spectator, People, Business Technology, Men’s
Health. In 2012 he was awarded the Gold Stanley
for Cartoonist of the Year
The start-up of something big
A wave of start-ups is sweeping
through the for-profit and non-profit
media sectors. James Kirby
offers a snapshot of where’s it
at and where it might be going.
Illustration by Matt Davidson
I
t’s an unseasonably warm September
evening in Melbourne. At the launch
party for Issimo, a new arts and style
digital publication, editor Veronica
Ridge frets over the space she has hired.
A former senior editor at The Age, Ridge is
worried the hall may be too big. But minutes
after the official launch time the venue is
packed. The hall is virtually infused with
goodwill as dozens of well-wishers, potential
readers, potential staff and potential
sponsors mingle excitedly at the prospect
of a new Melbourne-based publication.
What is remarkable about Issimo and
Ridge is not that the publication breaks new
ground (though it may well do so); rather,
the exceptional feature of this evening is that
the project has actually come to fruition.
Hundreds of senior journalists throughout
Australia have left big news organisations
in recent years but only a handful has ever
tried a media start-up.
If more journalists and media
professionals don’t try to start new
companies the industry can only shrink.
But there is hope…
The for-profit sector
It probably goes without saying that the
majority of media start-ups these days are
digital. It’s also worth noting that those
start-ups that are successful are often
eventually purchased or part-purchased by
one of the nation’s two dominant media
groups, Fairfax and News Corporation.
More recently, telecommunication groups
have also emerged as potential buyers; the
$6 million purchase by Optus of the
restaurant review and listing site Eatability
may have been a milestone.
Successful online starts-ups in Australia
have also been predominantly linked with
business and technology journalism, two of
the most lucrative areas of media activity.
Three leading examples of for-profit
start-ups over the last decade have been
AIBM, The Weekly Review Group and
Private Media (Crikey).
AIBM – Set up in 2004, the company
eventually grew to include a group
of journalist and investment banker
If more
journalists
and media
professionals
don’t try to
start new
companies
the industry
can only
shrink
shareholders. The bulk of the company was
owned by veteran business journalist Alan
Kohler, along with investment bankers John
Wiley and Mark Carnegie. It was 100 per
cent sold to News Corp for a reported
$30 million in July 2012.
AIBM has two publications: a free
business news website, Business Spectator,
and a subscription-based investment
website, Eureka Report. As an independent,
the group employed a range of quality
journalists and subeditors and its headcount
had grown to around 40 at the time of its
sale. Under News Corporation that figure
has risen closer to 50.
Private Media – This company was formed
around the purchase by Eric Beecher of
Stephen Mayne’s pioneering website Crikey
for a reported $1 million in 2003. Beecher
later started Smart Company, a website
focused on small business, along with a
string of related business and political titles.
The company is believed to be profitable and
operating on a scale close to AIBM when
it was sold to News. The key asset remains
Crikey, which is a subscription service.
Smart Company is free.
Metro Media Publishing (MMP) – This
was started in 2010 by former Fairfax
property editor and Age marketing director
Antony Catalano as a joint venture with a
syndicate of real estate agencies. It publishes
The Weekly Review, a free magazine which
has different editions distributed to selected
Melbourne suburbs. The nature of the
joint venture allowed real estate agents to
directly profit from the publishing of their
own adverts.
Fairfax reportedly paid $35 million in
cash and $35 million in assets for a 50 per
cent stake in MMP in December 2011.
As part of the deal, Fairfax merged its
32-masthead strong Fairfax Community
Network papers – which competed directly
with The Weekly Review for real estate
advertising dollars – into MMP. Although
the venture is successful, with an expansive
website as well as the print editions, 12 of
the original suburban mastheads have been
axed since the merger.
Separately, there are a number of
interesting stand-alone businesses that
have survived well beyond the start-up
phase, notably the IT publication Anthill
linked with James Tuckerman and IT Wire
linked with Stan Beer. There is also The
Sheet, a daily banking newsletter produced
by former Australian Financial Review
journalist Ian Rogers.
A
USTRALIAN start-ups look to the
US for leadership and new ideas
in this area. The prototype ‘startup to riches’ story would have to
be the online news site, the Huffington Post,
which was sold as a four-year-old company
with annual revenues of $60 million to AOL
for $315 million in 2011.
X
13
Q OUR MEDIA
X Following the remarkable success of
the Huffington Post deal, the US has seen
a range of online ventures flourish. There
have been some outstanding successes and
some intriguing ventures that may signal
future directions for Australian start-ups.
Founded just four years ago, New Yorkbased entertainment website Buzzfeed has
grown to employ more than 240 people,
with around 100 in editorial.
It has been widely reported the group is
operating on a cash profit and has not spent
all of the $46 million it has raised from banks
and venture capitalists. The site focuses on
material that once would have been the
hunting ground of tabloid newspapers and
some women’s magazines – entertainment,
celebrity and funny animal stories.
And in what may be a pointer to the
future of all media, up to 40 per cent of
Buzzfeed’s traffic comes from social media.
The Wall Street Journal website reports that
12 per cent of its traffic is now from social
media. In Australia, Business Spectator
reports that close to 5 per cent of its traffic is
now from social media.
However, one sobering aspect of Buzzfeed
is that it is primarily an aggregator, making
news and features from stories sourced from
other websites and the struggling giants of
old media such as daily newspapers and TV
current affairs shows.
The non-profit sector
Some of the most interesting journalism,
particularly investigative journalism, is being
produced by not-for-profit enterprises.
Australia’s philanthropic ecosystem is
obviously not as developed as that in the
US, but nonetheless there are some very
impressive start-ups in this area.
New Matilda is a venture which was given
a second life thanks to crowdfunding. The
Conversation is a more elaborate enterprise
– directly funded by universities – which
seeks to take academic work into the
broader community through the platform
of conventional journalism.
New Matilda – The New Matilda website
has a socially liberal perspective on national
affairs journalism. The venture was facing
closure in 2010 so long-time editor Marni
Cordell used Pozible, Australia’s best-known
crowdfunding website, to attract small-scale
contributions. New Matilda has so far raised
a cumulative $175,000 from supporters on
the Pozible site. (In September 2013 New
Matilda was again actively seeking funds to
extend the life of the publication.)
The Global Mail – The Global Mail website
also offers a socially liberal view of local
and international affairs. It is funded
substantially by web entrepreneur Graeme
Wood, with a $15 million commitment
over five years.
There can be explicit or implicit pressures
from major funders to ‘toe the party line’,
whatever that line may be
The journalism produced at The Global
Mail has often been excellent, and it has
received several Walkley nominations, but
it has been struggling to achieve popular
success. The weakness of the model appears
to have been in the vacuum created by
having strong funding. Paradoxically, not
needing to make a profit may have led the
group to initially make less effort on being
noticed by the wider media.
The Global Mail may be further pressured
following the launch of an Australian edition
of The Guardian, another operation which
might technically be classified in the nonprofit category as its ownership is ultimately
linked with the Scott Trust.
The Conversation – Meanwhile, The
Conversation website, which is most closely
associated with former Age editor Andrew
Jaspan, operates on very different lines.
The site collects and to some extent translates
work done by academics in Australia and
then uses the “creative commons” internet
system to allow newspapers and other
outlets to reproduce the work. Former
Crikey editor Misha Ketchell is the editor
at The Conversation.
The site is largely bankrolled by the major
universities, and it’s crucial to note that part
of the performance reviews of academics
concerns their ability to disseminate their
work to the public. The Conversation has
created a solution to a problem that had
beset universities for decades.
The universities contributing to
The Conversation put in around $75,000
each per annum. This funding was topped
up in the 2013-2014 Federal Budget to the
tune of $2 million. The website’s model
has now been reproduced in the UK and
may spread further.
A
S MIGHT be reasonably
expected, the US has a plethora of
philanthropically funded ventures,
ranging from significant forces
such as ProPublica (an investigative site)
through to small ventures such as Spot.us
(where readers fund single stories).
Other US examples include Mother Jones,
the San Francisco-based journalism review,
The Christian Science Monitor (owned by
the First Church of Christ Scientist), the
Huffington Post Investigative Fund (funded
jointly by an initial donation of $2 million
from the Huffington Post and The Atlantic
Philanthropies).
ProPublica – This high-profile operation
is led by a number of former Wall Street
Journal (WSJ) professionals and is funded by
Herbert and the late Marion Sandler – a US
couple who made their original fortune in
the financial services industry. The Sandler
wealth still supports ProPublica to the tune
of $10 million plus per annum. Among the
founders of the group in 2007 were Paul
Steiger, a former managing editor of the WSJ,
and current managing editor Dick Tofel, a
former assistant publisher at the WSJ.
ProPublica has more than 30 reporters
out of a total staff of 40. The group has
been linked with a series of important
investigations in recent years, which has
led to a slight widening of its funding base
to around 2300 retail supporters and some
revenue from sales and advertising.
It specialises in investigative journalism,
which it disseminates through the US quality
press. In total it now has more than 90 media
partners who reproduce the investigative
stories through a variety of channels. It
also has its fair share of critics, from those
who cite the Sandlers’ role in the sub-prime
mortgage scandals to others who carp at the
substantial salaries paid to senior editors.
Similarly, recent academic work
has highlighted the prosaic realities of
philanthropically funded institutes. There
can be explicit or implicit pressures from
major funders to ‘toe the party line’, whatever
that line may be. Moreover, it is clear that
the very nature of philanthropic funding
can be erratic and much time can be spent
by non-profits catering to the requirements
of keeping funders happy and ensuring that
funding is in place for future years.
Considering the scale of the Australian
media industry, the ample supply of capital
and the general buoyancy of the ASX as a
funding option, there is a surprising lack
of media start-up activity, especially of a
scale that can offer significant employment
opportunities to journalists.
Nevertheless, there is an encouraging
level of new funding models emerging for
the media. There is no suggestion these new
models will replace the role played by major
newspapers or free-to-air television stations,
but the more times new media ventures
are attempted, the more likely it is that new
titles will succeed. Let’s hope there are more
ventures such as Issimo coming down the
line very soon.
James Kirby is managing editor of
Eureka Report and was a co-founder and
shareholder in AIBM
Matt Davidson is an illustrator whose work
appears in The Age and the Sunday Age
On a global
mission
Heading into its second year,
The Global Mail website is
carving a niche for deep-dive
projects and data journalism.
Chief executive Jane Nicholls
expands on their aims for the
online publication
P
lease permit me a single legacymedia lament: I can’t believe how
slow so much work goes in the
Wondrous World of the Web. When
I leapt from print to the internet, I prepared
myself for warp-speed everything. But apart
from correcting on the fly (the deplorable
“not wrong for long” mantra), the absence
of the clanking presses, the papers-on-trucks
and the people waiting for their change after
handing over cash for the end product, print
is so much faster when you’re talking about
tinkering with your design.
I remember not merely telex rooms, but
also the days when art boards with waxed
bromides of typesetting and taped-on
transparencies (physical photo files, people),
all carefully overlaid with tracing paper,
would be flown by plane to Hong Kong to be
separated into film, plated out into sections,
tested on dye sheets, printed, stitched,
bundled, boxed and shipped back to Australia
(and wave bye-bye to your scheduled on-sale
date if a dock strike intervened).
Hard to believe, but in those carbonbigfoot publishing days, you could “deploy”
a redesign in the very next issue of your
magazine. It would still be back in port faster
than any seemingly minor changes you might
want to make to your custom website.
If you remember The Global Mail‘s
February 2012 launch position, we were, er,
reclining, and it took our site eight months
to move from side-scrolling to upright. I rest
my code-is-slow case.
But once I swallowed that single surprise,
the myriad possibilities of how journalism
can come alive so powerfully online opened
up before me like a jewel box, especially as I’m
working with a sparkling team of old hands,
bright sparks, geeks and quiet geniuses.
There are just over 20 of us, including our
paid interns, and we are wholly funded by
a sole philanthropist, Graeme Wood. The
Global Mail is free to access, free of advertising
and, therefore, free of the usual commercial
pressure. We well understand that there’s
plenty to envy right there and also that people
We have an express mission to aim for
positive social impact in all that we do
From a special
feature on mining in
Bulga, NSW, a Rio
Tinto site glows as
miners work through
the night. Photo: Ella
Rubeli/The Global Mail
have, rightly, high expectations of us.
In our second year, we have narrowed our
focus. Our shift is deliberately away from
stories that will be covered elsewhere – and
that makes us a very precious publisher to
investigative reporters and narrative writers
who want to tell new stories, in depth and
with context.
We are building projects in areas that we
believe are not being covered – either at all,
or not in enough depth.
As Global Mail editor, Lauren Martin,
puts it: “For journalists who want to delve
into big ideas, those genuinely curious and
independent thinkers who want to test ideas
through data (rather than use it to prove a
point), we’re the best partner around.”
And she’s right. Our data team has
produced amazing storytelling visualisations,
and for journalists who know their story
is best told in video and multimedia, we’re
developing new platforms for doing this.
“The town that wouldn’t disappear” by
Bernard Lagan and Ella Rubeli showed how
a multimedia treatment (brought to life by
our wonderful in-house dev team) can make
beautiful long-form text even more vivid.
It literally added the sounds of the people
and place to the experience of the story about
Bulga, a NSW town resisting a coal mine
expansion by Rio Tinto.
Our Drug Money series, by Clare Blumer,
Debra Jopson and Mike Seccombe, also with
the aid of our data and dev team, showed
the value of sustained investigations; we’re
not only tallying the money trail, but digging
into it for stories and making it searchable for
other researchers.
“For people (whistleblowers or reporters)
who want to expose a wrong, The Global
Mail is a secure place to do that,” says Martin.
“And for journalists who want to find things
out, rather than pull together what’s already
known, we’re an outlet that can support that
reporting and writing.”
We have an express mission to aim for
positive social impact in all that we do. An
example is Jo Chandler’s ongoing coverage
of Papua New Guinea. Her story about
the persecution of women as witches was
recommended and read by the likes of
Pulitzer-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof
and hundreds of thousands of others. The
narrative of her own multi-drug-resistant TB,
told as a story of the country’s plague rather
than vanity publishing, captured the attention
of Bill Gates, doctors, scientists and others
around the world.
“But like any publication, we say ‘no’ to
pitches more often than we say ‘yes’ – and
sometimes it almost hurts to say no to a
compelling human-interest story, but those
stories have plenty of homes,” notes Martin.
To ensure the widest possible audience for
our work we have partnered with established
players, including ABC Radio National, SBS
Dateline, The Daily Beast and The Guardian
– both the Australian online edition and
the UK mother ship, which ran additional
material from our Kiribati feature series by
Mike Bowers and Bernard Lagan. In July, we
became the first institutional member of the
International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists (ICIJ).
But I’ll leave the last word to editor Lauren
Martin. “For The Global Mail, 2013 has been
a year of sharpening focus,” she says, “and
the result is a media outlet with a distinctive,
credible voice, and a valuable source in
Australia’s journalistic ecosystem.”
Jane Nicholls was a magazine writer and
editor, most recently in New York as editor at
large of Time Inc’s People magazine, prior to
joining The Global Mail
15
Q ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Would you
like a policy
with that?
Election Watch harnessed
academic brainpower to analyse
the main parties’ policies, but as
Cathy Harper explains, policy
documents could be hard to find.
Cartoon by David Rowe
T
here’s a widespread view, confirmed
in many people’s minds by the past
two federal election campaigns, that
politics has become more about
spin than substance.
There’s also a frustration that the 24-hour
news cycle exacerbates this situation by
focusing on the personalities and the headline
or sound bite at the expense of policy analysis.
The University of Melbourne’s website
Election Watch, which was launched not long
before the official 2013 election campaign
started, is a model for a new type of public
debate in Australia.
The aim was to get away from the
poll-driven horse race aspects of much
of the media coverage and focus on the
substance, including the issues that weren’t
being aired elsewhere.
We also wanted to offer another point
of difference – independent and rigorous
academic analysis.
Among other things, we created a
repository of policy documents from the
three main parties (the Labor Party, Coalition
and the Greens) accompanied by expert
comment from University of Melbourne
academics. Voters could read the policy
documents for themselves, consider the
analysis and make up their own minds.
There’s clearly an appetite for this kind
of thing. We received more than 67,000 visits
during the 12 weeks Election Watch was
published. Importantly, less than 10 per cent
were from a University of Melbourne domain,
which shows wide engagement with the
general public.
The website had more than 20,000 visits in
the week leading up to election day (Saturday,
September 7) and 13,000 from the day before
the election (Friday, September 6) to the day
after (Sunday, September 8) inclusive. This
is a significant achievement, given the
intensity of the mainstream media’s coverage
of the election during this period.
Providing easy access to primary
documents and offering informed analysis
Looking back
to previous
elections is
one way to
think about
how things
have changed
and how
others have
stayed the
same
is how the mainstream media should work,
but that function is being eroded by the
pressures of constant deadlines and having
fewer journalists.
Early on in the life of the Election Watch
website, it became clear that another reason
there wasn’t much public discussion about
policy was because there simply wasn’t
much policy to discuss.
We enthusiastically tried to create a policy
repository only to find there were few, if any,
policy documents available.
Instead of statements on the economy,
health, education and the environment, with
detail on what each party wanted to achieve,
how they planned to achieve it and when,
there were only references to these subjects in
disparate media releases, speeches and press
conferences that contained statements or
broad promises, without much detail.
The starkest example of this was the
economy, which both Labor and the Coalition
said was their main concern, and yet about
which voters didn’t get full details until the
final few days of the campaign.
We also found that parties often named
a document as a “policy”, when it was really
only a broad promise without any clearly
stated plan about how the promise would
be achieved and when, and how much it
might cost. An aspiration surely doesn’t
amount to actual policy?
This situation improved as the campaign
officially got underway and parties did
release documents containing more detail.
University of Melbourne academics (and
alumni and students) were able to share their
expertise and contribute to the community’s
general knowledge.
Election Watch also tried to put some of
these issues in historical context. If you haven’t
done so already, have a look at Malcolm
Fraser’s official 1977 election diary published
exclusively by Election Watch, or listen to
Liberal Party campaign ads, 1940s style.
Looking back to previous elections is one
way to think about how things have changed
and how others have stayed the same. What
issues have completely dropped off the
agenda? Which have not been resolved – even
over many years? How realistic is it for a
leader to promise a hard line or a quick fix for
a perennial problem?
The mainstream news media often can’t do
this analysis. It focuses on what is new – what
happened today. In an election campaign,
this naturally lends itself to reporting on the
daily events of the leaders.
This sort of reporting can successfully
convey information about announcements,
but it can get hijacked by the parties’ highly
staged campaign stunts. The frenetic pace
of campaigning also means journalists don’t
have time to put events and announcements
into context.
Partly this lack of proper scrutiny is
being addressed by the rise of fact-checking
sections of the media – designed to check
the truth of politicians’ statements or slogans.
However, we also need “promise checking”.
Politicians make a lot of promises in election
campaigns. Which of these will be fulfilled,
partly fulfilled or abandoned?
This is the kind of work universities are
perfectly placed to undertake. Academics’
expertise and independence can be harnessed
as part of the democratic process.
Perhaps in Election Watch 2.0.
Cathy Harper was the editor of Election
Watch. She has been a journalist and producer
at SBS and the ABC since 2000
David Rowe is a Walkley-winning cartoonist
with The Australian Financial Review
Just the facts ma’am
The election is over but Australia’s new fact-checking groups live on. Peter Fray, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact,
and Russell Skelton, editor of ABC Fact Check, tell us why that’s important. Illustration by Sharon Murdoch
Isn’t checking facts supposed to be the
basic work of journalists? Is the rise of
fact-checking bodies a symptom of a
failing media?
PETER FRAY: PolitiFact is a different form of
journalism. We fact-check statements made
by politicians and make a conclusion [from
“True” to “Pants on Fire”]. We aren’t aiming
to replace the work of existing journalists.
PolitiFact has shown it works well in
partnership with existing media – Seven and
Fairfax Media were partners for the election.
PolitiFact’s success says more about how our
industry is evolving, how the ecosystem is
changing, rather than any failure on the part
of existing media.
RUSSELL SKELTON: With the massive
restructuring of the print media there are far
fewer journalists to report and edit copy.
Gone are readers and check subs. The integrity
of subediting has been heavily compromised
by outsourcing. The advent of the 24/7
news cycle places extraordinary demands
on reporters to turn around news stories,
leaving less time to investigate the veracity of
statements and claims made by politicians,
pressure groups and spin doctors. I’d say factchecking is the inevitable consequence of the
rapidly changing media landscape.
What makes your organisation unique,
and where do you see it fitting into the
broader media landscape?
FRAY: Well, PolitiFact was the first and
remains the only stand-alone fact-checking
site.
We deploy a method that’s been tried
and tested in the US for over six years. Our
various grades of rulings are well defined and
can be clearly understood. We reveal who
we’ve spoken to and link to all digital sources,
so a reader can go and look up what we’ve
used in the fact check and disagree with us.
They often do.
As for the bigger picture, we are a small part
of a larger movement that at once re-states
what journalism is for – that is, to hold the
powerful to account – and at the same time
uses the tools of the web to do so.
SKELTON: ABC Fact Check is online, on
Twitter, on Facebook, on radio and on TV
across a range of programs including the 7pm
news, News 24, Lateline and Lateline Business.
