Executive producer of the ABC‘s 7.30 shares her break into the industry in a feature that first appeared in Encore.
How did you get into producing TV?
That’s an interesting question. For all of my working life as a journalist – 33 years – I have been a reporter, first for radio, then television, then print.
It’s only been for the past year that I have been working as a producer, as EP of the ABC’s 7.30 program. Most of my time with the ABC was spent as a reporter on Four Corners, then I left the ABC to freelance, and spent a couple of years writing for The Australian and The Monthly magazine. By the end of 2011 I was ready for a change, and had found that it’s difficult to freelance in Australia with so few media outlets. A friend who was working at 7.30 alerted me to the fact they were looking for a new EP – I applied for it, and here I am.
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What was your big break?
My first big break was getting a job with the ABC in 1988. I had been working in commercial television, as a producer/reporter for Channel Ten’s Good Morning Australia program, and I was totally over doing stories on pet boutiques and the world’s longest sausage type stories (yep, I really did that one). I wanted to do serious journalism, so the ABC was the obvious place to be.
That led to a series of further breaks – a job as a reporter on 7.30 in 1989; a posting as a foreign correspondent to Hong Kong and later Beijing in 1992; and finally the big break, a reporter gig on Four Corners in 1996.
What changed after your break?
I got the opportunity to work on Australia’s – and one of the world’s – best, most authoritative and most respected current affairs programs, and to work all over the world – the US, Egypt, South-East Asia, deepest Africa, and more. It was the most amazing decade I could have hoped for.
What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
That family is more important than work.
Is it harder or easier for people to break into the industry today?
It’s always been really hard to break into journalism, but I think it is even harder today, in the shrinking, volatile and ever-changing media environment we now live in.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Persist. Keep trying. Don’t give up. If it’s what you really want, you’ll get there.
This story first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visit encore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.
