Why we decided to compile a list of Australia’s most published journalists
Compiling a list of Australia's most prolific journalists isn't exactly an easy task. Here, Streem's Conal Hanna explains why it's an important one.
Eighteen years as a journalist and editor has taken me to some pretty disparate places, from rodeos to religious festivals and the corridors of Parliament House.
One other place I have found myself, several times over the past decade, is in a room with consultants, hired to crack some version of The Digital Media Problem.
Consultants, I have learnt, love modelling, and one of the first things they always ask is how many stories a day a reporter should be able to write.
It’s about then that the alarm bells – which started ringing the moment the consultants entered the building – begin to ring much louder.
The question, of course, is very difficult – if not impossible – to answer. It depends so much on the ambition of the journalism.
What started as a lark request of our data scientist soon revealed a number of interesting things, such as the prevalence of sneaky catch-all bylines like Staff Writer.
Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash
It’s clear how common these are across all organisations. Sometimes there is good reason – such as to protect the identity of reporters covering organised crime. Another, more likely potential motivation: because the person who wrote the story is ashamed to put their name to it.
Another thing that stood out was the prevalence on the list of reporters from the sport and, to a lesser extent business, sections. One reason for their fast pace probably lies in the fact they have distinct print ‘sections’ that need filling on a daily basis. Both of these rounds also revolve around the scheduled release of key data points such as match scores or half-yearly results. Given the demands on reporting staff to keep up, it’s probably no coincidence that these are the two journalism jobs you see most often associated with ‘robot reporter’ trials.
I should point out that the byline data is not perfect. It fails to count joint bylines or, more accurately, joint bylines were treated as their own distinct entity, so unless you worked on a LOT of stories as a duo, you weren’t going to make the list.
We also learnt things along the way. We thought Peter Ryan was particularly prolific. It turned out there were two of him. The Age sports reporter publishes more online than the ABC business specialist, in case you were wondering, and still managed to make the list himself.
We also had to make some judgement calls. The top two reporters on the original list, for example, were removed.
Sarah Thompson from the AFR’s Street Talk column had 1558 pieces listed under her name, but it was felt this content didn’t generally constitute a full article, and including her would be unfair to other bloggers such as those at Parliament House, who publish thousands of words each day but it’s all captured under one article. Andrew Bolt (originally 17th) was another we removed because often his blog entries are short snippets, rather than full articles.
Number two on the original list was Heidi Parker, based overseas for the Daily Mail, who one can only assume is held up as an exemplar for colleagues globally as she churns through 6.4 stories a day. We decided the list should be restricted to Australian reporters only.
Certainly the prominence of Daily Mail Australia journalists – they took out all of the top five positions on the list – says something about the expectations placed there on staff, and their approach to the balance between quantity and quality.
Since its launch in Australia in 2014, the Mail has acquired a reputation for the rewriting of other outlets’ stories. All publishers do this on occasion. TV and radio pick up newspaper exclusives, online will grab interviews from broadcast. Sometimes when a rival has a great scoop, the only thing is to play defence and get a version of the story up. With suitable attribution, of course. But the Daily Mail practise this on an industrial scale, often “borrowing” far more than most people would consider reasonable.
Ultimately it’s hard not to feel sorry for their young staff who are seeking jobs in a shrinking industry but whose learning is focused overwhelmingly on one part of the job – writing under pressure.
Because what the consultants always needed to learn was that the writing is often the easy (well, easier) part. It’s the research that takes time, and that is most under threat when newsroom numbers are continually revised down.
That’s not to say all reporters on this list are taking shortcuts, by any means. Most of them are just damned hardworking, putting in lots of phone calls and generating myriad story angles.
Thankfully in Australia we still have a sizeable proportion of journos looking to create unique content, rather than just rehashing reports of someone else’s news reports.
For if reading an alphabetical list of the 1000-plus stories recorded by some journalists in a year taught me anything (other than the frequency with which the Daily Mail starts a headline, ‘SPOILER ALERT!’ or, shudder, ‘Busting Out!’) it’s that reporters should be grateful for the opportunity to pursue real, distinctive news.
Conal Hanna has been a journalist and editor for the past 18 years. He is currently media and partnerships lead for real-time media monitoring firm Streem.
* It would be interesting to know what regional, community or trade press journalists make of this list. Experience tells me they’re no stranger to the need to accrue a lot of bylines each week.
Word count as the basis for “ranking” a journalist’s worth first began to sneak into the debate about 20 years ago. Even then, it was a sinister concept. Now it’s even more so. In an industry obsessed with words like “matrix” and acronyms like KPI, journalists need to struggle to maintain the dignity and quality of their works and words and to resist being swept along in the sweeping tide of modern churnalism that sometimes favours clickbait over stories of genuine quality and public interest.
I’m not saying it’s bad to have a lot of bylines, or that being prolific is equated with lower quality journalism. Absolutely not. But I am saying that these sorts of measures are unsound and spurious when the real value of good journalism can only be measured in ways that have nothing to do with management-speak.
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Someone is confusing data with research.
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It’s easy to produce three or four stories a day when you just cut and paste press releases and company announcements or rip off other content like many do these days.
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This is a joke, surely.
You took Sarah Thompson of Street Talk off your list because her originally-sourced items didn’t constitute ‘articles’. Yet you left the Daily Mail reporters on the list because presumably their ripping and rewriting of others original work does constitute an article? Come on.
Further, you can’t just dance around the Daily Mail’s editorial standards and your generous characterisation of their ‘rewriting’ of others stories on the basis that everybody else does it. That’s an insult to the many journo’s who invest increasingly scarce time and resources into well-reported original news stories. (Only to see much of it quickly cut and pasted you know where.)
A sad attempt at brand building that doesn’t reflect well on said brand.
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