We reach more people on more platforms
than any other fact-checking organisation in
Australia. One of our most recent fact checks
on “turning back the boats” had 40,000 hits
online and on mobile.
What impact do you think your
organisation had on the election?
FRAY: We were used and abused by all sides
of politics. Labor quoted us against Liberal
and vice versa. We informed voters. We were
an alternative source of information and a
gateway or guide to information sources.
We made over 180 fact-checks. Did we stop
pollies stretching the truth, often to beyond
breaking point? No, we didn’t. But that’s
not to say that they or their staff weren’t
increasingly mindful that we were about.
SKELTON: Some politicians stopped
making or corrected statements following
a Fact Check verdict. Others, such as Kevin
Rudd, simply ignored them and kept on
repeating claims that were not credible. Our
primary aim is to inform our viewers and
readers online, not to reprimand. We avoid
moralistic pronouncements and tabloid
determinations.
Have you had a favourite “truth”
you particularly enjoyed proving or
debunking?
FRAY: Well, the most persistent “False” of
the election was Labor’s claim about the
Coalition’s $70 billion black hole. On the
same theme, we gave a “False” to the Libs
for claiming that all their policies were fully
costed and fully funded.
SKELTON: There are many: Joe Hockey
exaggerating claims on debt; Penny Wong’s
claim on the Coalition’s $70 billion black
hole; Palmer on asylum seekers being paid
more than pensioners.
There is a hunger (indeed a demand) for
information stripped of spin, cant and ideology
How useful can a fact be without the
context of journalistic framing?
FRAY: Our fact checks don’t ignore relevant
context. We write about context in virtually
all fact checks. We do journalism. We are
journalists.
SKELTON: What we publish is not framed
by a preconceived opinion that slots facts
into a contrived narrative. During the federal
election we were retweeted by all sides of
politics, an indication that our verdicts were
taken seriously. Research tells us there is a
hunger (indeed a demand) for information
stripped of spin, cant and ideology. Young
people don’t like their news spoonfed by news
outlets with agendas.
With the election over, what’s next?
FRAY: We are planning to launch the
Abbott-O-Meter to keep track of the new
PM’s promises. And I do fancy the MicrO-Meter for the new Senate from mid next
year. But our immediate challenge is to firm
either new or existing media partnerships or
new revenue streams. If anyone’s got a spare
$100K, I am all ears.
SKELTON: We intend to publish an
ongoing report card on election promises.
But we are also scrutinising a range of issues
including drugs in sport, the so-called
housing bubble, coal seam gas, foreign
land ownership and claims made by small
business against the business practices of
the big supermarkets.
Sharon Murdoch is a political cartoonist
whose work appears in several New Zealand
newspapers; Twitter @domesticanimal
17
Pencils at 20 paces
It was a dull election for cartoonists. Tony Abbott was
on his bike, Kevin Rudd was being Kevin, the result
was a foregone conclusion… so Patrick Cook gives
thanks for the craziest Senate in years
T
he 2013 election offered only limited opportunities
for the nation’s cartoonists to seize the nation’s
attention. This is because the results were foretold.
The necessary tension, controversy, clash of Titans,
gaffes and bloopers were absent.
Mr Abbott would win the election. Mr Rudd would lose
the election, descend further into delusion, and make an
impassioned and delirious speech about how he, Mr Rudd,
personally, had won. No-one would mention the G word,
least of all Ms Gillard herself. This duly happened.
The other problem was that the nation’s cartoonists
depend upon the nation’s journalists to alert us to what is
really going on. Otherwise we would have to leave the office
and find out for ourselves, and get nothing done, and our
coffee would get cold.
The journalists did not know what was going on because the
electorate kept it a secret. The electorate had decided not only
to demand a change of government, but to demand much less
Clockwise from left:
Parachuting Pete: Eric Lobbecke, The Australian
In the fold: Neil Matterson, The Sunday Mail
The fine print: Cathy Wilcox, The Sydney Morning Herald
Big ticket items: Glen Le Lievre, contributing
cartoonist for Fairfax and The New Yorker
Walking undead: Jason Chatfield, freelance,
jasonchatfield.com
Running gag: John Tiedemann, Daily Telegraph
Smoke signals: Fiona Katauskas, freelance,
fionakatauskas.com
In the Senate the electorate voted in
overwhelmingly tiny numbers for cars,
guns, sport, sex and Clive Palmer, just
to see what would happen
government or, at any rate, a much less recognisable government.
So it was that in the Senate the electorate voted in overwhelmingly
tiny numbers for cars, guns, sport, sex and Clive Palmer, just
to see what would happen. Clive Palmer was well known as
Australia’s widest politician, but not as a potential balance of
power. And what if the Tasmanian Sex Party had got up? If only
we had known.
So it was that while the nation’s cartoonists dutifully charted
Mr Rudd’s reincarnation as a kamikaze blue-arsed fly, and Mr
Abbott’s bicycling holiday, many of the cheeriest cartoons were
only possible as the results came in. An outstanding exception,
and it is on these pages, is Neil Matterson’s cartoon, featuring
polling station origami with the Senate ballot paper. Bold,
prophetic, beautifully imagined, and it is funny because it is true.
Patrick Cook is a cartoonist and columnist. His latest book,
with Alan Hargreaves, is 60 Second Recharge: Work and life made
simple (Wilkinson Publishing, $19.99). Please buy one.
19
Circle the ABC wagons!
The Howard years were a time
of funding cuts and culture
wars for the ABC, and Quentin
Dempster wonders what PM
Tony Abbott has in mind. Cartoon
by Andrew Weldon
Anton Enus: What about the public broadcasters
Mr Abbott… another soft target… are the ABC
and SBS in the firing line?
Tony Abbott: I trust everyone actually listened
to what Joe Hockey said last week and again
this week… no cuts to education, no cuts to
health, no change to pensions, no change to the
GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.
– SBS News ‘live cross’ interview, Friday,
September 6, 2013.
to the ABC Act to enshrine merit selection
of ABC directors were finally adopted by the
Australian parliament in 2012.
In the event that the Abbott government’s
latest commission of audit recommends
arbitrary funding cuts to staunch “Chris
Bowen’s black hole”, the ABC’s current board
will be in a much better position to apply its
statutory independence.
The ABC is accountable and should
be able to mount a convincing case of its cost
effectiveness. Since 1986, the ABC’s operational
base funding has been reduced 23 per cent in
real terms, and its full-time equivalent staff
from 7000 to 4600. The record shows that the
Hawke and Keating governments screwed
the ABC into the ground from 1986 to the
change of government in 1996. The Howard
government, sooled on by the Murdoch press,
followed suit.
H
e said it.
In the final hours of the federal
election campaign the incoming
prime minister, Tony Abbott, at last
verbalised a Coalition commitment. It remains
to be seen if the commitment will stand.
Public broadcasters are entitled to be
paranoid. In 1996 the incoming Howard
government immediately dishonoured a
pre-election commitment to maintain funding
to the ABC and SBS in real terms. Within
a year the ABC board ordered the industrial
“execution” of 1000 staff as a commission
of audit recommended cuts across the public
sector to staunch what the new government
said was “Beazley’s black hole”.
In the ABC’s case, $11 million was removed
from funding immediately with $55 million
defunded from the 1997 annual appropriation
onwards. The ABC entered into what it called
a “reshaping” – a euphemism that masked a
rapid reduction in original Australian output,
the vandalising of Radio Australia, and an overreliance on other broadcasters’ shelf programs.
ABC TV looked like a second-hand version
of UK TV. So much for enhancing a “sense of
national identity” as the ABC Charter required.
Right through the Howard years, the ABC
and its surviving ‘creatives’ endured what
was called the culture wars. The ABC board
was stacked with political partisans and,
in 2000, Jonathan Shier was appointed as
managing director. During Shier’s short reign
a Senate inquiry report, Above Board, carried
recommendations for the first time that an
end had to be put to political interference in
the ABC. The concept of what were called
“the Nolan rules” emerged, advocating an
arms-length publicly advertised merit selection
process to stop board stacking. Amendments
News Corp’s The Australian has demanded
that the ABC be funded through the
begging bowl: pledge-plea telethons like
the niche PBS in the US
What was galling through all this was to
see the testicular hold the then gatekeepers
of media policy – Rupert Murdoch and Kerry
Packer – had on our prime ministers.
There was Paul Keating’s cross-media
ownership rule in 1987, through which
Rupert swallowed the Herald and Weekly
Times newspaper group, rendering
competition policy in print a sick joke.
Kerry P enjoyed years of political protection
as subscription (pay) television was kept
out of Australia, until it had to be allowed
in from 1994. The Howard government
constrained digital multi-channelling from
its introduction in 2001, which protected
free-to-air broadcasters, particularly the Nine
Network, giving James Packer plenty of time
to bail out to private equity investors by 2006.
Good luck to them, you might say, in the
push/shove spirit of Australian free enterprise.
But the attacks on the ABC were unfair
and unwarranted. Whatever its faults and
deficiencies (there are undoubtedly many),
the ABC since 1932 and SBS since 1979
have made a significant contribution to
Australia’s success as a robust and informed
polyglot democracy.
Through some modest funding
enhancements in the latter part of the Howard
years and then through the Rudd 1 and
Gillard governments, the ABC has turned itself
into a digital revolutionary. With its smaller
staff it has ridden the digital multi-channel
and broadband wave with ABC1, ABC2, ABC3
(children’s) and ABC News 24, digital radio,
the innovative iView re-play technology and
downloadable content via iPod, iPad and
mobile devices.
Needless to say there is a debate raging
internally and externally about the quality and
distinctiveness of the content. But its audience
support and interactions have made the ABC
highly accessible and relevant to the lives of the
taxpayers who pay for it. This represents great
hope for a sustainable future for an Australian
public broadcasting/cybercasting system.
A $50 million cut now would be a hammer
blow to the ABC. To strike such a blow at the
behest of Australian private sector operators,
News Corp and Fairfax Media, as they try
to build paywalls around their own digital
content, would indicate malice.
News Corp’s The Australian has demanded
that the ABC be funded through the begging
bowl: pledge-plea telethons like the niche
PBS in the US. Fairfax more recently through
a Sydney Morning Herald editorial has
demanded that the ABC be broken up into
core and non-core funded functions and
perhaps made to charge for its online content.
This is a bit rich coming after successive
incompetent Fairfax boards failed to protect
their rivers-of-gold revenues from internet
raiders in jobs, cars and real estate.
While we wait to see what happens with PM
Tony Abbott now in power, those who support
mainstream, non-commercial and publicly
funded public broadcasting/cybercasting will
have to prepare to fight hard for it if necessary.
We must never get tired.
Quentin Dempster is a journalist and ABC
broadcaster. His book Death Struggle: How
political malice and boardroom power plays
are killing the ABC (Allen & Unwin) was
published in 2000.
Andrew Weldon is a Melbourne-based
freelance cartoonist; www.andrewweldon.com
Voters find themselves all over the map
Matt Liddy believes the ABC’s Vote Compass online tool drew Australian voters into the political conversation like never before
M
oments after Kevin Rudd took
the drive to “Yarralumla” to call
the 2013 federal election, the
ABC launched Vote Compass,
an online tool aimed at engaging Australians
in thinking, learning and talking about
critical matters of public policy.
The project merged social science,
online interactivity, data journalism and
political analysis – and along the way it
helped shape the national conversation
around the federal election.
The preparation for Vote Compass had
begun months earlier and was a close
collaboration between ABC News election
coordinator Gillian Bradford, election analyst
Antony Green, other ABC journalists and
a team of political scientists in Canada and
Australia – led by Vote Compass founder Cliff
van der Linden. The groundwork included:
% a social media and online crowdsourcing
initiative to help identify the key issues of
concern to Australians in the lead-up to
the election
% consultation between ABC journalists,
Antony Green and the Vote Compass
academic panel about what questions
should be asked in the survey
% discussion between the ABC and the
political parties to encourage the parties’
involvement in the process of plotting
their views on the issues.
From the moment Vote Compass was
launched, the response was overwhelming. By
election day more than 1 million Australians
had answered a series of questions to find out
how their own political views compared to
the major parties’ policy positions.
The tool received a significant response
from every electorate in the country. It
turned out that many Australians – often
regarded as completely disengaged from
politics – were champing at the bit to know
more about party policies, they just didn’t
want to have to wade through a mountain of
claim and counter-claim to find it.
Anecdotally, many users reported they
were unsurprised about how Vote Compass
plotted them against the parties, but there
were some who said the questions and results
had made them think more deeply about
long-held assumptions.
Thousands of those who completed the
survey shared their results on social media
and encouraged others to take part. Parodies
and mini-memes popped up, from a TwitPic
that had Pac-Man eating the whole Australian
political landscape to a T-shirt design
promising “the real Australian Vote Compass”.
Two friends discuss
their Vote Compass
results with ABC
Local Radio’s Spencer
Howson in Brisbane.
Photo: Emma Skyes,
ABC Local
The response rate meant the ABC had created what social scientists believe
to be the largest survey of political views in Australian history
The sharing and discussion on Twitter
and in particular Facebook became a huge
driver of traffic back to Vote Compass – and
meant it was reaching an audience beyond
those already engaged with traditional ABC
News broadcast channels.
From a journalistic perspective, the huge
sample size created a rich seam of data that
revealed where the electorate stood on key
policy battlegrounds, including the economy,
asylum seekers, climate change, paid parental
leave and gay marriage.
The response rate meant the ABC had
created what social scientists believe to be the
largest survey of political views in Australian
history, and allowed the data to be weighted
against numerous Census demographics to
create a representative sample of the wider
Australian population.
Working closely with Vote Compass
founder Clifton van der Linden and his ‘big
data’ experts, ABC journalists, designers and
developers turned the online results into
news stories, analysis pieces and interactive
online visualisations.
The approach to telling the story online was
multi-tiered and multiplatform, with the goal
of giving people the option of dipping into the
Vote Compass results or taking a deep dive into
the data. The coverage included:
% I nteractive data visualisations showcasing
what Australians were saying about the issues.
The visualisations included breakdowns X
10 things Vote Compass
reveals about Australians
1. Australia’s 11 most right-leaning
seats are all in Queensland. (The
most left-leaning is Grayndler
in Sydney’s inner west, held by
Anthony Albanese.)
2. The Coalition holds Australia’s
tenth most left-leaning seat, thanks
to Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth
in Sydney’s east.
3. Protestant voters rated Tony Abbott
(a Catholic) higher than Kevin
Rudd (an Anglican).
4. Men are much more likely than
women to rate broadband and the
economy as the most important
issues.
5. Gay marriage has majority support.
6. Almost half of Labor voters oppose
the party’s asylum seeker policy.
7. The further respondents live from
the inner city, the more likely they
are to support turning back asylum
seekers’ boats.
8. Australians want mining companies
to pay more tax.
9. An overwhelming majority
supports legalised voluntary
euthanasia for the terminally ill.
10. 61 per cent of Australians want the
government to do more to tackle
climate change.
21
X of how different demographic groups
responded and allowed users to find
their own stories in the data. The
interactives included:
% L
eft to right: a data visualisation that used
Vote Compass responses to rank every
electorate in the country from “more leftleaning” to “more right-leaning”.
% B
attlelines: an interactive map identifying
the top 20 seats where voters were most at
odds, which sparked furious discussions on
social media and local radio.
% M
ost important issues: an analysis of the
issues most important to Australian voters,
with the economy the runaway winner.
% S tories highlighting the most newsworthy
findings, such as how voters rated Tony
Abbott and Kevin Rudd on matters of trust
and competence (neither rated higher than
4 out of 10).
% A
ntony Green’s rich analysis on what Vote
Compass revealed about the attitudes
of Australian voters on everything from
conscience issues to leadership, the
economy and asylum seekers. He explored
what this revealed about the Australian
political climate.
% S nackable, highly visual charts providing
snippets from the Vote Compass results,
designed to drive further sharing and again
engage users on social media platforms.
Antony Green is not just an election guru in
Australia – even Canadian political scientists
would line up for his autograph
Whenever a new dataset was published, the
Vote Compass team released detailed reports to
ABC broadcasters across the country, allowing
them to identify the stories most relevant to
their local audiences.
Reporter Adrian Raschella took Vote
Compass to the streets, uncovering the views
of a wide range of Australians – from gym
junkies to taxi drivers. He also made the data
understandable for a wide audience, with his
reports on nightly 7pm news broadcasts as
well as on the ABC’s News Breakfast.
The Vote Compass results provided an
enormous range of stories across ABC outlets,
prompting discussions on Local Radio from
Karratha to Launceston, on national news
bulletins, 7.30, AM and Radio National’s
Breakfast with Fran Kelly among many others.
It informed questioning of local candidates
and provided a point of difference in a political
climate too often dominated by polls, puns
and party leaders.
Matt Liddy is ABC News Online’s executive
producer of special coverage; Twitter @mattliddy
6 things I learned working
on Vote Compass
1. Working with Excel spreadsheets
on your screen will make your
journalistic colleagues too scared
to interrupt you.
2. Canadians call electorates
that have strongly held views
“passionate ridings”.
3. Just one stray character among
thousands of lines of code can
have a big impact.
4. Antony Green is not just an
election guru in Australia – even
Canadian political scientists
would line up for his autograph.
5. Collaborating across oceans
means one party has to forgo
sleep – in this case the mildmannered Canadians.
6. Colour-coding the Excel
spreadsheets in point one is
the journalistic equivalent of
splitting the atom.
The week that was
Stephen Olsen offers a trans-Tasman take on
the brave new worlds explored at the Walkley
Foundation’s Storyology event in August 2013
F
rom beginning to end, the experience of being in
Sydney in August for Storyology was akin to being
amongst a diverse family, assembling together not to
bury journalism, in all its grand and granular forms,
but to breathe new life into it.
The depth and breadth of the line-up over five days could
have been overwhelming, but a neatly convivial stage setting
meant it retained the feeling of being invited into a suburban
lounge to meet a constantly changing crop of both known
and unknown relatives.
In my case, being a journalism refugee from New Zealand
meant the names and faces were more unknown than for
most. Being an assiduous list maker I’d even gone so far as to
create my own document of speaker bios (about 100 all told)
to get a better handle on the who’s who in front of me.
Not long into Storyology, news broke that Amazon founder
and billionaire Jeff Bezos had added The Washington Post to
his otherwise book-laden collection of business interests, at
what USA Today noted was a much lower sum than some
start-ups that have only been around for a few years.
While not exactly a shockwave it did prompt some quizzical
and querulous reverberations around the room, as it is still
doing in the wider world of media watchers. As observed in
The Sydney Morning Herald’s news review pages that weekend
by Nick O’Malley, it was part of a trend away from public
companies controlling big media – with their demand for
constant and increasing revenue – and towards a new era of
individually mega-rich owners possibly better able to ride X
23
X the waves, wherever that might lead.
The following day, ABC’s innovation
division director Angela Clark posited a
future of “TV everywhere” and “second
screenings”. She pointed out that no market
anywhere could hide from the new common
denominator of unconstrained, deviceempowered content consumption that
younger generations are tapping into.
Using a dating metaphor, Clark observed
that the notion of having an “exclusive
date” with one medium over another is best
considered as an old habit. What she called
“Whenever I can, I try to tell whatever story
I want to tell with pictures. It’s an extension of
the list mentality, which is that people on the
internet are more likely to share things that
they can process intuitively and which give
them an immediate visceral response”
Jack Shepherd, editorial director, BuzzFeed
“serious competition on the couch” is a
patent challenge to “raise the bar (and value)
for compelling content, not lower it”.
It’s a reminder that the disruptions shifting
the ground underneath so many aspects
of our shared world of press, media and
creativity are highly visible and continuously
being played out in the public eye.
One of the recurrent threads during
Storyology was a call to re-scope and more
purposely renew the skills that underpin
the strengths we possess in media – be
that as writers, editors, fact checkers, data
journalists, visual and audio storytellers or
any hybrid-like variation.
When the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson spoke
about the power of the story, she served up
a reminder that it’s imperative for journalists
to “love the detail”. Playing a clip by her
Four Corners predecessor Frank Bennett
(“The price of equality”, October 1966), she
also provided a salient paean to the narrative
power of brevity delivering “a pathos that
can’t be forced”.
What both encouraged and stimulated
me at Storyology was the extent of the
innovative journalism-based endeavours
on show.
Interactive editor Gabriel Dance, of The
Guardian US, doubtless put some minds at
rest when he affirmed a continuing need for
people “who can present stories and build
them out” and assured us that it’s becoming
“much easier again for people not familiar
with computer programming to become
involved”, just as readers are becoming “less
intimidated” by charts and maps.
Many of the situations portrayed at
Storyology resonated with lessons for where
I live and work in Wellington, New Zealand.
Comparable questions have been well aired
at marquee events pertaining directly to the
future of digital journalism – at Webstock in
March and Internet NZ’s NetHui in July.
We share parallel concerns about many
issues that I don’t have space for here,
including the challenge of finding ‘safe’ new
ways to make journalism pay. Some isolated
“Stories, storytelling, can have power. It can
change someone’s life, it can change the world.
