The Courier-Mail editor and UQ graduate Chris Jones says despite drastic changes to newspaper newsrooms in recent years, they have helped journalists to better serve their audiences. He shares his views on why the future is bright for current journalism students.
A recent opinion piece for Contact argues that the future of the print news media is bleak; that today’s university students will either find themselves working on a specialist website “or the new media website of what is old media, in which they toe the company line… rather than providing disinterested and accurate information”. I couldn't disagree more.
The author of the opinion piece, Andrew Kidd Fraser, is absolutely correct when he says the newsrooms of today are different to the ones in which he spent several decades working. As in every other profession, the past 20 years have brought almost unthinkable change to every single part of our business. We have, after all, just lived through the third industrial revolution – a revolution every bit as disruptive as the first, but one that has upended the world in a quarter of the time it took the machine to replace the craftsman.
Yet I believe the digital revolution has enhanced, not undermined, the opportunities for our craft. We are on the cusp of arguably the most exciting era ever for storytelling – one that I see will provide a rich and deeply rewarding career for today’s journalism students.
I started at The Courier-Mail as a cadet in 1998, while in my second year of studying journalism at UQ. I walked into a massive newsroom that housed easily 300 journalists (more if you included the Sunday Mail’s separate operation), all funded by a monopoly on the classified advertising “rivers of gold” – a cash cow that even then had not reached its peak.
There were many differences to today’s newsroom. The internet, for example, was something you booked a 15-minute slot in the newsroom’s library to use. As a reporter, you were expected to file just once a day – in the evening. Your story would be sent to a backbench of experienced journalists who would copy-taste it before sending it on to a small army of subeditors, where it was subbed and then checked before being returned to the backbench and night editor for final sign-off. There was even a full-time subeditor employed just to look after page one!
More than two decades on and those rivers of gold have dried up, forever. Today, The Courier-Mail must operate as any other business, monitoring our balance sheet carefully and making tough decisions about what we stop doing and what we start doing.
We have had to adapt to the challenges of today and the future. And if I’m being frank, it has been a good thing. It has made us engage with our audiences more than at any other time in history, to understand what they want to know and to listen to them – giving a voice also to those in society who need a vibrant, modern media to champion them when injustices are done.
Journalists today are driven by the same impulses any reporter from any period would understand. But today our storytelling now happens in real time, across multiple channels that are constantly evolving. My colleague Hedley Thomas, who is a little bit older and greyer than me, started many years ago in Queensland bashing out his stories on a keyboard. He is today’s premier news investigative podcaster. And he’s not alone in that transformation. Reporters are now telling their stories straight to video for us on web, apps and Instagram.
These are stories told with an immediacy unimaginable in the not-so-distant past, reaching growing audiences of Queenslanders and being accessed by them when, and how, they want to receive their news. This is a time when journalism for the consumer has never been more important.
The newsroom I am privileged to lead remains the biggest in the state, home to about 150 journalists. We have streamlined production to focus our priorities on our frontline reporting staff – journalists who investigate and break the stories that really do matter in Queensland. But the professional checks and balances of trusted journalism continue. Every story we publish goes through a rigorous process of scrutiny by experienced journalists. Lively news conferences where stories are pitched and challenged are now held three times a day. We still expect our reporters to develop contacts so they can break exclusive stories, as well as covering the news of the day in their round. But instead of a single daily deadline, we now ask our reporters to file through the day, to ‘build’ their own stories for digital publishing, and to ‘seed’ those stories into social networks. Despite these additional pressures, the team I lead breaks the vast majority of the big stories in the state in real-time – and sets the agenda every morning, whether on our front page or homepage, delivered to your front door, your mobile phone or tablet. It’s a remarkable story of successful change. Newsrooms are adapting to the challenges of the new media age.
