Profile

Deborah Kirkman talks with Chris McLeod, a long-time Press Council member. This is an unedited version of the interview. An edited version appeared in the hardcopy of the Newsletter.

DK: I've done a bit of research on you, and the first thing I want to know is what prompted the 18 years old Chris McLeod to seek a cadetship.

CM: I think it started at high school when I worked on the newspaper. But I was also interested in radio. Living in the country, radio was the main source of information - you got papers only once a week and, if you wanted fresh information, then radio was the thing.

After I left high school I did a couple of auditions for radio, one down in Grafton in New South Wales. The manager told me another way of getting into radio was via journalism. And having had that dabble with the high school newspaper, that seemed to register, so I wrote off everywhere around New South Wales.

DK: Where were you located? You said you were from the country.

CM: I went to high school in Armidale. I lived 17 miles out of Armidale.

DK: On a property?

CM: Yes, on a farm. I got a response back, from [APC member] David Sommerlad actually, who was with the Country Press even back then.

DK: Does he remember this?

CM: Vaguely. I've spoken to him only recently. He was at Inverell at the time, and he wrote to me saying they didn't have anything but he would put my name on a Country Press bulletin that circulated around the place. The Telegraph said yes, they'd had a spot as a copyboy. I'd thought about that, and a copyboy's wages aren't that great and Sydney is an expensive place to live. But fortunately, when I was thinking about that, two papers wrote to me in response to David's circular and said they had spots - one at Quirindi and another one at Wyong. I knew Wyong reasonably well because our mother comes from there ...

DK: Near the beach ...

CM: Yes. So, I jumped in the car and went to Quirindi. The bloke wasn't there, so I drove on to Wyong and they said can you start next week. When I arrived at Wyong I found I was there with another cadet, and we were it. The new editor hadn't arrived. So, we were two cadet journalists - one on his first day, and the other one had been there for a year.

DK: What was the name of the newspaper?

CM: We had two actually - two weeklies. The Wyong Advocate and The Entrance Guardian. Three years of cadetship at Wyong were most interesting years because you were working on a grassroots newspaper, the local community, doing photographs, printing photographs, driving the ute out to Windsor to get the papers printed and bring them back. There is no better introduction to newspaper life than a country newspaper. And that is why to this day I have a lot of sympathy for country newspapers.

DK: I've had long conversations with David Sommerlad about that, and how city journalists are distanced from their readership.

CM: Absolutely. As a country journalist you learn very quickly the sensitivity of the local people. You are likely to cop one in the street, although it didn't happen to me. You do get a good understanding for your readership and the community that, in a big metropolitan newspaper you don't get. And that is why every now and again the metropolitans have a look at the way they recruit journalists, whether they should recruit directly or recruit via suburban or provincial newspapers.

DK: Part of your job is the management of training and development programs for over 400 staff. Have you looked at going further afield?

CM: Yes, as a News Group project. But we have not developed it as a firm policy. We also recruit from university, school or whatever to make sure we have available the best people.

DK: Do you often recruit someone from school?

CM: Almost every year since I've been in this job, we've taken on a school leaver.

DK: A school leaver.

CM: Yes, we're only picking up five people a year at the moment. The turnover is down. There aren't the journalism jobs around there used to be in Melbourne. The newspaper market is much skinnier, although we increased our journalism team by 20-25 with MX.

DK: Has that been successful?

CM: Yes, very successful in reaching the 18-35 year old market. Getting to that group of people has been the bugbear of newspapers for the last 20 years. It is free for a start, so there is no question of value for money. We are up about 90,000 copies of that a day now. It is doing two things for us: it is bringing in new newspaper readers who will hopefully come across to the Herald Sun or whatever else we offer; plus it is an opportunity to bring in new advertisers who are aiming at that market. We rotate our trainee journalists through MX.

DK: How do you choose your cadets?

CM: We take applications up until the end of December. I always try to put school leavers in the process because if you get somebody good early, you're not competing with everyone else when they become a graduate. We consider everybody. Every applicant does the preliminary assignment that we set - a written thing about what they think of journalism. We ask them questions about why do journalists have such a low ranking, down there with real estate salespeople and all that ...

DK: Which is one of the questions I was going to ask you. How would you reply?

CM: The question we ask is not so much why that is, but is it justified and how do you think it can be overcome? My answer would be that we really shouldn't be worried about that. The ranking comes from the way people see journalists portrayed in the electronic media. This is my view. I blame the electronic media for some of the problems we have.

DK: The invasion of privacy ...

CM: Yes, that sort of thing. And it is assumed that all journalists behave the same way. That may or may not be a just assumption to make. I don't really think it is. And it is also portrayed as a glamorous profession. Certainly in the electronic media it is. In the print media it isn't. But print I think is recognised as being a bit more authoritative by people going into journalism.

The ranking- how do you overcome it? I don't think you really have to do too much. Adherence to ethical standards is an obvious thing that has to happen, and we do that in a number of ways: through the Press Council, through our own code and those employees who are members of the journalists' union abide by its code.