So go out, and find your stories, tell your stories,
and tell them well. But listen as well, to the
people that hear your stories”
Lyce Doucet, chief international correspondent, BBC
initiatives such as Scoop Amplifier have been
testing the boundaries, but our ecosystem is
yet to achieve a fraction of the critical mass of
those alternative media outlets being sustained,
if at some struggle, in Australia.
One overly dire way to describe the scene
in New Zealand would be to think of an
Australia without the ABC, SBS, Crikey, New
Matilda, The Global Mail, Guardian Australia,
venues like The Conversation or publications
like The Monthly.
If there is a flipside, it appears the conditions
for start-ups in New Zealand are becoming
more fertile. Recently there has been strong
interest from such major global investors as
Horizons Ventures, a vehicle allied to Hong
Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. Baby steps are
being taken by home-grown crowdfunding
initiatives led by Pledgeme, as well as Telecom’s
Givealittle and the Arts Foundations’ Boosted.
(Kickstarter is also moving down under.)
Later this year, AUT University
in Auckland will be hosting the
2013 gathering of journalism
educators. Plans for a foundation
for public interest journalism are
going to be on the program.
A mission I’ve taken on is to
infuse the thinking on this with
some measure of the inspiration
and motivation taken from the
week that was Storyology.
The digital revolution is
indeed transforming traditional
journalism but the story certainly
isn’t all bad news.
“I’m no longer interested in programmers versus journalists
versus developers. I’m much more interested in the people who
can find the story, who can report the story individually and build
it out themselves… Us, the readers, are becoming more familiar
with charts and graphs and maps and we’re no longer intimidated
or threatened or not interested in them – in fact we see them as
a complement to reporting. And that’s what actually interactive
and news apps teams are: we’re all a complement to the reporter
just the same the way that a 500-word article is a complement to
us” Gabriel Dance, interactive editor, Guardian US
Stephen Olsen is a freelance
writer and ran an event-specific
blog on Storyology at sydneygram.
wordpress.com. The Storyology website
at storyology.org.au has links to videos
and podcasts of keynote speeches
“Too often now, opinion and water-cooler gossip
passes as news. You can give first information reports
but let’s not underplay ourselves in being the last mile,
you know, the buck stops somewhere. When I put out a
piece of news, I pay for it by being the person credible
or incredible, standing at the end of the line.”
Shoma Chaudhury, managing editor, Tehelka
“You have to find the humanity
and you have to find the narrative
to tell the story” Sarah Ferguson,
reporter, Four Corners
25
Q OUR MEDIA
Come spy with me
It was a twisted tale that went from an armed raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion to spying on a journalist and then spying on the
entire nation. Jane Patterson reveals how the NZ government did it. Cartoon by Rod Emmerson
I
n January 2012, the New Zealand police
mounted an early morning armed
raid on Kim Dotcom in his Auckland
mansion. It was at the behest of the
United States, which wanted the internet
millionaire extradited to face charges
including online piracy, racketeering and
copyright infringement. The Government
Communications Security Bureau (GCSB),
New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, assisted
the police on the basis that Kim Dotcom was
not a New Zealand citizen or resident.
That raid sparked off a chain of events that
would eventually bring down a government
minister and a very senior public servant.
It also shone a light on the actions of New
Zealand intelligence agencies and journalists’
important role in a healthy democracy.
After the revelation that the GCSB had
broken the law by assisting the police to carry
out surveillance on Kim Dotcom, as he was in
fact a permanent resident, a wholesale inquiry
into the spy agency was launched.
That report into the GCSB was leaked
to a Fairfax reporter, Andrea Vance, a week
ahead of its scheduled release, and another
inquiry – to find the leak – was established.
Prime Minister John Key delivered the message
that he expected full co-operation from all
ministers and their staff. But one minister,
Peter Dunne (leader of the United Future
party), baulked and resigned his warrant.
Dunne insists he didn’t leak the report, but
that didn’t stop unfounded speculation about
his relationship with Vance, and the release
of email metadata sent between them. It
was later revealed that details about Vance’s
parliamentary swipe card, her phone records –
and also those of Dunne – were supplied to the
inquiry, without Vance or Dunne’s permission.
A subsequent Privileges Committee
inquiry heard that the journalist’s information
was treated in a cavalier manner and that
the protection of her sources – something
the law provides for – was ignored by the
Parliamentary Service, which supplied the
information to the inquiry. The head of
the Parliamentary Service resigned as a result.
The story has many twists and turns,
but the entire episode has highlighted the
work that journalists do to serve the public
interest. As one senior minister wryly noted,
while reporters can be a pain in the butt, they
should be able to go about their business
without having their movements and
communications tracked.
The parliamentary press gallery told the
Privileges inquiry it was appalled by the
That raid sparked off a chain of events that
would eventually bring down a government
minister and a very senior public servant
casual way the journalist’s information had
been handled, without her knowledge and
permission.
Press gallery reporters are not employees
of the Parliamentary Service, but they
access the precinct by swipe cards and
their phones are run through Parliament’s
switchboard, which is information held by
the Parliamentary Service. And although
a journalist’s accreditation is usually dealt
with directly by the Speaker of the House,
neither the Speaker nor Vance’s employer
was notified before the information was
released to the inquiry.
The press gallery noted that the
Parliamentary Service had required some
form of higher authorisation or personal
consent before agreeing to release the
information of the 74 others involved in the
investigation, including Cabinet ministers.
It also told the committee the protection of
journalists’ sources is enshrined in the law;
the Evidence Act states that no journalist or
their employer can be compelled to disclose
a source in a civil or criminal proceeding,
unless ordered by a High Court judge. Case
law also states that this principle should be
upheld generally and that the threshold for
revealing a source should be the protection
of human life, the prevention of a major
crime, or the defence of someone accused or
convicted of a major crime.
The press gallery rejected the notion that
an inquiry established by a politician (in this
case, the prime minister) had the authority
to override those principles, especially in
pursuit of someone who, at worst, had caused
a political embarrassment.
Another consequence of the illegal raid
was a law change that ultimately caused
the government much more discomfort.
The government had said the change was
needed to clarify the framework under
which the GCSB operated, and to make sure
it acted within the law while assisting other
agencies such as the police and the Security
Intelligence Service (SIS). But though the
government steadfastly insisted the new law
was not an extension of the GCSB’s powers,
basically the change meant that the GCSB
can now legally spy on New Zealanders.
In the past the GCSB carried out foreign
surveillance and the SIS had the domestic
focus. The question as to why both agencies
now need authority for domestic surveillance
was never adequately answered by the
government. Instead, the media received
vague answers about the avoidance of
replicating the GCSB’s hi-tech capability.
There were three main political problems
for the government. First, the bill was seen
as a way to retrospectively fix the mistake
of an agency that had been sloppy with the
law. Second, the government could only
curry a one-vote majority to pass the bill.
And, finally, it was widely panned by the Law
Society, the Human Rights Commission and
the Privacy Commission.
Another complicating factor was that
it happened just as Edward Snowden, the
American computer specialist contracted to
the US National Security Agency, was leaking
details of several top secret United States
and British government mass surveillance
programs. Media coverage of Snowden meant
that the dangers of the government accessing
and using citizens’ private information was
high in the public mind.
The law has now passed and the GCSB has
resumed its domestic spying, but not before
a fierce debate about government intrusion
into the lives of private citizens. The adage
that those who are not doing anything wrong
have nothing to fear seems patently false.
Jane Patterson is Radio New Zealand’ s chief
parliamentary reporter and former chair of
the parliamentary press gallery
Rod Emmerson is the editorial cartoonist for
the New Zealand Herald
Panning for gold
With the avalanche of information now available
for free on the internet, journalists of the future
may be less reporters and more curators, writes
Sara Phillips. Cartoon by Judy Horacek
I
didn’t go to the United Nations climate
meeting held in Durban, South Africa
in 2011. In some sense, I didn’t need to.
The activists and climate negotiators
I follow from the @ABCEnvironment Twitter
account broadcast blow-by-blow updates on
proceedings. YouTube clips were uploaded
every few minutes, it seemed. And countless
blogs dissected the negotiations minutely.
By the end of it, I felt as if I had been
there. I even have a sense of the scenery
of Durban from all those YouTube videos.
Nice beach.
Academic Adrienne Russell, from the
University of Denver, examined the role of
climate change activist broadcasting from
Durban in an article published in the journal
Journalism. She quoted former journalist
and climate activist Anuradha Vittachi from
OneClimate, who explained their strategy as,
“Instead of critiquing media we decided to
just do what we say they should be doing.”
OneClimate combined live and justrecorded interviews with “around-the-clock
news, analysis, audio/video and social media
with summit participants and global publics
throughout the event.” The result was a
stream of information that was niche, to be
sure, but also detailed, grounded and honest.
I was reminded of Russell’s article by
remarks from ABC managing director
Mark Scott about the new competitive
landscape for the media sector. He mused
that new competitors to the ABC might
come from unexpected directions and
pointed to US media distribution company
Netflix. What started as a DVD mailing
service has evolved into a subscriber service
streaming programs and films through the
internet. Recently Netflix commissioned
and broadcast its own original content: the
critically acclaimed House of Cards.
Laurie Oakes speculated on the future of
political journalism in the April-June issue
of the Walkley. “[C]ourtesy of the internet
anyone anywhere can now go directly to
many of the same sources that political
journalists use,” he wrote. “…bloggers,
tweeters and others in what is sometimes
called ‘the fifth estate’ now readily access,
interpret and report on a massive amount
of political information that was once the
press gallery’s domain.”
He envisaged a future where political
parties posted their own “news” directly
“Instead of
critiquing
media we
decided to
just do what
we say they
should be
doing”
to the web. Australians could tune in to
Channel Liberal or Channel Labor, each
with its own spin of course. For balance, we
could readily access a little bit of both, with
a dash of Channel Palmer if we fancied.
This vision of the future is not so farfetched. It would not be so different from
clicking through to Quadrant online and
contrasting it with New Matilda to get
a rounded viewpoint of current affairs.
Greg Jericho, aka blogger Grog’s Gamut,
was catapulted into the mainstream media
via his Blogspot work. But how long will it
be before he can stay embedded in Blogspot
and still be regarded as a serious political
commentator? My guess is that time is just
around the corner.
Independent experts, writing from a
position of knowledge, are clearly a soughtafter commodity. The questions they
pose are thoughtful and considered. The
arguments they wrestle with are nuanced.
Plus, a lot of the time, they write for free.
Blog sites like Blogger and WordPress
are chock-full of independent experts
writing on everything from Justin Bieber
to chemistry. Anyone with a passion and a
few hours can become their own publisher.
Sometimes their writing is not the best, but
with thousands of bloggers busily uploading
content every day you’ll find a few flecks of
gold in all that silt.
What will happen when blog hosting
sites wise up to the mountain of gold they
are sitting on? WordPress has a Freshly
Pressed section with “editor’s picks” and
“community favourites”aggregated and
promoted from the latest uploads.
It is rough and ready, but if Freshly
Pressed were to be carefully curated by an
experienced editor, selecting stories for
newsworthiness and timeliness, the site has
the potential to rival mainstream media
outlets. Don’t believe me? Look at Reddit.
Reddit bills itself as “the front page of the
internet”. A community of internet users,
“redditors”, post anything they like the look
of. Other users vote it up or down, with only
the best, most interesting content making it
onto the front page of Reddit.
If your story or blog happens to hit the
front page of Reddit, you can expect tens
of thousands of visitors overnight. It is a
Darwinian but surprisingly polite corner
of the internet.
The main attraction with Reddit, of
course, is that someone else has already
trawled through the silt and brought you
the one fleck of gold. The up-votes from the
community vouch for the value of spending
two minutes reading it.
Unfortunately for professional journalists,
the profusion of free commentary is in
direct competition with us. But what is
needed now, and even more into the future,
is a guide through the silt to find the flecks
of gold.
Perhaps the professional journalists
of the future will not be trained in reporting,
but instead be schooled in curating. Maybe
they will not be cutting their teeth writing
yarns about the local school play, but instead
will learn the basics of aggregation and story
selection as redditors.
With millions of tweeters, bloggers
and instagrammers providing the frontline
reportage for free, the professionals will
be the ones who successfully aggregate and
package the stream of information. Sites
that effectively aggregate the best of the
free content coming from interested experts
and johnnies-on-the-spot will become
the premier trusted sources of information
on the web.
It means that journalism is not entirely
dead, simply that it will be very different and
there will be fewer of us.
The need for good information will never
vanish. With the almost incomprehensible
volume of information coming in from the
web for free, journalism of the future will
be about providing the best of that
information in the best possible package.
In that respect, journalism will remain
substantially unchanged.
Sara Phillips is the ABC’s online
environment editor
Judy Horacek is a freelance cartoonist
based in Melbourne. Her most recent
cartoon collection is If You Can’t Stand
the Heat (Scribe, $29.95)
27
FINALISTS
2013 WALKLEY AWARDS
2013 NIKON-WALKLEY
PHOTO OF THE YEAR
Barat Ali Batoor, The Global Mail,
“The first day at sea”
In his photographic essay “Hazara exodus”,
Batoor documents the desperate journey of
asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Pakistan to
Australia. In September 2012, he was on a boat
with 92 others, hiding below decks to avoid being
spotted by water police and taking turns coming
up for fresh air. After all the years of debate
around “boat people”, Batoor brings us one of
the first glimpses of the journey itself. The judges
praised Batoor’s courage in recording a worldclass image with lasting resonance.
BROADCAST
PARTNER
FINALISTS
I
n 2013 we mark the 58th Walkley
Awards, paying tribute to almost
six decades of Australia’s highest
quality reporting, photography and
storytelling. Our industry may be
undergoing great change but the
quality of Australian journalism is as strong
as ever, with 1335 entries submitted this
year. Just ask the Walkley judges, drawn
from the entrants’ journalistic peers,
who donated their time to examine often
daunting piles of entries and decide
on the Walkley finalists.
Winners will be selected by the Walkley
Advisory Board and announced on
November 28 at a gala dinner in Brisbane.
After a review of the awards system, the
58th Walkley Awards feature some altered
categories to reflect our changing craft.
Notably, for the first time we have awarded
the Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year.
This single image was selected from all
photography entries to embody the year in
news. The judges chose this extraordinary
photograph by Barat Ali Batoor shown on
previous page.
The Walkley Awards would not be
possible without the generous support
of our sponsors, and we thank them for
their ongoing commitment to encouraging
excellence in Australian journalism.
With the world-class quality and breadth
of reporting featured here, it’s clear the
spirit of the Walkley tradition is alive and
well. We congratulate all the 2013 finalists.
Watch the 58th Walkley Awards
on ABC3 from 9.00pm on Thursday,
November 28, 2013.
Print/Text News Report
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY MEDIA SUPER
Josh Massoud, James Hooper and Rebecca Wilson,
The Daily Telegraph, “Rotergate”, “Peptide ‘link’ to NRL star’s
death”, “Dressing shed jabs”
After the launch of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority
(ASADA) investigation into illicit substances in Australian sport,
the DailyTelegraph team tenaciously pursued the scandal. They
exposed issues at the Cronulla Sharks rugby league club and
a culture of cover-ups.
Kate McClymont, The Sydney Morning Herald,
“Obeid’s shopping centre windfall”, “Eddie Obeid’s diaries”,
“ICAC: The hit series”
Reporting on the Independent Commission Against
Corruption’s investigation into former NSW Labor minister
Eddie Obeid, McClymont owned the story with forensic
research and cracking storytelling.
Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, The Age, “Airport
in grip of drug trade”, “Smuggled guns/When good guys go
bad”, “Bikies infiltrate police/With friends like these”
From corruption in the Customs service to exposing
Victoria Police officers with links to bikies, these stories
showed meticulous investigative work. McKenzie and
Baker worked with whistleblowers, leaks and Freedom
of Information requests to expose serious corruption
within law enforcement bodies.
Social Equity Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY SEVEN NETWORK
Tanya Denning and the NITV team, NITV, “CQ: Who
should tell Indigenous stories?” “NITV News, ‘Wave Rock’”,
“Awaken, ‘Cape York’”
With dedicated coverage of Indigenous issues and voices,
NITV leads the way to a fairer representation of Indigenous
Australia in the media.
Steve Pennells, The West Australian, “Untold crisis”,
“Crippled by torture, yet still defiant”, “General’s plea for
assistance a fitting epitaph”
The first journalist to enter military-controlled No Man’s
Land on the Jordanian/Syrian border, Pennells’ evocative
writing brought the face of Syria’s civil war into the homes
of ordinary Australians.
Sarah Whyte and Ben Doherty, The Sydney Morning
Herald, “Don’t abandon us: Bangladeshis”, “Right now we
have nothing”, “Kmart is ready to unpick veil of secrecy that
shrouds its network of garment factories”
Exploring the horrific living and working conditions endured
by Bangladeshi garment makers supplying Australians with
cheap clothing, Whyte and Doherty also highlighted the moral
complexities of terminating the supply.
Multimedia Storytelling
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA
Patrick Abboud, The Feed, SBS, “Tagging the Taliban”
Clandestine Skype interviews with a 23-year-old graffiti
artist lead into an exploration of the oppression of women
in Afghanistan. Malina Suliman fights the Taliban with a paint
can, one tag at a time. The Feed’s 3D multimedia graphic
environment takes you into Malina’s world.
Katharine Viner, Lee Glendinning and Madhvi
Pankhania, Guardian Australia, “Firestorm”
Drawing together words, images, video, audio and
interactives, this project reconstructed the dramatic
story of the January bushfire in Dunalley, Tasmania.
Tony Walters, Nicky Phillips, Francisca Sallato
and Andrew Forbes, The Sydney Morning Herald,
“Bone city unmasked”
Interactive graphics bring to life the stories from a treasure
trove of fossils discovered in outback Queensland. A great
example of how information-dense science reporting can
become accessible and captivating through multimedia.
Photo of the Year
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY NIKON
Barat Ali Batoor, The Global Mail, “The first day at sea”
Asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Pakistan, hidden below
deck to avoid being seen by water police, take turns coming
up for fresh air. Batoor captures the reality of “boat people” in
a way never seen before.
Headline Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY BHP BILLITON
Michael Evans, The Sydney Morning Herald, “Bomb
Alaska!”, “Six degrees of devastation”, “An officer, if not
quite a gentleman”
Adrian Nesbitt, Herald Sun app, “Easy, rider”, “The long
kick goodnight”, “Caucus interruptus”
Rita Williams, The Sydney Morning Herald, “Pell defends
confessional silence over sins of the father”, “Road to riches
paved with good incisions”, “Diaz and confused: Candidate
misses the points”
Coverage of Indigenous Affairs
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY NITV
Tanya Denning and the NITV team, NITV, “CQ: Who should
tell Indigenous stories?”, “NITV News, Wave Rock”, “Awaken,
Cape York”
The first national, free-to-air Indigenous television station
in Australia, NITV has broken stories of national significance
since its launch in December 2012. This entry comprised
an impressive breadth of coverage with unique and
sensitive content.
Fiona Harari, Good Weekend, Fairfax Media, “Growing them up”
A thought-provoking feature on the complexities of “informal
fostering” of Aboriginal children by non-Indigenous families.
Harari canvasses policy makers, childcare agencies, families
and foster parents, broadening awareness of a sensitive issue.
Kathy Marks, Griffith Review, “Channelling Mannalargenna”
In an elegantly written essay, Marks explores Tasmania’s
Indigenous history. She finds reverberations of colonisation
and complex issues around Indigenous identity in today’s
fragmented community.
Coverage of Community and
Regional Affairs
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY COLES
Joanne McCarthy, Ian Kirkwood, Jason Gordon and
Chad Watson, Newcastle Herald, “Shine the light”
The Herald’s reporting uncovered long-running child sex
abuse in the Catholic Church in the Hunter region, and led the
campaign for a royal commission into the abuse.
Donna Page, Darren Pateman and Matt Carr, Newcastle
Herald, “What on earth”, “Concrete creek”, “Slap on the wrist”
Trekking into Sugarloaf State Conservation Area (literally),
the Herald team discovered environmental damage caused
by contractors working for coal giant Glencore Xstrata and
covered up by the NSW state government.
Mandy Squires, Geelong Advertiser, “In my skin: Fitting in”,
“In my skin: Too much too soon”, “In my skin: Pimples and
bullies”
A deep exploration of issues faced by Geelong teens,
drawing on their own words and experiences and supported
with online interactivity and links.
2013 WALKLEY AWARDS
Sports Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY AUSTRALIA POST
Damian Barrett, NineMSN, Nine News, Triple M,
“Essendon Football Club scandal”
Breaking the story of the use of banned supplements
at Essendon AFL club, Barrett set in train one of the
biggest controversies in Australian sport history.
A dogged investigation.
Quentin McDermott, Clay Hitchens and Lorna
Knowles, Four Corners, ABC TV, “The world according
to Lance”
A world exclusive, this was the first television report to show
Lance Armstrong lying under oath about doping during
his cycling career. McDermott’s interview made an impact
internationally, both in the media and in contributing to
Armstrong’s fall from grace.
Radio Documentary, Feature,
Podcast or Special
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY QUT
Sarah Dingle, Background Briefing, Radio National, “The
family trap”, “Some home truths about child abuse”
Dingle examined child sexual abuse within the home at the
most intimate level – through interviews with victims and
perpetrators. Powerful storytelling, sensitive interviewing,
important journalism.
