Reporter’s Notebook: Geeking Out in Australia

By Joseph B.A. Marzan

For a week earlier this month, I traveled to Australia with nine other media practitioners to get acquainted with their own media industry, and I found myself in awe at how similar but different it is from our own here in the Philippines, all at the same time, among other confirmations, discoveries, and realizations.

In early January, I was invited by the Australian Embassy in Manila to join a Media Benchmarking Study Tour with other journalists from the country under the Australian Government’s Australia Awards program in partnership with Griffith University. That’s a lot of Australia in one paragraph.

This trip was intended to focus on discussions relating to journalism and human rights, which include topics on democracy, newsroom culture, and working conditions, which were essential to all of us participating, whether we were national or local in scope.

Australia shows a lot of promise from how its is viewed in traditional and social media: a healthy democracy flanked by politicians across ideologies, with ideal urban planning and an array of services available to its denizens.

As a Filipino, viewing it from the lens of a visitor, it was affirmed that what I saw prior to the trip seemed to be true, but as I’ve learned in that week, there is a lot to unpack when it comes to the media’s issues.

The first difference I encountered was how newspapers have remained to be a major player in the news media industry in Australia.

On my first day in Sydney, we got stranded as the connecting flight to Canberra was awfully close, so we went around, and one of the first things I saw, among the row of pharmacies and Asian-themed restaurants was a newsstand in the suburb of Mascot.

This newsstand sold newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, and the Sunday Telegraph, and magazines focused on issues from celebrity or political gossip, to gardening, and to brain games crossword puzzles, among many others.

There were more of these newsstands as we traversed around Sydney for the rest of the week, and Sydney locals whom I’ve spoken to tell me that newsstands have remained very popular in the country’s second-biggest city.

On our first full day in the Australian capital, Canberra (March 6), we visited the offices of The Canberra Times, which, like Daily Guardian, was a regional newspaper serving the Australian Capital Territory and some parts of neighboring state New South Wales.

The Canberra Times’ managing editor John-Paul Moloney told us that they did not lay off any of their staff during the pandemic, but as an innovation, many of them rarely reported to the office and worked primarily from their homes.

What kept them alive, he said, were advertisers who trusted legacy media like newspapers and broadcast radio and television for outreach.

They were also able to introduce a digital copy of their newspaper, which was available either as part of their newspaper subscription or as a standalone subscription in itself.

They are also able to track their online traffic and real time, and Moloney said that despite the emergence of online news media, newspapers remain superior to their sales, with the digital newspaper being popular with younger audiences.

Advertising is also what had kept the Star Observer, a monthly magazine catered to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community in Sydney and Melbourne, amid the pandemic, while also keeping their publication and distribution free-of-charge.

The Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) at Old Parliament House has a ‘Truth, Power, and a Free Press’ gallery, where one display showed a cover of The Canberra Times’ sister publication, Newcastle Herald, showing on its frontpage a 2013 story on how the Catholic Church in the area covered up sexual abuse by one of its priests.

But despite the continued persistence of print media in the country, some journalists we spoke to have mentioned the troubles brought by the left-and-right acquisition and shuttering of regional newspapers.

There were journalists who started their careers in regional and rural-based media, but have been moving to bigger outfits because of the shuttering of their papers, aside from other issues they faced before, including advertiser dominance in the pages and lower wages.

Reporters’ pay is also a hot topic among journalists in Australia, in print and broadcast, as mentioned to me by journalists we’ve met.

While we were in Canberra, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) personnel in Sydney who were members of the Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance (MEAA), went on a 40-minute strike, at the same time when interest rates were to be announced by the Reserve Bank of Australia, to raise the issue of pay.

The MEAA officers we met, and the Centre for Media Transition housed at the University of Technology Sydney, have highlighted the importance of regional media in Australia as watchdogs of local government power.

This is especially in the context of around more than 200 local and regional newspapers closing in the last decade, 150 of them in the most recent years.

We were able to discuss existing issues of the media in Australia with Fran Molloy, President of the MEAA’s Media section in the state of New South Wales, as well as Jane Worthington, Asia Pacific Director of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

The MEAA is the Australian counterpart of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), which is a member-union of the IFJ, the latter representing 600,000 media professionals in 187 unions in more than 140 countries.

Gleaning upon our discussions with Molloy and Worthington, it seemed apparent that reporter pay, legal threats, and intimidation were the most imminent threats to journalists, only lacking physical violence and threats to equal that of the Philippines.

But despite the issues that keep media practitioners up at night, in relation to their jobs, they still do their best to go after quality journalism, and the media is still highly regarded as an integral part of society.

A trip to the press offices at Parliament House in Canberra showed how the Australian Government values the contribution of the media to society, with all accredited media having a dedicated office, the ABC bureau having the biggest of them with radio booths and a TV studio.

This was a stark contrast as to how we as Philippine journalists were being given spaces in national legislatures and local governments, with media “boxes” or “lounges” being contained in a small room.

The Parliament also provides good space for journalists and photographers to cover their sessions at the Senate and House of Representatives.

Old Parliament House, just across the lawn from its younger sibling building, also showed the ABC having its own office, indicating how was integral to covering the parliament for a long time now.

The MoAD’s press freedom gallery extensively discussed the Australian press’ history and the challenges they face today, including disinformation and the emergence of false account names in social media.

State-run broadcasters ABC and SBS, whose offices in Sydney we were able to visit, showed how they could be independent and still generate revenue despite producing content which would be deemed critical to the government.

The SBS, in particular, showed how they catered to diverse voices, including Indigenous Australians and migrants including Filipinos.

It was there where we met Edinel Magtibay-Dearden, a former ABS-CBN journalist who migrated to the land down under, and had just been promoted to executive producer of the SBS Filipino program over their SBS Audio service.

Its also good to note that The Canberra Times, a regional newspaper, was conscious of how it should report, with Moloney mentioning that they were adamant to become a newspaper of record instead of simply covering crime, despite the latter being more financially attractive.

This is another contrast to local Philippine media, which has, at times, to choose reporting crime stories to be able to attract audiences through “dramatic” and “serious” tones.

We were also able to meet officers of the Walkley Foundation, introducing us to the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the Australian counterpart of the Pulitzer Prize, named after its founder, Sir William Gaston Walkley, handed out since 1956.

Our reporting as Filipino journalists also matters to Australians, as these are what form the basis for policy analysis provided by research centers like the Lowy Institute, which we also visited.

The human rights situation in the Philippines is also of significant importance to Australia, as stated to us by Lorraine Finlay, one of the 7 commissioners of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

It was here where we were told by Finlay that unlike the Philippines, Australia does not actually have a constitutional guarantee for freedoms of the press, of speech, and of expression, which was one of the considerations of why they are also looking at our media industry, to see how press freedom is like here.

The key takeaway from this trip is that, while Australia seems to be a dreamland for many Filipinos, including our own journalists, there is more to unpack than what meets the eye.

That rings true, especially for our respective media industries, which actually face similar issues and concerns despite differences in political and economic systems, and a lot more needs to be done, on both of our ends, to be able to achieve the ideal press freedom dreamed of by those who came before us.