We have taken disciplinary action against staff for breaches of it. We take it seriously. We have to. As everyone on the Press Council is aware, the alternative is not good for free speech - a system of licensing. Journalism can't be compared to other professions. You don't have to have a certificate to be able to practice it. We don't have a registration board which can strike you off if you are guilty of misconduct.

DK: What is journalism? Is it a trade, a profession ...

CM: I think it is a profession. But comparing it to the profession of medicine or law you need a bit of paper, whereas journalism is a people kind of thing. Journalists should be the representatives of the hundreds and thousands of readers that they are working for. Journalists have got to have guidelines on how they conduct themselves, simply to reassure the public that they represent that it isn't a free-for-all, it is not open slather. But as soon as you start imposing regulation journalists become tied to it, rather than tied to their readers.

DK: Any journalist will stress the importance of freedom of speech, a free press and their role in informing the public.

CM: That is how it works, the relationship between the journalist and the reader is based on the reader's right to be informed. In our induction process we tell all new staff members why journalists exist - simply because one and a half million people can't go to every press conference or every event to see for themselves what's going on. They rely on somebody to report it for them, and that somebody is the journalist. And one of the skills a journalist has to have is being able to know what the reader is going to be interested in.

DK: And the issue of the by-lines?

CM: I have sympathy with two arguments about that. One is that they should only be used for recognition for somebody that has done a good job. The other is is that it is the way journalists build up contacts. If there is an ongoing story, it should have the journalist's name on it because somebody might have some information and they can ring up and say I want to talk to so and so.

But, the use of by-lines has become a license to put comment into news stories, and I don't think that is a good trend. As the Press Council says, it should be identified as comment clearly.

DK: How do you respond to critics of tabloids, who suggest that they are not serious journals. I notice, for example, that the Herald Sun is the biggest selling daily newspaper in Australia.

CM: I think that's your answer. You can't be subject to ridicule if the public likes your newspaper.

DK: The people called "the chattering class" ...

CM: My view is that they regard serious news-coverage as a lot of words. In fact, a lot of words are comment rather than reporting. What we try to do is focus on reporting, and one and a half million people every day seem to appreciate that approach. People realise that whenever a major news event occurs, they'll get the best coverage of it in a newspaper. We've done an exercise here with our young journalists about transcribing all the words in a Channel 9 six o'clock news bulletin and how many pages of the Herald-Sun would it would fit - it comes to one and a half!

DK: I'll go to the Press Council now. What do you believe publisher members get out of contributing towards the Council.

CM: We prefer self-regulation to regulation. It is as simple as that. And more and more the Press Council is evolving as a forum for discussion about press issues. One of the big things that has happened with the complaints process is that most newspapers now deal with complainants better than they used to. None of us like having to answer to the Press Council. You may get an adverse adjudication, and it is an embarrassment to have to publish that.

DK: I have noticed a large increase in the number of papers appealing against adverse adjudications. Why now, and not in the past?

CM: I think in the past editors probably felt that it is not going to have an effect on the readership. But with the press under so much scrutiny from its own readership and all these so-called media commentators who seemed to have turned into a growth industry these days, it is not just a matter of having an adverse adjudication published in your own paper but also having people talk about it on radio or on the Media-Watch television show. My own target here is to not have a complaint go to adjudication - if it can be mediated or I can offer the complainant something that avoids that, well that's a good thing.

DK: Given that you are responsible for legal affairs in editorial areas, I was astounded that you voted to dismiss a recent complaint about the search for a person suspected of a crime and the paper's omission of the word "alleged".

CM: You have to concede that the paper may have been sure of itself. Journalists are often told things that they can't use, but on that basis they come to a conclusion. I was happy to concede that the newspaper probably did that in this case. But the counter-balance to that is that if they didn't and they got it wrong, there is a monumental legal problem.

DK: Another monumental legal problem is defamation. In your lifetime, do you think national uniform defamation laws will ever come in?

CM: It will never come in to the satisfaction of publishers. I think publishers do concede that they can't expect it all their own way. What we do want is to be able to fight with both hands free. Defamation is one of those situations where you are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. Is is so difficult to prove truth of a thing for a start.

DK: You wrote a paper about three years ago, saying that truth really isn't a defence.

CM: You can't prove truth. You have to prove it on the balance of probability. It is such a subjective thing. Journalists are encouraged to do the best they can to establish the truth, but that's only done by verifying things with other people.

DK: The question would always be, whose truth.

CM: Another problem we run into with defamation is how the law is applied. Defamation being part of the common law, judges can make it up as they go. If it is a codified thing then you've got a better chance because you know what the rules are before you start. But then that is quite restrictive. It doesn't develop along with community attitudes.

The work of the Policy Development Committee of the Press Council is significant. The hearing of complaints, and defence of freedom of speech are equally important. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are vital to our society. The two come together: with freedom comes responsibility. And that's where, if there is a threat to the free press, we are not going to get support from the politicians, we are going to get it from the public. We have to be able to look after our public now, to be able to call that in if we need to.

DK: So, you're saying that the press and the public have a reciprocal ...

CM: We have a mutual interest. We need them, and they need us.

DEBORAH KIRKMAN

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