Jemima Garrett, Chris Bullock and Linda McGinness,
Background Briefing, Radio National, “PNG land scandal”
This beautifully made radio program exposed an Australian
company’s land grab of more than 2 million hectares of land
without the consent of thousands of traditional owners.
Caro Meldrum-Hanna, 7.30, ABC TV, “The Essendon
files”, “Demons in damage control, “The Cronulla files”
Meldrum-Hanna led coverage of the banned supplements
scandal through her fine investigative reporting and by
securing an exclusive interview with the key figure at the
centre of it all: mysterious biochemist Steve Dank.
Manpreet Kaur Singh, SBS Radio Punjabi Program,
SBS, “The enemy within”
Investigating domestic and family violence in Australia’s
Indian community through personal stories and interviews,
this was originally recorded in Punjabi, and then distilled
into a 50-minute English program. A confronting,
comprehensive exploration of a culture where shame
all too commonly leads to silence.
Sport Photography
Feature Writing Long (Over 4000 words)
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE
Wolter Peeters, Fairfax Media, “2013 Sydney International
Rowing Regatta”
Making the most of an almost mystical pre-dawn glow,
Peeters captures the focus and dedication of rowers
preparing for a day of competition. The composition distils
a moment of serenity from a frantic time of day.
Melissa Lucashenko, Griffith REVIEW 41, “Sinking below
sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan”
An eye-opening and beautifully crafted essay on urban
poverty. Through the stories of three single mothers and
her personal experience, Lucashenko shines a light on
cyclical disadvantage and grinding struggle. It’s writing
in the tradition of George Orwell.
Quinn Rooney, Getty Images, “Australian Swimming
Championships”
Shooting in black and white, Rooney brings a fresh
perspective to one of our most-loved sports. The overhead
angle and play of light warps surfacing swimmers into
abstract works of art.
Cameron Spencer, Getty Images, “The World Athletics
Championships”
The cream of track and field athletes gathered in
Moscow for the 14th World Athletic Championships.
Spencer’s series sings with their energy and emotion,
from pole vaulters to sprinters.
Radio News and Current Affairs
Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY ABC
Mark Whittaker, Good Weekend, Fairfax Media,
“Did she do it?”
Bringing balance to the emotive case of Kathleen Folbigg,
a mother accused of killing her children, Whittaker’s
story is a powerful investigation of the circumstances
and characters that can prove or disprove a woman’s
innocence.
Wolter Peeters, Fairfax Media, “2013 Sydney
International Rowing Regatta”
Quinn Rooney, Getty Images, “Australian
Swimming Championships”
Pamela Williams, The Australian Financial Review,
“Killing Julia: How Kevin Rudd got even”
A compelling and insightful long-form feature, Williams’
exposé of the fall of Gillard at the hands of the former prime
minister, Kevin Rudd, is a portrait of treachery you don’t
need to be a political insider to appreciate.
Scoop of the Year
Jon Faine, Daniel Ziffer, Rebecca Ritters and
Ashlynne McGhee, 774 ABC Radio, “Police officer,
accused for a decade of murdering gangland informants,
comes clean”
In a searing live interview, Faine skilfully questioned a
former Victoria Police detective about his involvement in
several Melbourne underworld murders, bringing him to
tears.
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY NINE
Stephen McDonell, PM, ABC Radio, “Covert Chinese
media”
This story revealed a new aspect to Chinese government
propaganda. An Australian “reporter” was exposed as
being effectively employed by the Chinese government and
masquerading as a legitimate Australian media entity.
James Campbell, Herald Sun, “Secret tapes bombshell:
Police crisis rocks government”
The exclusive investigation exposed backroom dealings in
the Victorian premier’s office, capturing the state’s attention.
Two days later, Premier Ted Baillieu resigned.
Neil Mitchell, Radio 3AW, “The Ford scoop”
Radio journalism at its finest, with a good old-fashioned
scoop. Mitchell broke and confirmed the news that Ford was
closing its manufacturing operations in Australia; politicians,
the company and workers called in to tell their stories.
SPORT PHOTOGRAPHY
Trevor Bormann and Vivien Altman, Foreign
Correspondent, ABC TV, “Prisoner X – The Australian
connection”
This dogged investigation revealed that an anonymous
prisoner found dead in an Israeli prison was a Melbourne
man turned Mossad agent. The exposé made headlines
around the world.
Cameron Spencer, Getty Images, “The World
Athletics Championships”
Caro Meldrum-Hanna, 7.30, ABC TV, “Steve Dank speaks:
The interview”, “Demons in damage control”, “Alarming
revelations about the Cronulla Sharks supplements scandal”
An exclusive interview with the mysterious biochemist at
the centre of the Essendon supplements scandal anchored
Caro-Meldrum’s series of sport scoops.
31
FINALISTS
CARTOON
Cartoon
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY PRIVATE MEDIA
Mark Knight, Herald Sun, “Kevin’s same sex marriage”
Rudd changed his stance on gay marriage as he revved
up his campaign for the Labor leadership. In a polished,
perfectly drawn cartoon, Knight wonders if it was finding the
perfect man – himself – that turned Rudd.
Bill Leak, The Australian, “Change we can believe in”
Referencing Greek mythology and nimbly capturing
lingering suspicions around Rudd as leader, Leak’s cartoon
proved prophetic.
Mark Knight, Herald Sun, “Kevin’s same sex
marriage”
Cathy Wilcox, The Sydney Morning Herald,
“Kevin cleans up”
Masterful linework can say so much – and Wilcox only needs
one red squiggle to make her hilarious point about Rudd’s
meticulous cleaning up of Julia Gillard.
Artwork
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY MEAA
Pat Campbell, The Canberra Times, “Glimmer of hope”
Illustrating a piece about Julia Gillard’s ability to survive
“rough politics”, Campbell beautifully captured Gillard’s
vulnerability and resilience amid ominous seas.
Bill Leak, The Australian, “Change we can believe in”
Andrew Dyson, The Age, “Doghouse”
Showing Parliament House as the clenched teeth of a
snarling dog, Dyson elegantly summed up the savagery of
federal politics. A bold illustration and a perfect complement
to the article it accompanied.
Matt Golding, The Age, “An American birthright”
In the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, Golding
captured the complexity of the gun control debate in
America with stunning simplicity. A baby in utero, the
umbilical cord morphing into a gun’s trigger: it’s an apt
metaphor for a nation’s deeply entrenched gun culture.
Coverage of a Major News Event
or Issue
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY APN
Cathy Wilcox, The Sydney Morning Herald,
“Kevin cleans up”
Richard Baker and The Age team, The Age,
“Essendon drug scandal”
An impressive breadth of outstanding coverage of the
AFL’s supplements scandal, including news and opinion,
in-depth features and multimedia and online platforms.
John Bruce and the Lateline team, Lateline,
ABC TV, “Body of evidence”
Powerful journalism that exposed the institutional cover-up of
child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. The reports, built on
thorough research and compelling interviews, helped trigger
a royal commission into child sex abuse.
James Campbell, Matt Johnston, Michelle Ainsworth,
Annika Smethurst and Mitchell Toy, Herald Sun,
“Secret tapes bombshell: Police crisis rocks government”
This series of exclusives based on secret recordings
exposed corruption in the Victorian government and police.
The coverage led to the resignation of top officials including
the Victorian premier.
Feature Writing Short
(under 4000 words)
Patrick Carlyon, Herald Sun, “Medic! Medic! Medic! Medic!”
An explosion in a small town in South Afghanistan that killed
two Australian diggers is the starting point for this powerful
story. Carlyon delved into the hidden costs of war through
traumatised medic Corporal Mark Hughes-Brown.
Sarah Crawford, NT News, “Welcome to the real block”
Crawford spent a week living in Kurringal Flats, Darwin’s
worst public housing block in the middle of one of Darwin’s
wealthiest suburbs. The result is less gonzo stunt than
a study of society’s fringe dwellers, with matter-of-fact
reporting on disadvantage. The story prompted the NT
government to address public housing issues.
News Photography
Kate Geraghty, Fairfax Media, “Asylum”
Simply by holding up their identification cards, a group
of asylum seekers from Iran were no longer nameless
and faceless. Geraghty captured that moment through
the Manus Island airport’s security fence to illustrate the
debate about the PNG solution.
Chris McGrath, Getty Images, “King Norodom Sihanouk”
The death of the Cambodian king sent the country into three
months of mourning and people gathered in their thousands
at the royal palace to pay tribute. McGrath documented the
quiet beauty of the scenes.
Colin Murty, News Corp Australia, “Final journey”
The image of a tiny coffin being loaded into a plane on
Christmas Island gave a gut-wrenching human touchpoint to
the asylum seeker debate. It took research and skill for Murty
to capture the drowned 10-week-old baby’s final journey.
Business Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY J.P. MORGAN
James Chessell and Ben Holgate, The Australian
Financial Review, “10 ways to kill a network”
A colourful insight into the gripping corporate saga at
Network Ten, with impressive access to well-placed sources.
Adele Ferguson and Chris Vedalago, The Age and
The Sydney Morning Herald, “Profit above all else: How
CBA lost savings and hid its tracks”, “Targets, bonuses,
trips: Inside the CBA boiler room”, “Senate to launch
inquiry into ASIC”
This extensive investigation into the dark side of financial
planning revealed a high-pressure sales culture at the
Commonwealth Bank that saw customers, often retirees,
losing their savings after being pushed into high-risk
investments.
Gerard Ryle and the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists Team, icij.org, “Secret
files expose offshore’s global impact”, “ICIJ releases
offshore leaks database revealing names behind secret
companies, trusts”, “Release of offshore records draws
worldwide response”
Ryle obtained 2.5 million leaked records revealing the
names behind more than 120,000 offshore companies,
trusts and funds located in tax havens. In a groundbreaking
reporting model, Ryle shared the information with the global
journalistic community, triggering a worldwide response.
Feature/Photographic Essay
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY FAIRFAX MEDIA
Greg Bearup, The Weekend Australian Magazine,
“High alert”
Following the death of Sydney teenager, Henry Kwan,
who died after jumping off his balcony after taking
a synthetic hallucinogen, Bearup uncovered a new
distribution model for drugs.
Barat Ali Batoor, The Global Mail, “Hazara exodus”
In a courageous photo essay Batoor documents the
journey – his own journey – of displaced Hazara people from
Afghanistan and Pakistan as they seek asylum in Australia.
Batoor’s camera was ruined when the boat ran aground, but
his incredible images survived.
2013 WALKLEY AWARDS
Ed Giles, Getty Images, “The overthrow of Egypt’s
President Morsi”
There were photographers from all over the world
documenting the protests and violence on Egypt’s
streets, but Giles delivers a uniquely intimate version
of the deadly events from amid the crowd.
Steve Tickner, The Irrawaddy News Group, “KIA under
siege by the Burmese Army”
Tickner put his life on the line to photograph incredible
images of person-to-person warfare in a remote and
barely reported conflict.
International Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY UQ
Michael Bachelard, Good Weekend, Fairfax Media,
“They’re taking our children”
Working hard to get to the story despite resistance from
the West Papuan government and threats, Bachelard
revealed that children are being lured from the
Christian-majority province into Java to be indoctrinated
into radical Islam.
Amanda Hodge, The Weekend Australian Magazine,
The Weekend Australian and The Australian, “No place
called home”, “Taliban shadow on a gangster’s paradise
in Pakistan”, “Indian rape family speaks out for justice”
Hodge reported on the struggle of the Hazara people
in Afghanistan, explaining why so many seek out the
hazardous journey to Australia. She also explored preelection violence in Karachi and undertook a painful
interview with the family of an Indian gang rape victim.
A fine example of journalism giving voice to the
powerless.
Stephen McDonell and the ABC Beijing team,
7.30, PM, Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV and Radio,
“Sneaking into Tibet”, “Covert Chinese media”,
“The other China boom”
Casting light on China from multiple angles, McDonell and
the team looked at the wave of self-immolations in Tibet,
Chinese government media manipulation and a surge in
illegal drug imports from Burma.
Camerawork
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY AUSTRALIAN SUPER
Aaron Lewis, Dateline, SBS TV, “The greatest gathering”
Kumbh Mela, the festival where Hindus bathe in the
Ganges River, is the largest gathering of human beings in
history, and presents immense challenges for a camera
operator. Working with a translator and only the equipment
he could carry, Lewis shot the colour and mysticism of
this Indian holy festival while jostled by crowds – even
neck-deep in the Ganges.
Mathew Marsic, Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV,
“Ibrahim’s war”
Two years into Syria’s civil conflict, Marsic’s was the
first Australian TV crew to enter the city of Aleppo.
Documenting 11-year-old Ibrahim’s daily life in a war
zone, Marsic worked without electricity, shooting
discreetly on a digital SLR and charging batteries with a
generator at night.
Tim Noonan, Sunday Night, Seven Network,
“Shipbreakers”, “Surrogacy”, “Jackson’s story”
A case study in the modern videojournalist’s toolkit.
Noonan shot with a GoPro and drone in Bangladesh,
where supertankers go to die; filmed Australians at
the centre of a surrogacy controversy in Thailand; and
produced a feature on a single dad devoted to his
disabled son.
TV/AV News Reporting
ARTWORK
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY BBC
John Hill, Ten News, Network Ten, “Marginal VTR”, “Local
VTR”, “Diaz all-in”
An election game-changer in the western Sydney federal
seat of Greenway, Hill’s interview with Liberal candidate
Jaymes Diaz went viral on the internet, relentlessly exposing
Diaz’s ignorance of his own party’s policy and just how the
Coalition would stop the boats.
Robert Ovadia and Paula Doneman, Seven News, Seven
Network, “Who are the Jedi?”, “Allegations of drug use”,
“Police vs army: The cover-up”
Exposing the “Jedi council” of Australian Defence Force
personnel under investigation and allegations of attempts
to cover up the scandal, Ovadia’s reports combined oldfashioned investigative skills and compelling storytelling.
Pat Campbell, The Canberra Times,
“Glimmer of hope”
David Speers and Kieran Gilbert, Sky News, “Labor
leadership challenge”
Sky News led the charge with live coverage of Labor’s final
leadership challenge. Speers had an exclusive interview with
Prime Minister Gillard as she announced a leadership ballot,
and with the ballot still under way the Sky team were the first
to announce that Kevin Rudd would return as prime minister.
TV/AV Daily Current Affairs
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY SBS
Andrew Dyson, The Age, “Doghouse”
Chris Allen and Aaron O’Brien, A Current Affair,
Nine Network, “Drug granny”
Classic tabloid current affairs with a goldmine of gotcha
moments, this story exposed an unlikely suburban drug
dealer: a grandmother known as Ma.
Tracy Grimshaw, A Current Affair, Nine Network,
“2Day FM DJs scandal”
Securing an exclusive interview with the radio DJs blamed
for the suicide of a nurse in Britain after a prank gone wrong,
Grimshaw was measured and methodical. The interview ran
without cuts, exposing raw emotion.
Suzanne Smith, John Bruce, Tony Jones,
Michael Doyle and Brant Cumming, Lateline, ABC TV,
“The tipping point”
Centred on an exclusive interview with Detective Inspector
Peter Fox, Lateline unflinchingly explored allegations the
Catholic Church and NSW Police had covered up child sex
abuse in Catholic institutions.
Matt Golding, The Age, “An American birthright”
TV/AV Weekly Current Affairs
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY ABC
Correspondent, ABC TV, “Prisoner X – the Australian
connection”, “Prisoner X – the secret”
Tracking Australian man Ben Zygier from Melbourne to
Mossad agent to his death in solitary confinement in an
Israeli prison, Foreign Correspondent exposed a cover-up
that went to the highest levels in Israel.
Matthew Brown, Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV,
“Ibrahim’s war”
Seeking insight into ordinary people’s daily life in rebel-held
Aleppo, a city under fire from Syrian government forces,
Brown told the story of the lost children of Syria through
11-year-old Ibrahim.
Quentin McDermott, Clay Hitchens and
Lorna Knowles, Four Corners, ABC TV,
“The world according to Lance”
Before Lance Armstrong was stripped of his cycling medals,
Four Corners scooped the rest of the world with the first
television report to show Armstrong lying under oath about
his doping.
33
FINALISTS
NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY
Kate Geraghty, Fairfax Media, “Asylum”
Investigative Journalism
Documentary
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY BAYER
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY LINC ENERGY
Correspondent, ABC TV, “Prisoner X – the Australian
connection”, “Prisoner X – the secret”
A global scoop secured against a wall of obfuscation, this
report about one man’s tragic involvement with the world
of espionage and intrigue reverberated around the globe,
particularly in Israel and Australia.
Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, Contact Films, ABC TV,
First Footprints
Joanne McCarthy, Newcastle Herald, “Shine the light”
An example of accurate and tireless public service
journalism, McCarthy’s work exposing child abuse within the
Catholic Church in the Hunter Valley led to a judicial inquiry
and royal commission.
Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, The Age, “Airport in
grip of drug trade”, “Smuggled guns”, “Bikies infiltrate police”
Tracing complex links between corrupt Customs officers,
bikie gangs and their turf wars in Sydney and Melbourne,
these stories revealed systemic corruption in a federal
department.
Chris McGrath, Getty Images,
“King Norodom Sihanouk”
Heather Kirkpatrick and Kristy Dowsling, Mary Meets
Mohammed
Sonya Pemberton, Genepool Productions and SBS TV,
Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines
Hayden Keenan and Gai Steele, Smart St Films,
Persons of Interest
Walkley Book Award Long List
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY MEDIA SUPER
James Button, Speechless: A year in my father’s business,
Melbourne University Press
John Garnaut, The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo, Penguin
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY NETWORK TEN
Paul Ham, Sandakan, Random House
Jenny Brockie, Meggie Palmer, Ross Scheepers
and Hannah Meagher, Insight, SBS TV, “Young mob”
Breaking with Insight’s usual format, Brockie built an
impressive rapport with six Aboriginal teenagers to tell
a broader story about life in Alice Springs. A moving,
sometimes startling insight into difficult lives.
Belinda Hawkins, Every Parent’s Nightmare, Allen & Unwin
Caro Meldrum-Hanna, 7.30, ABC TV,
“Steve Dank breaks his silence”
Steve Dank was the name at the middle of Australian sport’s
biggest-ever scandal and the interview every journalist
wanted. He chose to speak to 7.30, and his revelations
about supplements in the AFL and NRL were explosive.
Commentary, Analysis, Opinion and
Critique
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY ISENTIA
Katharine Murphy, Guardian Australia, “Julia Gillard: Where
did it all go wrong?”, “Tony Abbott has another rival in the
toughest race of his life – himself”, “Tony Abbott keeps the
Catholic faith, quietly”
Stitching together the disparate threads of Gillard’s
leadership to explain how and why it was ending, Murphy
delivered timely analysis with resonance; her studies of
Abbott explored his values and character.
John Silvester, The Age, “Read all about it”, “Peppery saga
brings sniffing salts to mind”, “Public are fickle when judging
a victim’s worth”
In his Saturday crime column for The Age, “Naked City”,
Silvester brought to bear all his experience and writing craft
to explore news stories with historical context, telling details
and humour.
Caroline Wilson, The Age, “Would you want your son
playing in the AFL?”, “Right thing for Hird to do is step down”,
“Blind pride drove coach’s denial and the bodies piled up”
In these powerful opinion pieces on the Essendon Football
Club’s drug scandal, Wilson fearlessly took an unpopular
stance, calling out the club’s treatment of young players and
calling for the disciplining of coach James Hird.
Kaye Harrison, Treehouse Productions, JOTZ Productions,
The Sunnyboy
Interview
John Hill, Ten News, Network Ten, “Diaz interview”
The Liberal candidate for Greenway, Jaymes Diaz, failed to
articulate a single point of the Coalition’s six-point plan to
“stop the boats”. Hill’s questioning was calm but tenacious;
the video became a viral sensation.
Colin Murty, News Corp Australia, “Final journey”
Rachel Clements, Steven McGregor and Lisa Watts,
Night Sky Films, Big Name No Blanket
Anna Krien, Night Games, Black Inc
Colleen Ryan, Fairfax: The rise and the fall, Melbourne
University Press
Jill Stark, High Sobriety, Scribe
Mark Willacy, Fukushima, Pan Macmillan
Pamela Williams, Killing Fairfax, Harper Collins
Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer
of the Year
Brian Cassey, The Weekend Australian, The Global Mail,
The Courier-Mail and AAP
A moving portrait of a grown up victim of child abuse
anchors Cassey’s collection of freelance assignments for a
range of media outlets. Politics, news, features and action
are all captured with style, from Indigenous stockmen to a
total eclipse.
Kate Geraghty, Fairfax Media
From world exclusive images of Bali bomber Idris and
Hamas leader Khalid Mishal, to Indigenous wrestlers and
debutantes, Geraghty brings integrity, empathy and gravity
to every story. She is a consummate visual storyteller.
Quinn Rooney, Getty Images
It takes a deep understanding of a sport to anticipate
and capture those split-second peak moments – a punch
landing, a motorbike crashing, a Socceroo celebrating
or a synchronised swimmer tossed in the air. Rooney
nails the emotion and energy of sport with technical
skill and creativity.
