When I was a teenager I would run across the lawn damp with dew to collect the newspaper of the front lawn. I wanted to read the tennis and school notes. I read all of the paper. And it sparked my interest in becoming a journalist.
I did work experience at the local paper, the Daily News, and wrote a lot of letters to newspapers along the eastern seaboard of Australia and inland. About 78 letters, as I recall. I worked my way through the phone books. In May 1979, I was taken on as a cadet by the Coffs Harbour Advocate as it was then called. On my second day a senior reporter took me along to interview Tammy Fraser, whose husband Malcolm was then the prime minister of Australia.
In a four year cadetship I covered almost everything, although, perhaps luckily, I did not cover too many council meetings. That was left to my more worldly colleagues. I remember interviewing a man who worked on the museum train. He told me, and there was something about the way he said it that made me remember, that one day a tsunami would come. I hadn’t known what a tsunami was until that day. I learned so much about so many things. There were some terrible tragedies. Some wild and wacky people. I think it’s time I wrote about that kind of thing again. Occasionally too, rightly or wrongly I omitted covering stories. Sometimes it doesn’t serve anyone to drag someone onto the front page for a misdemeanour. Well, granted it might prevent someone else from a misdeed but anyway…
I remember taking the banana prices of a telex machine and running those, and putting in a story about the death of Andropov in Russia.
The two local papers mentioned above ceased daily print publication last week. It saddened me. I like to pick up the local paper when in a cafe, or buy it when something big has happened locally, or when there’s a picture of my daughter in it. And I know her grandmother and uncles liked to keep copies of that.
Yet I am definitively one of the iPad and digital generation who consumes news online.
I have an article about all of this published in today’s print and digital versions of The Australian. It’s accessible only to subscribers. That’s another new thing too.
