My life is multiplatform journalism. I started in the worlds of music press and public radio, before moving on to The Age newspaper, then published independent zines Crusty Playlunch and Drivel by night while I worked at environmental law and healthcare newsletters by day. The Millennium Bug came and went, and I got a job at a multi-million dollar dotcom startup entertainment portal – and then it was time for the 21st century.
I was among the first of the new generation of journalists hired and trained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to go into regional areas of Australia equipped with a primitive disc-fed digital camera, a digital video camera and and microphone and audio recorder, to produce content for radio and television and run the website.
That part of the journey took a good 13 years… starting off in a radio station on the main street of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, in the middle of a broadcast area approximately 900 kilometres from the blue waters of the Southern Ocean to the edges of the APY Lands and stretching as far east as the Nullarbor Desert, before moving to Ballarat, the goldtown just an hour’s drive from Melbourne where the riches are in the town’s culture – the music, the art and the people.
For a year I took a job as national producer for the ABC Rural department, looking after the Heywire program, which brings together young people from all over Australia seeking to make a positive change to their communities, and then I became a multiplatform editor, in charge of ABC Local Radio’s metropolitan and regional websites in Victoria and Tasmania as well as the team of multiplatform reporters and producers based in those radio stations.