Journalistic Leadership
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY QANTAS
Most Outstanding Contribution to
Journalism
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA
Gold Walkley
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY MEAA
2013 WALKLEY AWARDS
JUDGES
PRINT/TEXT
News Report
Amanda Wilson, communications consultant, former editor
The Sydney Morning Herald
Darren Burnett, editor in chief, Sunshine Coast
Newspapers
Paul Ramadge, vice-chancellor’s professorial fellow,
Monash University
Feature Writing Short
Rick Bannister, editor at large, Smith Journal
Ben English, deputy editor, The Daily Telegraph
Roslyn Guy, former associate editor, The Age
Feature Writing Long
Peter Fray, editor in chief, PolitiFact Australia
Sarah Oakes, editor, Daily Life, Fairfax Media
Anita Jacoby, managing director, ITV Studios
RADIO/AUDIO
News and Current Affairs
Paul Barclay, presenter and series producer,
ABC Radio National
Clinton Maynard, content director, 2UE
Erin Maher, news director, Radio 2GB
Documentary, Feature, Podcast or Special
Glynn Greensmith, journalism lecturer, Curtin University
and ABC Radio
Sharon Davis, journalist, radio and documentary producer,
freelance
Gordon Lavery, network manager, ABC News 24
TV/AV
News Reporting
Ian Ferguson, director of news and programs, Sky News
Lee Jeloscek, political reporter, Seven Network
Angela Murphy, news director, Network Ten
Daily Current Affairs
David Salmon, deputy news director, Seven Network
Sue Spencer, executive producer, Four Corners, ABC TV
Anthony Flannery, head of news and current affairs,
Network Ten
Weekly Current Affairs, Feature or Special
Mark Calvert, executive producer, news and current
affairs, Nine Network
Hugh Riminton, political editor, Canberra, Network Ten
Rob Raschke, network director of news, Seven Network
ALL MEDIA
Multimedia Storytelling
Hal Crawford, editor in chief, NineMSN
Stephen Hutcheon, tablet editor, The Sydney Morning
Herald
Marina Go, publishing director, Private Media
Coverage of a Major News Event or Issue
Clive Mathieson, editor in chief, The Australian
Sarah Ferguson, reporter, Four Corners, ABC TV
Joseph Fernandez, associate professor, Curtin University
Scoop of the Year
Gay Alcorn, columnist, The Age
Paul Patrick, network news director, Network Ten
Katharine Viner, editor in chief, Guardian Australia
Business Journalism
David Speers, political editor, Sky News
Andrew Main, wealth editor, The Australian
Mathew Dunckley, Melbourne bureau chief, Australian
Financial Review
PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY
Camerawork
Sam Clark, videojournalist, The Project
Olivia Rousset, documentary director and videojournalist
Mike Dalton, director of news, Nine Queensland
Coverage of Community and Regional Affairs
Jocelyn Nettlefold, local content manager, ABC Hobart
Jane Canaway, journalist and editor
Peter Owen, group executive editor, APN Australian
Regional Media
Barat Ali Batoor, The Global Mail, “Hazara exodus”
International Journalism
Peter Kerr, NSW executive director, Asialink
Peter Lloyd, senior reporter, ABC
Andrew Holden, editor in chief, The Age
Investigative Journalism
Chris Masters, journalist and author
Jane Nicholls, CEO, The Global Mail
Andrew Clark, senior writer, The Australian Financial Review
Coverage of Indigenous Affairs
Ben Hawke, executive producer, Landline, ABC TV
Natalie Ahmat, presenter, NITV News
Rhonda Black, director, Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS
Ed Giles, Getty Images, “The overthrow of
Egypt’s President Morsi”
Sports Journalism
Michael Cockerill, editor, footballaustralia.com.au
Craig Nitschke, sport editor, The West Australian
Tiffany Cherry, presenter and producer, Fox Sports
Social Equity Journalism
John Henningham, director, JSchool Journalism College
George Negus, presenter and journalist, Negus Media
International
Tracey Spicer, anchor, Sky News and columnist,
Fairfax Media
Steve Tickner, The Irrawaddy News Group,
“KIA under siege by the Burmese Army”
Commentary, analysis, opinion and critique
Patrick Cook, freelance
Jason Whittaker, editor, Crikey
Peter Ryan, business editor, ABC News
Interview
Jonathan Holmes, media columnist, Fairfax Media
Ben Naparstek, editor, Good Weekend
Ellen Whinnett, head of news, Herald Sun
Headline journalism
Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia and The Drum
Andrew Marlton, cartoonist, First Dog on the Moon
Stephanie Peatling, senior reporter, The Sydney Morning
Herald and The Age
Artwork
Ann Stephen, senior curator, Sydney University Museums
Fiona Katauskas, freelance cartoonist
Peter Allen, author and former editor, The Sun-Herald
Cartoon
Katharine Murphy, deputy political editor,
Guardian Australia
Rocco Fazzari, artist, Fairfax Media
Peter Sheehan, artist and illustrator
35
FINALISTS
NIKON-WALKLEY
PRESS PHOTOGRAPHER
OF THE YEAR
Brian Cassey, The Weekend Australian, The Global
Mail, The Courier-Mail and AAP
LONG-FORM JOURNALISM
Walkley Book Award
Malcolm Farr, chief political writer, News.com.au
Catherine Fox, freelance journalist, author and speaker
Adele Horin, writer and journalist
John Van Tiggelen, editor, The Monthly
Richard Guilliatt, author and journalist, The Australian
Deborah Cameron, project director, KJA Strategic
Engagement and Communications
Susan Wyndham, literary editor, Sydney Morning Herald
Paul Bailey, editor, The Australian Financial Review
Ian Reinecke, author and journalist
Walkley Documentary Award
Quentin Dempster, presenter, 7.30 NSW, ABC
Mitzi Goldman, writer, producer and director, Looking
Glass Pictures
Sandra Levy, CEO, Australian Film Television and Radio
School (AFTRS)
David Salter, journalist and broadcaster
Morag Ramsay, producer/director, Four Corners, ABC TV
Tony Krawitz, director, Blackfella Films
Steve Pennells, chief writer, The West Australian
WALKLEY ADVISORY BOARD JUDGES
Laurie Oakes, chief political correspondent, Nine (chair)
Jill Baker, deputy editor, Herald Sun
Helen Dalley, host, Late Agenda, Sky News Australia
Narelle Hooper, co-chair, Australian Financial Review
Women of Influence Awards
Liz Jackson, reporter, ABC
James Kirby, managing editor, Eureka Report
Peter Meakin, senior journalist
Nick Moir, photographer, The Sydney Morning Herald
John Stanley, weekend breakfast presenter, Radio 2UE
Michael Beach, The West Australian.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Peter Solness, freelance
Michael Amendolia,freelance, michaelamendolia.com
Simon O’Dwyer, The Age
Verity Chambers, Sydney Institute of TAFE
Heather Faulkner, lecturer, Griffith University
Kate Geraghty, Fairfax Media
AWARD SPONSORS
The Walkley Foundation would like to thank all of its sponsors for their continued support and for
sharing a belief in striving for excellence. The 58th Walkley Awards are proudly sponsored by:
PLATINUM PARTNERS
GOLD PARTNERS
Quinn Rooney, Getty Images
SILVER MEDIA PARTNERS
MEDIA PARTNERS
SILVER PARTNERS
PARTNERS
For more information on partnership opportunities with
the Walkley Foundation please contact Louisa Graham,
general manager, The Walkley Foundation on
(02) 9333 0945 or email [email protected]
Thank you for voting
us the best.
Best Airline Australia Pacific region
World Airline Awards 2013.
Qantas is proud to sponsor the Walkley Foundation.
Qantas Airways Limited ABN 16 009 661 901.
37
Q TECHNOLOGY
The net’s next big thing
Matt Davis sees quality
webcasting as a tool to put
journalism back at the top of
the viewing agenda, no matter
what device you’re on
T
he debate regarding the internet’s
effect on news media has had
commentators in opposing corners
for some time now. On one hand
it has meant a more open industry where
new players have successfully innovated and
embraced a rapidly changing fourth estate.
On the other hand it has been a challenge
to the status quo, a giant vacuum that has
sucked advertising revenue and jobs from the
once powerful traditional model.
Sitting ringside, both corners have valid
points and regardless of the ongoing federal
debacle that is the National Broadband
Network, the internet has clearly stamped its
fundamental position upon our industry.
This unrestrained flow of information and
access to technology has created an exciting
landscape – new audiences, new agendas
and new angles are being delivered to today’s
tech-savvy consumer. The preferred medium?
Smartphones and tablets.
“Although the internet may have destroyed
the newspaper’s old business model, we can
use it to create a new decentralised system
that may generate an even more vibrant
marketplace of ideas for the 21st century,”
wrote Bruce Ackerman in “How the internet
can save journalism” on the Huffington Post.
We have seen the development of
multimedia, interactive, graphic driven
content, but what of live events, live forums
and live action? The world happens in real
time and the audience wants to be part of
what is going on now.
In its most basic form “the news” has
looked to live streaming to deliver reports
from location – a cheaper method than
using satellites. But tiring of bad online video
content, the market’s next big thing is likely
to be a move to live multi-camera webcasts
that are not only delivered to the viewer but
ask them to engage with it through integrated
social media platforms.
As we await a
new invisible
hand to guide
us forward,
one thing
remains clear
– a market is
emerging for
quality live
webcasts
Above from left:
Tilt Vision delivers one
of the first ACIJ forums
on issues confronting
journalists.
Acclaimed theatre
production Namatjira
returned home to
Ntaria, NT in 2012
and was performed
under the stars.
Welcomed by the
locals it was viewed
globally in celebration
of Albert’s story.
D O Y O U H AV E
A STORY TO
TELL?
Learn how, with the people who
know books and writing best.
The roll-out of high-speed broadband
will support the continued development of
webcasting. But despite its modest financial
requirements, our industry has been slow to
take up creative webcasting, and we need to
look further afield to understand the impact
this medium is having.
Surfing organisations embarked on
some of the world’s first webcasts nearly
two decades ago. From humble beginnings
swimming cable out into the surf, this
innovative subculture has set the benchmark
for webcast production and audience
engagement. Today it has a gigantic global
audience for surfing contests including those
at Cloudbreak in Fiji and Bells Beach in
Victoria, among many others.
The 2011 Billabong Pipe Masters (Hawaii)
saw more than 6 million streams initiated
during the three consecutive days of
surfing, 30 per cent of which was viewed on
smartphones. These are numbers very few
Australian broadcasts can match.
Surfing is not alone – arts companies such
as Big hART have embraced the concept,
streaming the acclaimed Namatjira theatre
production on a variety of occasions to
connect both the theatre audience and the
Indigenous communities who own the story.
Since that time numerous organisations
across Indigenous Australia and the general
arts community have followed and delivered
content from community to community, city
to city and country to country.
As the business models for traditional news
organisations break down, and a generation
of journalists enter an industry that is a mere
Faber Academy
at ALLEN & UNWIN
T (02) 8425 0171
W allenandunwin.com/faberacademy
shadow of its former grand self, the viability of
polished, live-streamed content is emerging.
The Australian Centre for Independent
Journalism, based at UTS in Sydney, has
presented vibrant and topical forums that
deal directly with the world of journalism.
Free from populist political jargon, these
events have not only been a success in terms
of viewer numbers but also through instant
participation using social media.
For the past two years the Walkley
Foundation has also streamed its annual
journalism conference globally, and its
stellar line-ups of talent have drawn strong
audience numbers and engagement.
As financing models are debated and
we await a new invisible hand to guide us
forward, one thing remains clear – a market
is emerging for quality live webcasts,
especially those with well-founded
journalism at their core.
“Learning how to use tools is different
from saying everyone is a reporter. Anyone
can make bread, but it’s lousy bread. You
need to spend time like a true, professional
baker to learn to make good bread,”
observed Yves Eudes, a reporter with French
broadsheet Le Monde.
We at Tilt Vision believe there is a future
here; a future that is mobile and interactive,
a future that generates jobs, and a future that
will allow journalism to once again be at the
forefront of media for people.
Let’s start baking some great bread.
Matt Davis is a journalist and producer, and
founder of webcast company Tilt Vision
Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Raising a glass to the legends
The Hong Kong Foreign
Correspondents Club is a place of
legend, and David Southwell had
the good fortune to get inside.
W
e had been searching for a
Hong Kong bar so hip that
no-one quite knew where
it was when, for me, a
much more exciting prospect came along.
I was with a group being ushered around
on a famil – a PR-sponsored junket to
write stories to entice tourists. While I was
more than happy to be shown the city’s
purported attractions, I’d also put in a
special request to go to the Hong Kong
Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC).
Most of the others in the group, who
worked for style-spotting and luxury
travel magazines or websites, didn’t seem
particularly keen on the idea. But as we
continued to wander around Hong Kong’s
Central district, that incredibly hip bar
was proving elusive.
So the Hong Kong tourism woman –
urged on by me and a major metro travel
section editor also excited by the prospect
of seeing a legendary journo hangout –
guided us towards the club. This was good
of her because, strictly speaking, the FCC
is not a tourist attraction. It is a private
club for media representatives. To gain
entry you may need to show membership.
Even when the door isn’t guarded,
members of the public who wander in
will find they can’t buy drinks or food.
Everything sold must be charged to a
member’s tab.
As luck would have it the Hong Kong
tourism woman met an old family friend,
who had just walked out of the club. He
generously agreed to host us as his guests,
so we could put drinks on his tab and
repay him as we left. As it also turned
out, he was the Australian former press
secretary to Chris Patten, Britain’s last
colonial overseer of Hong Kong.
Since 1982 the FCC has been located
in the Old Ice House. This is a splendid
and stolidly colonial sandstone and red
brick building. The main bar area is pretty
well everything you could hope for – a
drinking den straight out of the pages of a
Graham Greene novel.
There is a central rectangular bar
perfect for sitting at, G&T in hand,
and striking the world-weary pose of a
grizzled expat. The walls are decorated
with framed magazine covers, newspaper
One of the buildings having historically housed the Foreign
Correspondents’ Club was located at 41A Conduit Road.
The building was demolished in the late 1950’s.
There is a central rectangular bar perfect for
sitting at, G&T in hand, and striking the worldweary pose of a grizzled expat
pages and largely black-and-white photos
of old journos and other notable figures.
As the travel editor sighed, it was as if the
“walls breathed history”.
Two large photos dominated, one above
the bar and another frosted onto the
window of a small adjacent dining room.
Both images showed clumps of one-time
eminent members, and one featured Chris
Patten in a chummy gathering with the
journalistic luminaries of his day.
The FCC had been based in China until
the Communists forced it out. Relocating
to Hong Kong it became the hub of the
China Watcher, those esoteric specialists
who attempted to peek through the cracks
of the Bamboo Curtain and decipher the
various moods and manoeuvrings of the
then isolated nation and its communist
rulers.
The club’s renown grew exponentially
when it was used as a base and R&R venue
for reporters covering the wars in Korea
and then Vietnam.
It is the Vietnam reportage that largely
creates the bar’s mystique. The dining
area’s inside walls are adorned with
famous, perhaps defining, images of
that conflict, including the naked girl
running from the napalmed village and
the blindfolded Viet Cong suspect being
summarily executed by a shot from a pistol
held to his head. In the dining alcove, less
well-known images from a Pulitzer Prizewinning Life magazine photo essay create
a vivid tableau of the fear and torment of
young US military personnel in combat.
Strangely for a press club, we weren’t
allowed to take photos. The staff were very
polite in asking us not to and we were very
polite in sneakily defying them. Of course,
I wanted a shot where I played the part of
narrow-eyed war-weary barfly, recently
returned from up country, where “I saw
some shit, man. I really saw some shit.”
I was paying hammy homage to a
shrine of journalistic mythology. The
club’s decorations are a testimony to
the roguish misfits and miscreants who
inveigled their way under the blanket
of US military exaggeration and bluster
to discover the truth of a floundering
campaign.
This makes the FCC the perpetual
foreign correspondent haunt of
imagination, where grizzled reprobate
reporters batter out world-changing
stories on battered typewriters, clutching
even more battered bar tabs.
But far from uncovering superpower
military misadventure, I was there with
a group whose main interest was in
uncovering the coolest bar or boutique
shop with the best bargain on-trend shoes.
Of course this type of journalism, or
travel and lifestyle writing if you prefer,
obviously has a use and a readership. It
can also be seen to appropriately reflect
a time of relative peace and prosperity,
at least among the Western and major
powers.
No-one could wish the sadness and
folly of another Vietnam War, even if it
did elevate a type of hero correspondent
to legendary status. Still, in the FCC I had
my chance to raise a nostalgic glass to a
possibly vanishing breed of journalist,
which certainly isn’t me, who prefers the
war-torn jungle to the bar-worn junket.
David Southwell is a subeditor for
mX newspapers. He previously worked
for news.com.au, AAP and the Balmain
Village Voice, where he was an acclaimed
morning and afternoon tea correspondent
39
Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Myanmar’s different voices
Myanmar’s ethnic media is at a crossroads writes Ko Htwe. Government restrictions
have eased, but ethnic groups are still fighting for an equal voice
M
yanmar’s independent media
suffered during 60 years of
military rule. The country’s
dictator, General Ne Win,
effectively banned or censored any media that
was not state owned. While a series of reforms
implemented by President Thein Sein’s
nominally civilian government over the past
18 months has significantly improved press
freedom, Myanmar’s ethnic media still faces
serious difficulties.
Say Reh Soe is the editor of the
Kantaryawaddy Times (KT), a news agency
dedicated to reporting on issues relating
to Kayah state in Burma’s east and its
predominantly Karenni population. He
recently returned to Myanmar after many
years of exile on the Thai-Myanmar
border, where he had been producing
a bi-monthly newspaper.
In 2012, Say Reh Soe received a temporary
six-month licence from the Myanmar
government to print and distribute the
newspaper inside the country. Distribution
began in January 2013.
“It is not easy to work inside. We have
many obstacles. While other journals are
publishing daily and weekly newspapers, we
just started a monthly journal so our news is
not fresh,” he explains.
The 20-page monthly journal has a print
run of 1000 and sells for about 300 Kyats (a
little over 37 cents). Despite its Karenni focus,
the journal is published in Burmese in order
to appeal to a wider audience. Many copies
get passed around two or three times among
a population starved for local news. There
is no daily paper printed in Kayah state, the
country’s smallest.
Say Reh Soe says interviewing local officials
remains difficult in a country where the media
had been restricted for so long.
“Publishing inside we need sources and
interviews with government officials but they
still see us as outside media so it is difficult to
get in contact with them.”
As in most areas outside Burma’s major
cities, phone and internet access is at best
haphazard, and more often non-existent.
He points out that travel, too, is difficult in
Kayah state. The countryside is controlled by a
number of armed rebel groups, governmentbacked militias and military forces. “In our
state there are many different armed groups
from other small minorities and to go to their
area we need permission from them.”
In the past, when Say Reh Soe was
distributing the Kantaryawaddy Times outside
His newspaper was printed in the Karenni
language. This saw the government label it
as “rebel literature”
Burma, his newspaper was printed in the
Karenni language. This saw the government
label it as “rebel literature”.
“We will discuss with our members
whether to put our language back in the paper
later,” he says.
In Myanmar, the Kachin, Karreni, Karen,
Chin, Mon, Arakan and Shan ethnic groups
have their own literature and language. The
first ethnic Karen language newspapers
appeared between 1836 and 1846. In 1842, the
Baptist mission printed a monthly publication
in Sgaw, the Karen language. But after the
Ne Win regime took power in 1962, all the
ethnic publications disappeared.
It took until the 1990s before ethnic media
reappeared among exiled communities.
The Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN),
operated by Shan exiles since 1974, provided
regular reporting on Shan state, Myanmar’s
largest and most ethnically diverse. Reporting
on the region’s long-running civil war and
its infamous drug trade, SHAN supplied
news and analysis that was missing from
mainstream sources.
But the recent ‘democratic’ developments
in Myanmar have resulted in international
donors cutting their funding for the various
exile news organisations and those, like
the Democratic Voice of Burma, that focus
on national news. This has been a blow for
groups that only recently have been given
permission to have their correspondents
report from inside Myanmar.
For non-Burmese speakers, the ethnic
media is often their only source of news. The
mainstream media uses a language they don’t
understand. It’s a problem for indigenous
people right across Asia.
According to the Indigenous Voices in AsiaPacific report, by the Asia-Pacific Regional
Centre of the United Nations Development
Program, mainstream media has failed to
include indigenous peoples, both in terms
of diversity in their staff and in the content
they produce.
“This has been far from ideal,” the report
states, “for example, while environmental
damage, infringements on land rights and
transgressions of cultural norms are issues
that have often been covered, the points
of view of indigenous peoples have largely
been missing.”
Pascal Khoo Thwe, an award-winning
novelist from Burma’s minority Padaung
people, has said: “Media in any form is
important for maintaining ethnic culture.
Therefore it is necessary to have proper
media outlets for ethnic groups. It will help
each group understand and explore their
own culture.”
But long-time Myanmar watchers point
out that many of the ethnic media formed
in exile have close ties to Myanmar’s armed
rebel groups and rarely, if ever, have coverage
critical of the actions of such groups.
This is refuted by Khuensai Jaiyen, the
respected long-time editor of the Shan
Herald which runs regular interviews with
the senior leadership of the Shan State Army
South. “There are also causes regarding the
armed groups that we have to report without
omission,” he says.
