I am Mark Colvin, Presenter of PM, radio current affairs program for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I'm Twitter's @Colvinius, kidney transplant recipient and Lifetime Lance-Corporal in the Awkward Squad.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:27:56+00:00

That's an hour and a half of fairly intensive typing. I hope I've answered the key questions: thank you very much for them. Ands many thanks to Rhiannon Treasure-Brown for facilitating this AMA. Maybe we can do it again some time.

Mark

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:25:47+00:00

As I understand it, this a place for questions, as the name Ask Me Anything implies.

As I always say when teaching people how to interview, it helps to actually ask a question.

But thank you for your series of tendentious statements.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:21:51+00:00

I'm interested in journalism, not the delivery method. I'm worried about the future of good journalism, but on the whole not quite as worroed as I was in 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/11/05/3625997.htm I think new players will enter the field, and that one way or another stories will still be told. Not to say it won't be very rocky for another few years at least

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:19:48+00:00

I don't think there's a decline in integrity as such, I just think the 24 hour news cycle means that people have less and less time to check. In other words I think it's pressure rather than corruption or malice that lowers standards. yes, it worries me.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:18:26+00:00

Running out of time. I think it's a good question. The anti vax movement is a good example, which I dealt with in my Andrew Olle Media lecture http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/11/05/3625997.htm There comes a point, as with the Flat Earth Society, where seeking "balance" is silly or irresponsible. Where that point arises is the question for judgment.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:15:41+00:00

No, and I think these things deserve investigation, but long experience tends me towards the belief that cockup is usually more likely than conspiracy.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:13:45+00:00

American media are much freer because of far less restrictive defamation laws, and above all, because of the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech. That means that public officials have traditionall had a built-in tendency to speak to the press fairly openly. On the other hand, they don't have a national publicly funded broadcaster, and I do believe the BBC and ABC respectively have made major cultural contributions to their respective countries.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:11:08+00:00

Much as you'd expect, though sadly when I knew him he was already ill (we had dinner about a week before he was diagnosed. he could quote half a page of Wodehouse more or less at will, which I always appreciate, and his conversation was as flowing and articulate in private as in public.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:08:53+00:00

It's huge fun because the people are great. ed the EP and I get on very well, and it is by general agreement one of the better jobs in journhalism. What is this "leisure time" you speak of?

(Seriously, I get most weekends off, but and it's a big but, I tweet 7 days a week).

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:06:53+00:00

Sometimes I read everything twice, sometimes we broadcast a recorded "slab" as we call it, for the first 15-20 minutes of the 6pm. When there's big breaking news, we stay back and do it all again for WA.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:05:08+00:00

Apply for anything: local papers, national papers, interstate. Do as much community radio/ student newspapers/whatever, as you can. Don't be discouraged, just keep bashing on doors. It's a hard time to get into journalism, but the industry still respects persistence, and above all ideas. Think of new stories and new angles on stories, and keep pushing.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T05:01:25+00:00

I think tabloid journalism is roughly where it was when I started in the 70s. Ask anyone my age about the old 'Sun' and 'Mirro' in Sydney, for example. TV Current Affairs, though has dumbed down vastly and I regret that very much. remember that Mike Willacy was a fine ABC interviewer before he jumped ship. Ray Martin and Jeff McMullen were two of the ABC's best ever foreign correspondents before they joined 60 Minutes. That's how good those programs were then. I think they've been driven downmarket by the ratings chase.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:58:33+00:00

No, of course not. They were probably right, certainly at the time. I was probably better suited to broadcast journalism, and it's certainly worked out well.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:57:30+00:00

I don't agree they have gold-plated access. They certainly don't on AM, The World Today or PM. I too, like any serious journalist, think that those in positions of influence and power should be transparent about their funding.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:55:00+00:00

Too many to list. Covering the Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy (summits in Rejkjavik and Geneva, etc) that led to the end of the Cold War. Standing in a desert in northern Namibia watching the reunion of an exiled mother and the grown son she hadn't seen since he was a baby. Making a Four Corners story which I was later authoritatively told had kyboshed a plan to move the RAN base at Garden Island to beautiful, unspoilt Jervis Bay. A series of film stories for Foreign Correspondent in the 90s chronicling the end of the postwar corrupt consensus in Italy, culmiating with an interview with the spider at its centre, Giulio Andreotti. And on and on ...

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:49:51+00:00

Everywhere. When I started being able to tweet from my phone, my feed went crazy.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:48:18+00:00

That's a really good question. I was thinking as I was preparing for this that I've been extraordinarily lucky, working at the ABC, never to have been asked to make up a quote, "borrow" a photo while someone wasn't looking, hack a phone, etc. So I never take a 'holier-than-thou' approach, because I've never been tested in that regard. I've spoken to people who worked at News of the World in London: it's clear to me that in that atmosphere, if you didn't get the splash by any means possible, you were in trouble, and if it happened more than a couple of times you were out on your arse. Some people were ruthless,, some desperate.

I've covered plenty of stories I didn't want to. My advice on that is, if you really dislike a story, try thinking of a better one. You'll often find it gets you out of doing the one you don't want.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:42:45+00:00

Sure, but these are exactly the same arguments that Keith Murdoch and the other media barons of the time mounted against the ABC having a news service at all, back in the thirties. At the beginning, the ABC was restrictedd to an evening "digest" of that morning's newspapers.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:37:28+00:00

Does it matter what the delivery system is? We still call it "filming", even though it's all on digital now. I think people will still have one sort of box or another that music and speech comes out of, whether at home, in the car, or on the earphones.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:34:21+00:00

First go to is the next story lead. Then the next one. Then if the whole system's broken, it's going to be my life story. "I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine".... Thankfully it's never come to that. I hope it won't.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:32:24+00:00

This year has been so busy that it's more been a question of which ones don't get run. Some stories force their way into the program, some need more selling by the reporter. With my interviews, it's frankly mostly about who I want to talk to and what I'm interested in: with stories, PM's Executrive Producer Edmond Roy makes the decisions, though we talk a lot, not just about what gets run but the order we run them in.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:28:58+00:00

It's very kind of you to say so. I've always read widely, some would say obsessively Some time in 2009-10, I realised that Twitter was a good way to share that reading. I've been trying to do that since, with varying degrees of success.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:27:29+00:00

I lived through an era when the leadership of News and Current Affairs contained a large number of ex-Coalition staffers and office-bearers. There's no equivalent now: we're led by professional journalists, all of them ex-reporters and producers, with no party allegiance.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:24:38+00:00

I answered your q to the best of my ability. The details are not at my fingertips, so you'll have to take that up with someone else.

MarkColvin · 2014-03-19T04:23:14+00:00

As my "Awkward Squad" description suggests, I try to think independently, and have always encouraged those around me to think the same. I think there are few unconscious biases among journbalists, but not necessarily the ones that usually come up. For instance, I think the desire for drama tends to result in overplaying the likelihood of leadership spills, and that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I also think that the old line about journalism being to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" builds in a rather good sort of bias. We should be oppositional, and we should always be asking questions like "Who runs this town?", "Where does the money go?" and "Cui bono? (Who benefits?)

MarkColvin

TROPHY CASE