Jarrod Watt
My life is multiplatform journalism. I started in the worlds of music press and public radio, before moving on to The Age newspaper. By the mid 1990s I was publishing independent zines Crusty Playlunch and Drivel by night while I worked at environmental law and healthcare newsletters by day and volunteered as both a breakfast program presenter and assistant to the in-house production team at public radio station PBS-FM.
The millennium bug came and went, and I got a job at Scape, a multimillion dollar dotcom startup entertainment portal run by the Village Ten corporation, writing and producing multimedia features focused on Australian and international music and music culture.
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 a microphone and audio recorder to produce content for radio and television and run the website.
After a decade’s worth of reporting and producing radio, video and online content from Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Esperance and then Ballarat and South West Victoria, I became a national producer for the ABC Rural department’s Heywire program. I then moved on to join the first generation of state-based multiplatform editors for the ABC, overseeing a team spread across Victoria and Tasmania producing content for the websites and social media accounts of 10 radio stations.
In 2014, I moved into teaching and freelance content production, teaching multimedia journalism as part of the masters program at Swinburne University and joining the teaching team for the Advanced Diploma of Sound and Light at Federation University.
In 2015, I moved to Hong Kong and took up a job as Deputy Online Editor for the South China Morning Post. Initially, I was part of a small, dedicated online production and video team, and it’s been exciting to be a part of its growth and transformation into dedicated front page, social and video teams.
Over the past couple of years, I have developed projects that have incorporated new technologies and applications, including 360 cameras, virtual reality and augmented reality. With the advent of Facebook Live in 2016, I trained SCMP staff and developed equipment for our ongoing work broadcasting to an international audience with great success.
My job now is Specialist Digital Editor, continuing to work on new digital storytelling techniques and technologies but now focused mainly on developing, writing and producing podcasts. Since 2018, I’ve created seven different podcasts based on different aspects of the fabulously diverse and talented editorial teams within the SCMP.
In the last four years, I’ve also been working part-time at Hong Kong Baptist University, teaching multimedia journalism for the masters in journalism program as well as delivering occasional guest lectures for City University and Hong Kong University.