Han Mai was a member of the All Burma
Student Democratic Front (ABDSF), a
rebel group formed by students who fled to
Myanmar’s borders after the 1988 uprising.
He worked in Thailand as a journalist
covering Myanmar for many years and
believes it’s important that the independent
media not only provides critical coverage
of military and the nominally civilian
government, but also of the various rebel
groups as well.
Han Mai reported last year on allegations
that troops from the Kachin Independence
Army (KIA), the last major rebel group
not to sign a ceasefire with the central
government, were abusing local women
in their area of control.
Many ethnic youth and former fighters
come to Thailand to be trained as
journalists, and they play an important role.
“Communicating with ethnic language can
build trust and it is more easy to hunt news
because many ethnic minorities viewed the
government as Burma, and that caused racial
hatred,” says Han Mai.
These ethnic journalists are seen as a
reliable outlet for local ethnic people who
have suffered oppression and do not believe
the state-owned media or trust journalists
speaking Burmese.
“The ethnic minorities have been
discriminated [against] not only in education,
health, economic but also citizenship for
decades, which are hard to disclose under
the military regime. But nowadays it is open
and can reveal what is happening in ethnic
and remote areas, so ethnic journalists are
important,” Han Mai explains.
While Myanmar’s government has now
allowed the publication of two dozen daily
newspapers and more than 150 weekly
journals in Burmese and English, it is still hard
to find any published in an ethnic language.
Nan Paw Gay, the editor of the Karen
Information Centre (KIC), says journals with
ethnic language are less than 10 per cent of
what’s published in Myanmar and there are
Karen News
videojournalist Saw
Kwe Say (above)
and (left) Saw
Blacktown of Karen
News on assignment
interviewing some
of the 480,000
people displaced
by the military in
eastern Myanmar.
Photos: Phil Thornton
only eight ethnic journals published outside
the country.
KIC started publishing a Karen-Myanmar
language journal in September with the
permission of the Ministry of Information.
The plan is to distribute it in Karen state,
Pegu, Irrawaddy and the Rangoon Division
where many Karen people are living.
In August 2012, the Nationalities
Brotherhood Forum (NBF), an alliance of
Chin, Mon, Shan, Arakanese, Karen and
Karenni political parties, released a statement
to support the publishing of newsletters
and journals in ethnic languages. The NBF
said some ethnic journals from outside
the country were trying to register their
publications inside in both Burmese and
ethnic languages.
“Ethnic journals different from Burmese
are needed that can report on the respective
ethnic people, their history, culture and
literature. Burma has many different ethnic
people and all of the journals, magazines
and periodicals published only in Burmese
will destroy the characteristics and identity
of ethnic people and by neglecting the views
of the minority,” says Nan Paw Gay. “This is
against the aims of democracy. Respecting
equal rights, the role of the ethnic people, is
also important in the affairs of the state.”
Amart-dein Journal is a quarterly in the
Mon language. It was selling 3000 copies
illegally within Mon state, but is now
permitted to publish legally in Myanmar.
Another Mon language monthly, Guiding Star,
also received temporary permission to publish
inside Burma on February 15, 2013.
Mon journalist Nai Arkar says the journal hits
two birds with one stone. “It is preservation of
our language and some Mon who cannot read
or write Myanmar can read it easily,” he says.
Article 16 of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples states: “Indigenous peoples have
the right to establish their own media in
their own languages and to have access to
all forms of non-indigenous media without
discrimination.” It also declares: “States,
without prejudice to ensuring full freedom
of expression, should encourage privately
owned media to adequately reflect indigenous
cultural diversity.”
Myanmar’s first ethnic media conference
was held in Moulmein, capital of Mon state,
in April and urged the promoting and the
development of ethnic language media, but
the struggle continues.
Ko Htwe is an ethnic journalist from
Myanmar based in Chiang Mai, Thailand
41
Q OUR MEDIA
The people you meet
Is it the job or is it the people you work with?
For John Coleman the fun in journalism has
come from both angles. Cartoon by Guy Body
F
ive-time Walkley winner Evan
Whitton has called journalism the
last of the fun professions. No doubt
he was referring to the variety of
stories journalists cover and the excitement
that accompanies many of them. But to me,
a product of 1950s journalism, much of the
fun stems from the characters I’ve met in
Australia, Britain and the United States.
For instance, on The Courier-Mail in
Brisbane in the 1960s, I recall muscular,
darkly handsome John who loved to play
tricks on colleagues. Such as when a reporter
was called to one of the soundproof phone
booths to answer a call from the RAAF about
a search and rescue at sea.
“Are the search aircraft in the air now?”
asked the reporter.
“Yes, I can put you through if you like,”
came the reply.
Excited, the reporter scribbled furiously
to the chatter across the intercoms and the
roar of the aircraft hurtling through the sky.
It went for several minutes. An incredible
exclusive, he thought.
Until peals of laughter came from the next
booth’s open door. It was John, brilliantly
mimicking the pilots and the roar of engines.
Then there was Bob, the brilliant foreign
correspondent promoted to executive ranks
back in Brisbane. He loved words – phrases
that sang – and his enthusiasm for stories
was unbounded. He sent me into exclusive
restaurants with young Aborigines to test
colour bars… had me undergo hypnosis…
dress as a bodgie and mingle with bodgies
and widgies… infiltrate Gold Coast pyjama
parties… almost drown in the first shark
meshing boat off Southport’s notorious Bar.
I baulked at only one story, aimed at
exposing fare evasion. “What would happen,”
he mused, “if you jumped on and off trams
in Queen Street without paying?”
There were the swashbuckling police
roundsmen who, hats on back of heads and
cigarettes drooping from lips, tuned into the
police radio, often arriving at crime scenes
before the cops, drove two-radio cars and
admired each other’s pistol collections.
In Townsville, on The Bulletin, editor Jim
was a towering figure. He worked incredible
hours at the untidiest desk I’ve ever seen and
would advise his reporters to “just give us the
guts [of the story].”
He began the day early and left, exhausted,
near to midnight – the bus driver waiting
patiently for him across the road, irrespective
of timetable – again imploring his night chief
sub to “just give us the guts, don’t be late…”
Jim loved writing obituaries and a close
friend was Ned the undertaker who dropped
by late at night with news of the latest deaths.
One time, though, wires got crossed and
Jim penned an obituary about a leading
churchman. The churchman did nearly die
when he picked up the paper next morning.
Jim, unfazed, wrote a light-hearted apology
with a photo of the risen Lazarus. Somehow
it made the error even more embarrassing.
Yet Jim, a two-finger typist, could dash off in
minutes a lucid, hard-hitting political editorial.
Fearless in every sense, he threw out of his
office a group of thugs who tried to stand over
him because of the paper’s policies.
There was Alf, the Chinese boy who joined
the paper straight from high school and
worked under my tutelage. At the port, I sent
him to board a Chinese coastal freighter to
seek stories. Later, I found him walking up
and down the wharf disconsolately, greeting
me with his broad north Queensland accent:
“Those bastards can only speak Chinese.”
He went on to edit a paper in Hong Kong
and later stun Fleet Street with his exclusives.
A succession of metropolitan journalists
came north in search of the sun. Few lasted.
I recall one, so affected by sun and alcohol that
he couldn’t walk up the long flight of stairs to
the newsroom – the loud thumping told us
he was attempting to manoeuvre himself up
the stairs on his backside, step by step.
It was my job as the cadet to collect the
empty beer bottles that Bob, the night chief
sub, cast aside. I’d put them down my shirt
and dump them on my way home on my bike.
Yet Bob was brilliant – he came from
the old Sydney Mirror – producing quality
editions and occasionally becoming a
reporter and turning in national scoops.
In Fleet Street, on the mass circulation
Sunday paper, there was suave, debonair
Sol, blissfully
ignorant of
Australia…
greeted me
memorably
with: “Happy
Anzac Day!”
Harry. The paper loved to focus on the
behaviour of eccentric vicars, and moneyhungry stringers across Britain sent in a
stream of tips. I was sitting next to him one
night when Harry, it seems, had taken the
stringer’s word for an outrageous story and
not bothered to check it. Too late, he picked
up the phone and, terror rising in his voice,
exclaimed: “Reverend, you didn’t say that?…
had you ever thought of saying that?”
Brendan, a brilliant Irishman, was one of
Fleet Street’s celebrated journalists. Often he
would disappear at mid-morning to one of
Fleet Street’s many pubs.
A cigarette pack with lighter on top on his
desk was meant to indicate to Bob, the Scots
news editor, that he was downstairs in the
loo. But Bob was never fooled and his yells of
“Brendan!” echoed across the newsroom.
The Cockney chief reporter Peter had
better contacts in Whitehall than Prime
Minister Harold Wilson, and bureaucrats
trembled when he rang to expose some
blunder or corruption. He wrote brilliant
investigative pieces about the gangster Kray
brothers and relentlessly tracked the Great
Train Robbers and their accomplices.
Sally, who carved out a distinguished
career in Fleet Street and another in the US,
co-authored a book on kidnapped heiress
Patty Hearst. Now in late life, she has become
a household name in the UK and US by
turning a life-long interest in astrology into a
syndicated horoscope column.
In Canberra’s government media, John,
chubby with a sunny smile, was one of the
finest Christians I’ve met, founding with
a group of others his own little gospelbased church. He’d greet colleagues on a
Monday morning with, “My house is full of
refugees”… And it was true: he and his wife
Meg clothed, fed and provided shelter for a
stream of Vietnamese boat people.
When Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin in
1974, John toured the city to report on the
devastation and then joined Meg in cooking
and serving meals for the homeless and
distressed at the relief centre.
Then in New York there was veteran Bill,
a deft subeditor who somehow subbed his
own speech as he talked… Tom who wanted
to know if all my successive consul-generals
were “sirs”… and Sol, blissfully ignorant of
Australia, who greeted me memorably with:
“Happy Anzac Day!”
Colourful, eccentric, characters, sure, but
also the finest, most hard-working and ethical
people I’ve met in a lifetime. I remember
them all with affection – and hope the fun
never goes out of journalism.
John Coleman is a Walkley winner and also a
United Nations Media Peace Prize
Guy Body works for the New Zealand Herald,
in addition to freelancing
Mad as hell and not taking it anymore
Chris Rau has had nearly 30 years in print journalism, but news bosses who put shareholders
above the readers have made her go on a mainstream media strike. Cartoon by Jon Kudelka
I
’m tired. I feel like a pale and wan
version of Lilly van Schtupp as played
by the immortal Madeleine Kahn in Mel
Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, who sang “I’ve
seen zem coming and going, and going and
coming – and always too soon…” The same for
hurried news stories.
After nearly 30 years in print journalism, I’m
hoisting the flag of surrender.
When newsrooms ditch copyreaders,
subeditors, photographers and a large chunk of
their journalists, the outcome is grim. We see
it in spelling errors on front pages every day;
stories missed, stories buried, and who knows
what good stories may have been omitted?
Only a frazzled news editor who never signed
up for a squillion jobs at once.
In print, I’ve worked on suburbans,
regionals, nationals, metros and magazines,
some full-time but since 1994 as a freelancer.
There seem to be only two options for
freelancers now: unpaid blogs, websites and
online work, or the occasional paid gig on
the whim of an editor who might that day be
enamoured of your idea.
But this isn’t meant to be a whinge. I’m
positive that the hunger for good stories will
endure. Readers, listeners and viewers will
always want to digest a good yarn, whether it’s
the latest NT croc story or a dry economics
piece in the Financial Review. And I’m sure
there will eventually be a backlash against the
seven-second sound bite and the underresearched and under-checked news item.
What worries me is the changing
demographic among current and would-be
journalists. Now there are almost no options in
the mainstream press for all those enthusiastic,
idealistic media students coming out of
university. Instead, if they’re lucky, they might
end up in jobs in marketing, PR or media
across the government and business sectors.
When you’re working for a police media
unit or the Department of Immigration
(and now Border Protection), you soon get
told to stuff your moral compass. And your
storytelling ability.
This is in a way a passionate plea for news
executives to hold their nerve. Invest in staff,
research and time. A story that only you can
break – with a good team – will not depend
on another outlet’s whim, so don’t rush it.
Reflection and time is the only way you’re ever
going to create a great wave of a story beyond
merely surfing the reactive ones. Chasing the
24/7 news cycle is killing newspapers.
This is where newspapers have fallen
down. By outsourcing the very things that sell
Reflection and time
is the only way
you’re ever going to
create a great wave
of a story beyond
merely surfing the
reactive ones
newspapers: credibility (good journos and
subeditors), time (now one person is doing the
job of three, and doing broadcast to boot), and
space (The Sydney Morning Herald’s “compact”
format simply doesn’t work), newspapers are
not doing their job.
Shareholders have taken precedence
over readers and, ironically, share prices
have dwindled. Cutbacks have left a trail of
frustrated readers and seen advertising decline.
It might have escaped the media executives’
attention that people care more about
society than the economy, and the constant
banging on about fiscal matters (such as the
franking credits involved in the Coalition’s
maternity leave scheme) leave audiences
running for the exits.
Politicians, media executives and businesses
need to realise that financial or political success
will only come when you genuinely care about
a society, not just an economy.
One of the ideals in newspapers was
to inform the public. Where I live, in Sydney’s
west, a local mum came over for a visit. Ten’s
The Project was showing footage of Kevin
Rudd before his successful leadership spill.
Julia Gillard had been in power for nearly
three years and my visitor said: “Oh, isn’t
he the prime minister? ...Oh, I think it might
be a woman now.”
It only goes to show how inflated our egos
are in the media when a lot of people obviously
don’t absorb any news at all.
But, here’s the crux. I’ve found that editors
these days are so tied up with overwhelming
demands that they don’t have the time or
thought to envisage a good idea if it hits them
with a four’be’two. They are so busy now, it can
be a bit of a shock for a freelancer to actually
get one on their phone line. And you’re hard
pressed to get even a yea or nay to a freelance
idea. Just a simple response saying “sorry, we’re
not interested,” or “we don’t have the space”
is a rare event.
In this emergent era of social media, it’s
easy to forget that not everything has to keep
accelerating. Not every journalist needs to
be a specialist in IT or social media; not every
IT expert can necessarily persuade a reluctant
interviewee to tell their story. Some people
will always be better at researching and gentle
interviewing, others might have a great natural
flair for broadcast, and others might be a
wonderful tech-whizz. Rarely do they all come
in the same package.
In my case, I’ve heard senior colleagues
talking about what it’s like to start unpaid
websites and to create an online voice. For
a little while, I thought about this but have
concluded that it’s quite a big and expensive
team effort (as I’d have to recruit the IT whizz)
for no gain at all. To what purpose?
In the meantime, potentially good story
ideas bite the dust, journalism students are
left with bleak prospects, and I’m going
on mainstream media strike. It’s specialist
medical and social reporting for me, with the
occasional glance above the parapet should
an irresistible story pounce into my sphere.
Chris Rau is a Sydney-based freelance
print journalist and author of Dealing With
the Media (UNSW Press, RRP $34.95)
Jon Kudelka is a Walkley award winner
and freelance cartoonist and animator;
www.kudelka.com.au
43
Q BOOKS & REVIEWS
Auckland’s newspaper wars
This look at Auckland’s early newspapers mixes entertaining anecdotes
with bigger philosophies, says Kevin Childs
philosophy to scoops as he pictures a reporter
rowing ashore with a great exclusive.
This reporter is a former compositor,
destined to become a powerful press baron.
As the New Zealand Herald’s shipping reporter,
Henry Brett is rowed out to meet a steamer
carrying cataclysmic news. Up against him are
the newshounds from the Evening News and
Daily Southern Cross. Brett doesn’t have to
go on board, however, for the purser throws
down a parcel of papers and tells him to row
for his life.
Back on land the Herald is soon on the
streets with a special edition. In the parcel
were detailed accounts of a Maori massacre
leaving readers enraged and Luckie forever
known as Kaskowiski.
Such anecdotes leaven an account of the
battle for women’s rights, fights against libel
laws, land rights and New Zealand wars and
make obvious the need for a similar book
looking at the rise and fall of Australian
papers and their characters.
Hastings has an interesting conclusion to
his battlefield story, finding that the war was
never about orchestrating public opinion.
“Newspapers fought their battles on many
different grounds and against many enemies,
politicians and political factions as well as
each other. The prize was profit and a say in
a few days earlier that took the lives of about
50 people in one night. As his rivals were
stuck interviewing passengers, Brett was off,
thanks to his contact.
His paper was one of the few survivors
out of more than 30 started from the 1840s
to the mid-1880s. Two collapsed after a
20-year battle. The Herald is still daily, while
its only rival into the 1990s, the Evening Star,
continues in the masthead of the Sunday
Star-Times, now edited by a gun formerly of
Brisbane, Garry Ferris.
Guns of a different type enter Hastings’
story. WAR WITH RUSSIA screamed
the Daily Southern Cross in a four-deck
headline early in 1873. A CALAMITY FOR
AUCKLAND proclaimed the sub-head.
To make an impact, editor David Luckie
ran a hoax about a Russian warship taking
Auckland by force. Kaskowiski was its name
(say it slowly). There was a footnote to the
splash saying the report came from the paper
three months hence. Few saw this, however,
politics, but the results were never certain
and the unpredictability of the winner
on the day undermines arguments that
papers were somehow able to dictate what
people thought.”
As we watch papers shrivel and vanish,
Hastings’ words ring true: “The only
constant was that readers held the key to
success or failure.”
The Evening Post, July 31, 1937, retrieved from
The National Library of New Zealand’s Papers Past
A
waiting the arrival of the skeletal
remnants of a newspaper, just 20
minutes from the city centre and
after 8am, offers time these days to
ponder whether the previous night’s footy will
be reported (alas, no), and so the thought arises
– what purpose does the paper serve? Apart,
that is, from an apparently prolonged and often
ungrammatical suicide note for an industry.
The sinister thought also occurs that the
absence of an account of an event from the
previous evening may be intended, deliberately
or not, to drive one, again, to the web.
Looking at neighbouring lawns, it is
obvious some people still cling to print. This
is despite the reactionary outlook of Australian
newspapers which, for many years, were
often instruments of social control in their
denigration of anti-war movements, women’s
rights and similar advances. Yet, as David
Hastings notes early on in Extra! Extra!, his
intriguing story of early papers in Auckland,
this was not always so, for the English language
sheets that began in the 18th century were
public-spirited institutions engaged in
rational-critical debate.
The entry of commercialism corrupted
them, “turning them into complexes of power
that threatened the critical functions they
originally performed”. You don’t have to look
far to see evidence of such corruption on this
side of the Tasman and elsewhere.
Hastings cites philosopher Jürgen
Habermas’s influential book, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, in arguing
that the press is the enduring cornerstone of
every real democracy.
Other high-minded authors talk of the
essential importance of newspapers to the
function of democracy, not only through
criticism, analysis and discussion, but also
as a watchdog on power and privilege. The
Finkelstein inquiry summarised views of
media commentators who held that today’s
papers are commercial corruptions of the
ideal. Then there are those who hold that the
early newspapers, of which Hastings writes,
acted for an elite intent on domination.
This is interesting stuff from this former
ABC journalist, who is that rare bird, born to
a doctor father in Belize.
Hastings recently retired as editor of that
excellent paper, Auckland’s Weekend Herald
(declaration: I wrote a few pieces for it during
the Rugby World Cup). His editorship included
winning a newspaper of the year award.
Hastings shows his class when, early in Extra!
Extra!, he picks up the pace and moves from
The only
constant was
that readers
held the key
to success or
failure
Extra! Extra!: How people made the news by
David Hastings, Auckland University Press,
RRP NZ$45.
Kevin Childs was Victorian president
and federal vice-president of the Media
Alliance’s predecessor, worked on 11 papers
in three countries over a 45-year career,
is the author of eight books, vice-president
of the United Nations Association of
Australia (Victorian Division), a board
member of Liberty Victoria and teaches
at RMIT University
A new Staria is born
Buxom space captain Staria may have been pushed out of the daily papers, but Lindsay Foyle
expects to find her in another galaxy soon. Cartoon by Roger Fletcher
F
or 33 years readers of The Daily
Telegraph were able to travel to
regions far beyond Earth. They
were doing it on one of the bestread pages in the newspaper, in a space
adventure comic strip with the curvaceous
and sexy Staria, captain of the Venus III,
a Federation of Intergalactic Peace Keeping
Organisations’ space patrol ship. She had
been tirelessly battling evil aliens and
intergalactic outlaws of all descriptions.
But as good as she was at getting out of
sticky situations, she fell victim to one
of the most evil beings in all the galaxies.
She was struck down by a pink slip –
sometimes known as the “do not come
Monday” letter, but in this case it was a “do
not come after 20 July 2013” email – and it
was wielded by a newspaper executive.
It was all part of News Limited’s
rearrangement of feature pages in their
metropolitan daily newspapers. It resulted
in the same eight comics running in The
Courier-Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Herald
Sun, Mercury and Advertiser. Five are old
syndicated comics from overseas – Calvin
and Hobbes, Fred Basset, Hagar, Garfield
and The Phantom. Only three are Australian
– Ginger Meggs, Insanity Streak and Snake.
Not that Staria is complaining. She
has survived the arrival and departure of
more than a dozen editors at The Daily
Telegraph, and had a longer career than
many journalists who have worked there,
and a great deal more fun.
Guiding her through every adventure
over the past 33 years was Roger Fletcher.
Best known as a mild mannered artistic
warrior who arrived on this planet in 1949,
Fletcher was captured by comic strips at an
early age. He attended the Julian Ashton
Art School in Sydney to expand his drawing
– and rubbing out – skills. To avoid just
being drawn into trouble he added to his
capabilities with a course in scriptwriting at
the Australian Film and Television School.
By the early 1970s Fletcher was comic
combat ready and he developed a Sunday
comic about a broadsword wielding
almost-naked warrior named Torkan.
Despite a weakness for comely wenches
and a fiery temper, Torkan has rarely been
bested in combat. He lives in a long past
world, inhabited by dragons, witches and
other beasties that defy description. It was
a good move. Torkan has been appearing in
The Sunday Telegraph ever since June 1976.
As good as
she was at
getting out
of sticky
situations,
she fell victim
to one of the
most evil
beings in all
the galaxies.
She was
struck down
by a pink slip
With the upper hand on a Sunday comic
strip, Fletcher then started looking around
for a daily fix. He turned his sights as far
into the future as he had into the past with
Torkan, and Staria took form in the cosmic
(comic?) dust.
Sci-fi had been big in the comic world
from the 1930s, but back in the 1970s there
were those who considered space adventure
a relic of the past. Maybe they were stuck
on the Moon after Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin took them there in 1969.
Luckily they were transported back to
Earth in 1977 when Star Wars erupted onto
movie screens all over the world.
Torkan might be a lone warrior, but
Staria never was. She had a crew of three
travelling with her on the Venus III. First
officer was Kru, a formidable Dromad
warrior with wings and the head of an
ancient bird of prey. The navigator and
medical officer was Doctor Umbo, a harddrinking sophisticate. And then there
was Horry, one of the very few surviving
members of a race of telepaths (they may
have proved very helpful for those dealing
with newspaper editors).
While Staria may have been banished
from the pages of The Daily Telegraph she
will not be disappearing forever. For a
short time she will survive in a cryogenic
state. After resuscitation she will once
again be able to use her incredible combat
skills in an expanded universe, known to
humanoids as a graphic novel.
This will have a secondary benefit.
Staria will be placed beyond the reach of
misguided theoretics, who harbour the
belief comics are for children, when all
those who live in the real world know
comics are for fully-grown life forms…
who buy newspapers, when they have
comics in them.
Lindsay Foyle is a past president of the
Australian Cartoonists’ Association
45
Q PAYING TRIBUTE
With a twinkle in his eye
Bill Peach
May 15, 1935 – August 27, 2013
Bill Peach was a current affairs icon
with cheek, wit and a sharp intellect.
He was also a great friend, writes
Tim Bowden
Bill Peach’s contribution
to current affairs television
journalism in Australia cannot
be underestimated. To most
viewers, he WAS This Day Tonight,
the first weekly current affairs
show of substance to screen in this
country in 1967. He fronted it for
the next eight years.
In an industry renowned for
prima donnas and inflated egos, the
Bill Peach you saw in his compere’s
chair, with his trademark thermos
of (spiked) coffee, was the same
nice guy off screen. He seemed, as
his colleague Peter Luck said, to
have the Ginger Meggs quality of
the boy next door. Ginger was of
course cheeky, and so was TDT.
Peach was the perfect front man
for the times, covering up for the
many on-air technical stuff-ups in
those early days of black-and-white
television with good humour and
an appropriately droll comment.
Mike Carlton put it perfectly: “I can
see him now, that boyish grin, that
twinkle in the eye, the apt and witty
one-liner that would mollify even
the most angry Cabinet minister or
Retired from Bowral.”
But this geniality concealed a
well-read, sharp mind, a passion
for Australian politics, history
and bush poetry, a disdain for
pomposity and bullshit, and a
keen awareness of the pioneering
importance of what TDT was doing
for the national debate – in the
face of timidity and near panic in
the ABC management of the day.
In his forensic and insightful book,
This Day Tonight – How Australian
TV Came Of Age, published in
1992, Peach wrote:
“We had lots of cheek, lots of
hide, and lots of pride. But we had
no hidden agenda, no axes to grind,
no covert interests to serve. We
thought that critical examination of
society was the legitimate role of the
program. We did it, and we annoyed
some mighty powerful people,
especially when we employed the
one criticism they could not bear,
the criticism of laughter. They
struck back. Gore Hill [where the
ABC’s Sydney studios were located]
was aptly named.
“There was not enough
questioning in Australia when TDT
began. I believed we helped change
that. If our questioning changed
other things which needed to be
changed, I’m glad and I’m sure my
BBC’s Pacific Service in Bush
House in the Strand. We remained
friends for the rest of our lives,
which included my stint with
TDT from 1970-73. In fact most
of his close friends had known
him from his early life. I believe he
was that rarest of mortals – a man
without enemies.
I’m sure he would agree that in
a fully lived life – which included
running a travel business in later
years – his time with TDT was the
Farewell Betty
of Bondi
Elisabeth Wynhausen
June 23, 1946 – September 5, 2013
In her 50-year career, Elisabeth
Wynhausen went nude with
hippies, prowled Bankstown in
a burqa, and entertained the
Twittersphere as Betty of Bondi,
writes Tom Dusevic
Bill Peach is farewelled by some of the TDT reporting team after his last program in
1974. From left: Paul Murphy, Bill Peach, June Heffernan, Tony Joyce, Peter Luck.
Photo: John Pearson, ABC Archives.
I believe he was that rarest of mortals –
a man without enemies
former colleagues are. When I said
on TDT, ‘The unexamined country
is not worth living in’, I was not
signalling my intention to go and
live somewhere else. I was hoping
Australia would grow up.”
At heart, Bill was a bush boy,
born in Lockhart in the NSW
Riverina, where his father was a
stock agent. His love of the bush
and Australia was realised in his
post-current affairs life, with superb
documentary series like Peach’s
Australia, Peach’s Gold and The
Explorers, all done for the ABC.
I first met him in London in 1961
when we both worked with the
watershed. I’d like to leave him
with the last word, indeed the final
sentences of his fine book on the
history of the program:
“This Day Tonight was the
mother of all nightly current affairs
programs in Australia. You are still
watching TDT on your television
set in many forms. It may not
have the name it was born with a
quarter of a century ago, but in an
important sense it is still around.
Perhaps it will always be around.”
Bill lost his beloved wife,
Shirley, in 1997. He is survived by
his partner Pam Young, and his
children Meredith and Steven.
When she wasn’t stirring up a
newsroom, Elisabeth Wynhausen’s
natural habitat as a reporter “was from
the perspective of the people at the
back of the crowd.” It’s the vantage
point that guided her original and
brilliant journalism, whether it
was delivered in newspapers,
magazines, books, blog posts
or tweets over five decades.
Was there ever another scribe
whose surface hard-boiled truculence,
legendary profanity and serial
wisecracking co-existed with such
a compassionate and joyful soul?
Wynhausen was loved wherever she
worked – by readers and colleagues,
even some of her editors – because of
a fierce independence, fearlessness and
an obsessive dedication to her craft. She
produced memorable, elegantly written
yarns, with people at their heart.
She immersed herself in difficult
stories, going into the field to observe
and sometimes live among people
who were on the periphery: Kings
Cross street kids, residents of the
Block in Redfern, Asian women in
sexual slavery, itinerant workers,
the mentally ill and homeless, crack
addicts, and black Americans in the
segregated Deep South.
Born in Holland in 1946,
Wynhausen arrived in Australia with
King of the columnists
Photo: Stephen Dupont
Keith Dunstan
February 3, 1925 –
September 11, 2013
her parents and younger brother in
1951. Many in her wider family of
Dutch Jews died at the hands of Hitler’s
executioners. She grew up on Sydney’s
northern beaches and recalled her
coming-of-age in the sublime Manly
Girls (1989), which was both poignant
and hilarious.
Wynhausen began her career at Frank
Packer’s Daily Telegraph in 1970. She’d
lived on the bohemian fringe, mixed with
activists and went about without shoes.
Even as a junior reporter, her boisterous
motormouth upset the Packers.
She got a job on Donald Horne’s
Bulletin then moved to Fairfax’s weekly,
the National Times. Wynhausen made
her name during the raging ’70s as a
creative and unorthodox feature writer,
rambling around the country to go nude
with hippies on a commune or clothed
to follow leading politicians.
“The profiles had a sly innocence
which undermined the pretensions
of public figures, and people gossiped
about them knowingly,” she wrote
in her memoir.
Wynhausen moved to New York
in 1978 and roamed the continent.
In a spectacular coup, she persuaded
Ita Buttrose to assign her to cover the
1980 US presidential campaign for
The Australian Women’s Weekly, and
interviewed future first ladies Nancy
Reagan and Barbara Bush.
Her years in America, where she also
wrote for the National Times and The
Age, expanded her reporting range and
interests, and deepened her essential
outlook as that of an outsider.
She returned to Sydney in the early
1990s and wrote a column called
“Snooping Around” for The Sun-Herald,
before being hired by Paul Kelly at The
Australian. Again, Wynhausen flourished
in an environment that was serious and
competitive, yet open to possibility and
supportive of her “slow journalism”.
For the next 14 years, she would
cajole editors, inspire younger reporters
and fire up the Surry Hills flagship.
Wynhausen would march in to berate
the boss in his office or, if she felt like
a pause, she’d happily take a nap on an
editor’s couch.
When not on the trail of spivs or
prowling around Bankstown in a burqa,
she was breaking the hearts of editors
with her flagrant disregard of deadlines,
or market testing line by line, her soonto-be-released masterpiece on a network
of unpaid copy-tasters.
Storming out of the comfort zone of
print features, Wynhausen embarked on
two book-length odysseys of reportage.
Dirt Cheap (2005) was a ground-level
investigation of the conditions of
low paid workers, based on her own
experience as a cleaner, hotel maid,
factory hand and check-out chick.
The Short Goodbye (2011) told the
human stories of loss behind the global
financial crisis, a work written after
Wynhausen was famously sacked from
the Oz while writing a story about
people being laid off.
Perhaps her bravest and most
revealing book was On Resilience (2009),
the inspiring, pocket-sized gem written
after the deaths of her brother Jules and
mother Nan.
In recent times, Wynhausen used
her unrelenting eye and street-wise
sensibility to examine her home turf
through her Backstreet Bondi blog,
and to niggle, nudge and entertain
the denizens of the Twitter-sphere as
Betty of Bondi.
Once asked by a counsellor about her
career highlights, Wynhausen wrote she
had “always liked nailing people doing
the wrong thing”. She truly did that, but
much more, giving voice to the people
at the back of the crowd, while searching
out all of humanity during the grand
time in which she lived.
Before she fell to pancreatic cancer,
she put the best of her works online.
To see Wynhausen’s greatest hits, visit
www.elisabethwynhausen.com.
Keith Dunstan was gently amusing,
but there was a sharp tip to the
pen if someone needed a prod.
By Peter Coster
No Brains At All, the title of Keith
Dunstan’s autobiography, was the
remark of a schoolmaster who didn’t
realise that behind that disarming
smile was a very sharp brain.
We were at opposite ends of the
newsroom when Dunstan wrote
“A Place in the Sun” for the Sun News
Pictorial in the morning and I wrote
“In Black and White” for the Herald
in the evening.
Our eyes sometimes met across the
distance of a huge newsroom in what
we might not have then realised were
the glory days of print journalism.
Dunstan, who died of cancer at
age 88, became the US West Coast
correspondent, and after some years
I followed. I arrived in LA on a sunny
day to be picked up by Keith at LAX.
We drove to Beverly Hills,
high-rises baking in the sun and
people wandering about in shorts
and sunglasses.
Dunstan drove an unusually small,
very ugly but economical Chevrolet,
concerned even in the freewheeling
’80s about saving the planet.
When he picked me up he got in
the right-hand side.
I said I didn’t think I was ready
to drive on the opposite side of the
road and he gave that gentle smile
and said he must have been thinking
he was back home.
Dunstan was born on February 3,
1925, and went to Geelong Grammar.
He described himself as one of the
RAAF’s “least successful pilots” in
WWII, serving in Morotai and North
Borneo, and at war’s end he joined
The Sun, serving in London and
New York.
Writing APITS, as “A Place in
the Sun” was known by the more
than a million who read it, he
gave the impression deadlines were
easily achieved.
He was never stressed and
unfailingly polite, not always a
quality of reporters. His reportage
was his alone.
The pen was sharpened, but with
a humour that never gave offence.
When he created the Anti-Football
League it mocked football-mad
Melbourne, but the most hysterical
of football followers read it with
delight. His style gave the impression
of unhurried leisure. That must have
been why so many people read it.
The tip of the pen was sharpened but with a humour
that never gave offence
Keith Dunstan’s son Jack participates in his first football burning as they relaunch
The Anti-Football League. Photo: Herald Sun
47
Q BOOKS & REVIEWS
Japan’s fatal shore
Deborah Cameron can admire the dignity and stoicism of Japanese society, but the
Fukushima disaster laid bare its flaws, and Mark Willacy recorded it
B
eing a foreign correspondent
means living with a knot of
nervous exhilaration in your
stomach. It comes from being
‘on watch’ over an entire country, culture
and economy and every story in it. When
a correspondent really hits their straps
– which isn’t always – the result jumps off
the page or off the screen.
Until 2011 the nuclear threat that most
worried Tokyo correspondents was North
Korea, the secretive regime that was inclined
to loose-off underground tests or stumble
about with missiles. That was before the
events of Fukushima, where a massive
earthquake and 40-metre high tsunami
killed 20,000 people on March 11, 2011, and
caused a nuclear reactor to leak radioactive
material. The event shaped the tenure of
ABC correspondent Mark Willacy.
In the margins of Willacy’s book,
Fukushima: Japan’s tsunami and the inside
story of the nuclear meltdowns, is the story of
a Japan correspondent coming to maturity.
Willacy had previously been an ABC
correspondent in the Middle East and was
serious about it. But when he first arrived
in Japan he fell into the smothering grip of
sumo, covering too much of it. Yes, sumo
tells us something of ceremonial, feudal
Japan, but not everything.
Clichés ensnare many a Japan chronicler
up to and including the Australian novelist
Peter Carey, whose attempt, Wrong About
Japan, I read and put out with the recycling.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster seemed
to bring Willacy to his senses. Importantly
for his audience, it gave him a much needed
prism through which to observe a complex
and important society. And the way that this
is drawn in the pages of his book – through
the perspectives of so many people at a time
of deep shock and confusion – is with the
right combination of good reporting, critical
thinking and empathy.
Willacy is a fine storyteller who surveys
the Fukushima nuclear plant from all angles;
As the Fukushima
disaster unfolded
there was no-one
at the top who
could understand,
calculate or
articulate the risk
and then explain
it to the PM
he scuba dives to the depths beneath it and
then takes to the skies above. He drives into
the zone with a Geiger counter beeping on
the dashboard.
Willacy meets farmers, rescuers and others
whose orderly lives were never the same.
Among many moving accounts, the story of
a mother who got a Bobcat licence to carry
on excavating after the official rescue ended
captures the sad, tough and lonely disaster.
Willacy meets a stoic pig farmer who
hefted his floundering pigs to safety out
of their broken pens because that was his
job, only to discover when he got home at
the end of the day his house and wife were
washed away. As Willacy swims with a body
retrieval crew he writes chillingly of his
hopes not to find the “ghosts of Yamada”.
The book’s reach extends to the office of
the former Japanese prime minister, Naoto
Kan, whose poor management of the disaster
cost him his job. What is clear now is that
Kan was himself an inevitable casualty of
decades of decisions that were misinformed,
stupid, corrupt, unquestioning or plain bad.
Willacy spent hours with Kan and is
not unsympathetic. How was the prime
minister meant to give direction when he
was landed with the head of the nuclear
agency who, because of a culture of salary-
man promotion, was an economist. As the
Fukushima disaster unfolded there was
no-one at the top who could understand,
calculate or articulate the risk and then
explain it to the PM. What is more, the boss
of the energy company that operated the
crippled reactor did not return to his post
after the tsunami but kept to his plan for a
spring picnic trip with his wife.
As we know in Australia, where our
disasters in all of their naked fury tend to be
seasonal – fire, flood, tempest – they reveal
our character and culture. Japan is the same.
It is infuriating that so many people
were lost – including an entire school and
almost all of its children – because no-one
seized authority, spoke up and ordered an
evacuation to the hills. There is great dignity
in struggle, duty, obedience, silence, humility
and endurance but not if good people stop
thinking straight, stifle dissent and never
question authority.
Willacy’s book is timely for broader
reasons. On one reading, nuclear power –
expensive to build and optimal only for peak
loads – is on shaky ground and even more
so with deadly Fukushima mistakes factored
in. Yet it is not so clear cut.
We live in an age where prospecting
for new resources – renewables mostly
– is redefining the energy sector. It is
affecting the strategic decision-making of
governments, energy companies, major
investors, regulators and consumers right
down to household level. The nuclear
industry wants in. Willacy’s book is a
warning that resonates beyond Japan.
Fukushima: Japan’s tsunami and the inside
story of the nuclear meltdowns by Mark
Willacy, Pan Macmillan, RRP $32.99.
Deborah Cameron is a communications
consultant who previously worked as
the Tokyo correspondent for The Sydney
Morning Herald and The Age and as an
ABC broadcaster
Assassins’ creed
Catherine Fox asks whose interests are being served by the mainstream coverage of politics in Australia.
Illustrations by Jeff Fisher
A
lthough poring over the entrails
is a post-election ritual, many
will be grateful the tsunami of
poll analysis, full of either back
patting or stabbing, has just about come
to an end. But two books written well
before the campaign got underway could
inject some much needed reality into the
revisionism that has emerged. It’s amazing
how some pundits can insert an “I told you
so” theme into their conclusions despite
plenty of evidence to the contrary.
In The Stalking of Julia Gillard, former
press gallery journalist Kerry-Anne Walsh
builds a compelling case from the evidence
to show the systematic destruction of Julia
Gillard’s leadership by Kevin Rudd and
his cronies. She points out that Rudd was
ably assisted in this task by some strange
bedfellows – his political foes and several
Canberra media heavyweights who were
supposed to show no fear or favour. They
shared a common approach – a tenacious
adherence to the story that regardless of
what she did, Gillard’s prime ministership
was so poor it warranted her replacement.
“The longevity of her prime ministership
was constantly threatened by a neverending succession of headlines” in the
media, which helped to build momentum
for a denouement. “We in the fourth estate
have much to answer for,” Walsh writes.
The consistency of the attacks is well
documented. Gillard was a competent
politician, whose strong negotiation skills
allowed Labor to win power in 2010 and
steered a record 480 pieces of legislation
through a hung parliament. But she was
painted as a serial liar – apparently the
only PM in Australia’s history to break a
campaign promise – and, of course, the
“worst Prime Minister ever”. This absurd
claim shows how short political memories
are, and the fact these kinds of accusations
were either unchallenged or recycled by
many in the media is astounding. The selfreferential nature of the gallery, the fierce
competition for a headline story and the
reliance on anonymous quotes all fed the
relentless Gillard-Rudd stories.
The obsession of the media with
the leadership struggle at the expense
of significant policy initiatives is also
highlighted. Walsh reveals how the
cumulative effect of the symbiotic media/
political cycle (which former Labor finance
minister Lindsay Tanner wrote about
in his book Sideshow: Dumbing down
democracy) works in practice, and what the
consequences are for independent thought
and comment. This is lazy journalism but,
worse, plying statistics to promote the
case that a leader is terminal years before
an election is engaging in “fraudulent
misrepresentation”.
There’s much evidence of how the
destabilisation campaign was sustained
through targeted leaks to the media. The
critical role of the 2010 campaign leaks,
which relied on fanning sexist attitudes by
revealing Gillard opposed pension increases
and paid parenting leave, is outlined in
troubling detail. During Gillard’s tenure, the
critics constantly claimed that gender had
nothing to do with her incompetence. But
it was the presumption of incompetence
because of her gender and regardless of her
achievements that fuelled the most savage
personal attacks we have seen on a PM.
Even those who were not in the Canberra
hothouse and saw this unfolding (myself
included) should have done more to
counter the debased abuse. It was shocking
how quickly it became normalised.
Many in the gallery had a stake in the
outcome of this leadership battle and
became players in the drama rather than
independent commentators prepared to
apply the “they would say that wouldn’t
they?” test to their sources, the book reveals.
While the undermining efforts of the
Rudd camp are not given quite as much
attention in Aaron Patrick’s book Downfall:
How the Labor Party ripped itself apart, a
lot of other unedifying Labor shenanigans
certainly are. Although at times the awkward
shift from NSW’s Eddie Obeid to the Health
Services Union and then Queensland’s Bligh
years and back to Canberra is clunky, the
book makes clear the enormous breadth of
the challenge to reshape Labor. While it also
provides some much needed background on
one of the men intrinsic to Labor’s future,
Bill Shorten, the structure of Downfall
X
49
Q BOOKS & REVIEWS
X suggests it may have started out as more
of a Shorten biography which morphed into
something different as Labor imploded.
When examining the Gillard/Rudd
battle, Patrick comes to some similar
broad conclusions as Walsh. Rudd had
an amazing ability to continue to paint
himself as a victim of disloyalty as the
evidence piled up of his own treachery
and destabilising. Yet, Patrick writes, Rudd
“was largely unchallenged on this point”
by the media.
When it comes to the gender arena,
Patrick reminds us that Gillard had
gone out of her way to avoid gender
politics until the misogyny speech,
which “may have been the speech of her
career” and homed in on one of Tony
Abbott’s weaknesses. While noting some
commentators missed the importance
of the speech, Patrick then describes the
YouTube clip of the speech as a “minor
sensation”. Most Australian PMs would
kill for 2.5 million internet hits and
international coverage of a speech.
By the end of 2012, after months of
headlines over Gillard’s work as a lawyer
two decades ago, along with the Peter
Slipper and Craig Thomson scandals,
Patrick writes “politics had become a
struggle over the identity of modern
These books remind us it’s also time for a
critical discussion on whose interests are
really being served by the mainstream media
coverage of politics in Australia
Labor”. That struggle is a gift to the
Coalition that will just keep giving.
Meanwhile, the notable absence of any
recognition of Julia Gillard’s contribution
in the lead-up to the 2013 election was
probably not surprising – Rudd was trying
to pretend she had never existed and
Abbott didn’t need to bring up the shafted
figure of a powerful woman as he eagerly
dragged his daughters from pillar to post.
But in due course some thoughtful analysis
of the Gillard years should provide a
welcome reality check to the hysteria of the
coverage in recent times.
It would be valuable if some who were so
quick to criticise and collude in her demise
could contribute to a more measured effort
and pay her the respect that has always
been extended to former PMs and their
legacy. Stalking Julia Gillard would be a
good place to start as it makes it clear that
alongside the failures and fights she also
had some significant successes, such as the
National Disability Insurance Scheme and
the Gonski education reforms.
For those reviving Labor, Patrick’s book
will make uncomfortable but necessary
reading. There is no shortage of advice for
how to reshape the machinery of the Labor
Party, but Patrick concludes it now needs
honest and brave leadership. Whether that
is delivered by a man or a woman shouldn’t
matter, and as Gillard herself suggested on
the evening she lost the leadership ballot,
it’s time for a more nuanced discussion
about gender in this country. These books
remind us it’s also time for a critical
discussion on whose interests are really
being served by the mainstream media
coverage of politics in Australia.
The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne
Walsh, Allen & Unwin, RRP $29.99.
Downfall: How the Labor Party ripped
itself apart by Aaron Patrick, ABC Books,
RRP $29.99.
Catherine Fox is a journalist, author
and commentator and former
“Corporate Woman’’ columnist for the
Financial Review
Jeff Fisher specialises in book covers and
literary design. His clients include The
New York Times, Bloomsbury and Phaidon
The NSW Writers’ Centre presents the
Creative Non-Fiction Festival
Saturday 2 November 2013
Curated by Benjamin Law (Good Weekend, frankie)
Join some of Australia’s best memoirists, journalists and editors
for discussions on ethics, the craft of writing non-fiction, and
how to develop the perfect pitch.
Speakers include Monica Attard, Tim Elliott, John van Tiggelen,
Jane Cadzow, Alyx Gorman, Brendan Shanahan, Dominic Knight,
Clementine Ford, Trent Dalton and Nadia Saccardo.
The NSW Writers’ Centre, Callan Park, Balmain Road, Rozelle.
For more information and to book:
nswwc.org.au Q (02) 9555 9757 Q [email protected]
Members: $55
Concession Members: $45
Non Members: $80
We need
to talk…
Big media is meeting its big
audience, and the relationship
between them has changed
says Tim Dunlop. Illustration by
Anton Emdin
M
y book, The New Front Page:
New media and the rise of
the audience, begins with the
assumption that journalists
and editors are serious when they talk about
themselves as a “fourth estate”. It accepts they
are telling the truth when they say that their
watchdog role is their most important job.
Having accepted this claim, it then examines
what the media actually does, but from the
point of view of the audience.
Specifically, it looks at how consumers of the
news are using the tools of new media to inject
themselves into conversations about the issues
of the day, and it considers why so many truly
engaged audience members are dissatisfied with
the news product being presented to them.
At around this point, I can feel a number
of journalists getting antsy. “Here we go again,”
I can hear you thinking. Another so-and-so
who doesn’t have a clue, coming in and telling
us our job. Another outsider pontificating from
the sidelines. Doesn’t this guy understand the
24/7 news cycle? That our business model is
broken? That we are being asked to do much
more with much less?
Any of you entertaining such thoughts
need to know: you are part of the problem.
Such defensiveness is understandable, but to
truly recognise how lame it is, consider, as a
journalist, how much time you would give to
a politician who responded to your criticism
of what they do with similar arguments. Quite
frankly, you would scoff.
It’s time for journalists to get over their
defensiveness. We-the-audience understand
perfectly well that your business model has
collapsed, that the news cycle is constant and
grinding, and that you are being asked to do
more with less. But here’s the thing: we still
think you should provide a service we are
happy with, especially as, increasingly, you are
asking us to pay for it via paywalls.
We also understand that fourth estate
journalism exists on a nexus between the
commercial and the civic worlds. You
are trying to inform us as citizens, but in
order to do that you need to make money
from what you are doing.
So what I am trying to do is rethink the
relationship between the media and their
A lot of the
criticism you
cop from
your audience
is coming
from a place
of love
audience in a way that reconciles the civic and
commercial aspects of journalism.
Journalists should understand two basic
facts. One is that a lot of the criticism you cop
from your audience is coming from a place
of love. No, really. The people who can be
bothered responding day after day to the work
you produce only do that because they are
genuinely interested.
The second fact follows logically from the
first: your most engaged audience will be
your biggest critics. Such people are going to
have strong views about your work and they
are going to feel some sense of ownership
of it. New media has given them the tools to
respond critically and you really need to find
a way of welcoming that engagement rather
than shunning it. Because it isn’t going away.
Now, we also know that this highly engaged
segment is a relatively small part of the overall
audience, somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to
15 per cent. But my argument is that unless
you can satisfy them – convince that 10 to
15 per cent that your product is worth paying
for – there is no way on earth you’re going to
convince the rest of the audience to pay.
What’s more, you can’t presume that
because only 10 to 15 per cent of people pay
attention to “quality” journalism – the truthto-power, fourth-estate stuff – that the rest
of the audience isn’t interested in that sort of
journalism. By dismissing the majority of
your audience like this, you are foreclosing
on the possibility of rethinking the ways you
present important news and gain a larger
paying audience.
Your job, surely, is to increase the size of
your engaged audience, because that’s where
the money is.
This is why I’m very interested in work
being done by Hal Crawford and Andrew
Hunter from ninemsn. Their Share Wars
project (see page 54 of this issue) strikes me as
one of the most useful ways to examine what it
is a mass audience looks for in a news story. It
opens up the possibility of rethinking “quality”
news so that a mass audience not only engages
with it as citizens but pays for it as consumers.
All of this is about ways of rethinking
top-end journalism so that it can reach as big
an audience as possible. And as much as I am
a champion of new media, I am also utterly
convinced that democratic societies need big,
traditional media organisations to do the
heavy lifting of fourth-estate journalism.
We need well-paid, trained journalists with
the support of a mainstream media and the
deep, institutional knowledge they embody to
be able to provide that service to society.
But I am also convinced that the only way
such news organisations will survive is if they
invite their most engaged audience members
into the news-making process, listen to them
and learn from them and work with them.
It stands to reason that in such an
environment, the power of journalists will
start to eclipse that of their editors. Individual
journalists will become brands in their own
right because that is the product people
will pay for and engage with. The role of the
editor will become more that of a curator and
crowdsourcer, as well as being a guardian of
trust and transparency with the audience.
Journalists will increasingly be specialists
rather than generalists, and the successful
journalists will be the entrepreneurial ones
who work with their audience through
social media, responding to their needs and
reflecting (not pandering to) their concerns.
But even the most successful ‘brand name’
journalists will still benefit from association
with a respected masthead or network.
The new front page of 21st-century
journalism will be a joint project between
the media and their audience. If that doesn’t
excite you, then maybe you’re working in
the wrong business.
The New Front Page: New media and the
rise of the audience by Tim Dunlop, Scribe
Publications, RRP $27.95.
Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum,
and was the author of two of Australia’s
most successful political blogs, The Road To
Surfdom and Blogocracy, as well as the music
blog Johnny’s in the Basement. He has a PhD
in political philosophy and communication
Anton Emdin draws cover art, illustrations
and cartoons for international and domestic
publications such as MAD, The Spectator,
People and The Global Mail
51
Q BOOKS & REVIEWS
All in a day’s research: Rats and rickshaws carry a
The big difference between investigating an article
compared to a book, says Claire Scobie, is the
amount of stuff you need to know and just how
long it takes. Illustration by Peter Sheehan
T
he metal rattrap was large and sat
on the cornice like an ornament.
“What’s that for?” I asked the
Indian porter.
“Rats,” he said, putting down our bags.
My husband and I were in a temple
town in Tamil Nadu and all the other
hotels were full. Inside our lacklustre room
the smell of mothballs wafted from the
drains. As we left for dinner I questioned
the receptionist further.
“No rats here, madam.” He feigned
surprise. “Only in the hotel next door.”
When we came back that evening the
trap had gone. But the rats hadn’t. My
husband spied a large hairy creature
scuttling across the bathroom floor.
Thankfully he only told me after we’d
checked out – of the aptly named Ratney
Residency in Madurai.
Sharing my room with a rat is just one
of many things I’ve done in the name of
research. For my second book, The Pagoda
Tree, set in 18th-century India, I’ve also
ridden on a bullock cart, met a prince and
driven all night from Delhi to Pushkar in
search of the perfect crumbling palace. I’ve
trespassed and been chased by a fist-waving
security guard; had my breast groped,
once; had a parrot read my fortune, twice;
eaten with my fingers off a banana leaf,
lots. Most enjoyable of all, I’ve worn a sari.
When doing fieldwork for my first book,
Last Seen in Lhasa, there was another
groping episode. That time I was in a remote
mountainous region in Tibet, walking for
weeks with a tribal group. All the women
were flat-chested and on two separate
occasions, a young porter poked my breast
rather innocently – as if to check it was
real. In India, the incident fell into the
euphemistic category of “eve-teasing”.
This makes it sound benign. Here we
name it as sexual harassment.
The major difference between
investigating an article compared to a book
is the amount of stuff you need to know.
And the length of time it takes to find out.
Of course I didn’t need to go to Tibet seven
times to write my travel memoir. The first
few trips I went as a journalist, only later
transforming it into something longer.
But researching my first novel required
a different approach. This time I wasn’t
writing about characters, I was writing
as characters – namely a young temple
dancer or devadasi named Maya.
English novelist Sarah Waters once
described how her characters seemed to
“come out of the mist” of the historical
material once she’d done enough. But how
much is enough? Kate Mosse (Labyrinth,
Citadel) says she spends three-quarters of
the time it takes her to write a novel doing
the research. I resolved to follow Louis de
Bernières’ advice not to research too much
after he became bogged down in Turkish
history when writing Birds Without Wings.
I started in all the obvious places: online,
Google books, Google scholar, in libraries.
I had set my novel in the mid-1700s because
there was a possibility of exchange between
East and West and the cross-cultural
relations and conflicts would provide great
tension for the plot. So from the outset
I knew that the India Office Records in
the British Library in London would only
provide part of my story.
I spent numerous weeks there over the
four years working on the book. The library
is home to some of the world’s most famous
tomes including the original Magna Carta
and the Gutenberg Bible. My favourite place
to write and read was in the cavernous
Rare Books Room.
Disappointingly I didn’t have to wear
white gloves to look at some of the works
I requested. Many had thick yellowing pages
and were written in faded ink. I do admit
getting a touch of archive fever though when
reading an original diary and imagining
the person who wrote it. It made history
real and brought the past streaming into
the present.
While I learned much about the English
in India, there was little on Indian women
– even less on temple dancers. In general,
archives are full of sources written by the
victors – usually men. In my novel I was
trying to show history from the other side.
My four trips to the sub-continent helped
fill the gaps. I adopted a dual approach:
in libraries and the ol’ journalistic trick
of following your nose. First stop was
the palace library in Thanjavur where the
effable Mr Perumal ensured regular cups
of chai as I read dusty manuscripts; then
a raft of libraries in Chennai. The most
fruitful was the Adyar Library, set in a rare
patch of greenery. The man at the front
writer into the past
When we came back that
evening the trap had gone.
But the rats hadn’t. My
husband spied a large hairy
creature scuttling across the
bathroom floor
desk was a stickler for rules and said
I needed a letter of request to join. An
elderly lady overrode him and allowed me
in, as long as I was barefoot and didn’t plug
in my laptop, “too much electricity use.”
Each time I went back the rules changed
but it was worth it for the discovery of some
rare 18th-century Tamil texts.
Just like when I am following the
breadcrumbs of a story, I also made contact
with local reporters. I visited Chennai’s
eminent historian, Mr Muthiah; sat in
on classical dance classes; interviewed a
star of Tollywood – the Tamil version of
Bollywood – and hung out with the Queen
of Higginbotham’s. With her smeared
black-kohl eyes and haphazard sari, this lady
had worked for decades at Higginbotham’s
bookshop, a Chennai institution. She knew
everyone and loaded me up with books.
All of this research was shaping the
historical canvas for my novel. But I still
needed to get a sense of how my characters
lived and breathed. For this I did “history
with my feet”. In Thanjavur I retraced the
steps that my fictional character Maya
would have walked. I saw the inscription on
the walls of the 11th-century “Big Temple”
detailing the names and addresses of 400
devadasis brought there for its inauguration.
I walked along West Main Road where these
women lived.
In Chennai I visited Fort St George
where the East India Company established
its base and my character Thomas arrived
as a young clerk. I located one of the few
18th-century “garden houses” that hadn’t
been demolished for redevelopment. As
I criss-crossed this chaotic sprawling city,
each rickshaw ride became more terrifying
than the last. On my last night, an early
monsoonal downpour hit as we were
crossing a flyover. There were no windscreen
wipers and the rickshaw driver could see
nothing ahead. All around traffic screeched
to a halt as the water levels rose. The man
revved up the engine and hammered it
home, squeezing between buses, bumping
through potholes. As he pulled up outside
my guesthouse, I cheered. In India you
can be grateful for the small things – even
rattraps have their uses.
Claire Scobie is an award-winning journalist
who has lived and worked in the UK, India
and now Sydney. The Pagoda Tree (Penguin,
$29.99) is her second book
Peter Sheehan is a writer, illustrator,
designer and storyboard illustrator;
www.petersheehan.com
5 tips on researching a book
1
Be prepared for the long haul
When you are used to writing articles to a deadline the shift to
writing longer pieces can be liberating – and daunting. You have to
devise systems and tricks to keep you writing during the slow times.
I’ve found the writing software Scrivener invaluable. It’s more userfriendly than Microsoft Word as you combine all your research and
writing in one project.
Write as you research
It seems obvious, but too often writers feel like they have to
know everything first. If you don’t know how your character
physically travelled from A to B, get her there anyway and then
work out later if she travelled in a pony and cart, a carriage or a
Morris Minor.
Create your own research system
Whether it’s the old-fashioned card index, Post-it notes
in books, photographing sources with your smartphone, or a
spreadsheet, keep a note somewhere of the titles of every book,
page reference and any quotes as you go. Update it regularly. If
necessary, use a referencing system like Endnote – useful if you
have an extensive bibliography and footnotes.
Enlist help from experts
Just as you call upon an expert for a choice quote in an
article, contact people who know your subject better than you
do. Interview them, ask them to recommend the best books,
ask them to fact check key sections. Librarians and archivists
are particularly helpful.
Create your own personal deadlines
Schedule each “to-do section” in your calendar and block out
periods of time. Be realistic. Give yourself extra days for the tricky
bits. If giving yourself a word-length target – say, to write 1000
words a day – is counter-productive, then set yourself a time-based
target of two hours. Write as much as you can during that time,
with no distractions.
And finally, bribe yourself. Your favourite cake. A treat. But only
if you finish the section you’ve set yourself for that day.
2
3
4
5
X
53
Q 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT…
…sharing stories
Andrew Hunter and Hal Crawford started Share Wars to analyse how news stories were being shared on social networks.
From March to June 2012 they tracked the sharing of news articles from 118 publications across the world. This is what they
found out. Illustration by Cathy Wilcox
1
Dogs beat cats
In three months we tracked 1.5 million
stories and gathered gigabytes of data,
and at the end of that time we could lay one
major existential question to rest – dogs
beat cats hands-down on social networks.
Counterintuitive as it may seem in the world
of Grumpy Cat and Keyboard Cat, dogs
are twice as likely to appear in a top-shared
story, and appear in twice as many headlines
overall. The reason? Dogs are just so much
better at acting like humans than cats. It
turns out that animals acting like humans is
sharing gold.
Sexy is not sexy
Throw out your tabloid rulebook. Sex
does not sell when it comes to social
networks. Of the most-shared 500 stories of
the period, less than 2 per cent involved sex.
Even within this small slice, the stories were
more schoolboy humour than titillation.
People don’t want to put their personal brand
next to sexual material, so as more digital
traffic flows through social networks, sex in
news media should decline.
Sharing is not sharing
We came to the Share Wars project
believing most sharing was about
passing on information in an altruistic, “I
thought you’d be interested” kind of way.
The data revealed a different picture, with
around two thirds of top shared stories in
what we call the “norming” category: an
appeal to group identity, usually involving a
moral judgment. Gay marriage (approval),
bad parenting (disapproval) and instances of
righteous violence (approval) were among
the norming subjects.
The US is more partisan than Australia
Norming is bigger in America. When
we compared US and Australian
publications, we found that judgmental,
identity-reinforcing stories account for close
to three quarters of all shared US stories.
Australia, by comparison, has just over 60 per
cent norming.
The most shared story in Australia
was ...
An article about a young woman who
sued Geelong Grammar because she didn’t get
into law at the University of Sydney. This story
from The Age achieved a total share count of
more than 34,000. The fascinating thing about
the Facebook share counts is that they have an
internal logic – the ratio of Likes to total shares
– that indicates whether the audience approves
of a story or, as in this case, condemns it.
2
3
4
5
8
6
Words that share
The 10 most common words in headlines
of Australian news stories that received
100-plus Facebook shares were (in order):
1. You
2. Gay
3. Facebook
4. Baby
5. Girl
6. Teen
7. Marriage
8. Mum
9. Life
10. Sex
Why “Facebook”? “Facebook” and “Twitter” are
among the most-shared words on their respective
networks. We think this is because social
platforms, like other forms of communication
technology (such as the telegraph), have an
inbuilt promotional advantage: their collision
with traditional life generates fascinating stories
that are distributed through mainstream media
and the social networks themselves.
Words that don’t share
The 10 most common headline words for
those Australian stories that received zero
shares were:
1. Stocks
2. China
3. Syria
4. Shares
5. Report
6. Murder
7. Budget
8. Plan
9. Markets
10. Case
Why “report”? As a document explaining or
investigating an action, “report” itself is devoid
of action. News audiences do not like inaction.
7
Who is winning the Share Wars?
When we totalled Facebook and Twitter
shares, the leaderboard showing the most
shares for Australian news sites were:
1. news.com.au (800,834 total shares)
2. smh.com.au (758,730)
3. Ninemsn News (752,970)
4. Herald Sun (538,165)
5. The Age (439,859)
When we adjusted for audience size to create a
shares-per-story-published figure, ABC News
moved up the list:
1. news.com.au (58 shares per story)
2. ABC News (53)
3. Ninemsn News (49)
4. smh.com.au (39)
5. The Age (29)
Facebook v Twitter
Facebook comprehensively beats Twitter
for sharing power. Facebook accounted
for nine times the social media shares of
Twitter across the 13 Australian news sites we
tracked. The sites with the highest percentage of
tweets were The Age (22 per cent Twitter to 78
per cent Facebook), smh.com.au (21 per cent
Twitter to 79 per cent Facebook) and ABC News
(16 per cent Twitter to 84 per cent Facebook).
Most-shared topics
We manually classified the 500 mostshared Australian news stories by
subject and the most popular topics during our
capture period were:
1. Stars (about famous people)
2. Animals (often animals behaving
like humans)
3. Kids (cute and courageous children)
4. Gay rights (mostly gay marriage)
5. Crime sagas (eg Baden-Clay charged,
Naden caught)
6. Cool culture (eg Anchorman II announced)
7. Parenting (neglectful parents/discipline)
8. Politicians (eg Xenophon gassed in Malaysia)
9. Nanny state (eg ban on touching in schools)
10. Quakes (eg Melbourne earthquake)
9
10
Andrew Hunter is an Editor-in-Chief at
Microsoft. He has worked in newspapers,
magazines and digital during a 20-year career in
media
Hal Crawford is ninemsn’s Editor-in-Chief.
He is a print and digital veteran who began his
career at The West Australian newspaper. Hal has
also taught journalism at La Trobe University in
Melbourne
Cathy Wilcox is a Walkley Award-winning
cartoonist for The Sydney Morning Herald and
The Sun Herald
auspost.com.au
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