With all the focus on redundancies in newspaper companies, it’s good to look at the upside.

Former publisher of the ‘Balmain & Rozelle Village Voice’ – and wife of former PANPA chief executive Mark Hollands, Kylie Davis does. In her blog on the INMA website, she rejoices the richness of churn.

“All my staff had a use-by date,” she says, meaning that they joined, learned, and went on to greater things. The pocket-sized community paper trained more than 40 cub reporters, designers, and sales reps over the ten years Davis “owned and loved it”.

As the boss who was left behind, “I was so proud I could burst,” she says.

In my own days as a newspaper publisher and editor, decades ago in the UK, we saw the same thing and felt the same way about it. It was always better to take on bright up-and-comers than the sad down-and-outers we sometimes had to accept. I remember one of the latter whose raincoat tended to ‘clink’ when he came to work.

And of course the Aussie sub who I recruited, wed and who is my partner in the struggling – yes, we’d love more advertisers to make use of our regional/global readership! –  business which is GXpress. No more moaning I couldn’t get good subs “for love or money”. Encouragingly, I see the Fairfax NZ is full of the process of recruiting a new intern intake. Long may it continue.



In that context, I have to say I love a good newspaper romance… and we have had a couple just lately.

The ABC ran a documentary about farmer’s son James Clark, who fell in love twice. Once in Paris with wife-to-be Josephine Birch – who he wooed in eloquent prose – and later with the western Queensland paper which became the ‘Warrego Watchman’ under their care. Less affectionately remembered in the ‘Australian Story’ doco is the 1960s Polygraph web press on which the Cunnamulla local had been printed. It “threw a tantrum” just before his partner did, leading to a contract with APN Toowoomba… and the saving of the marriage.

That’s on our website, as is our resident historian, Rod Kirkpatrick’s delightful tale of Leonora Gregory (see page 26) who took on the editing and production of the ‘Gulf News’ in Croydon, north Queensland. Not bad for a slight 20-something who had never seen a composing stick or a steam-driven Wharfedale in her life.

Rod told me how he ran across a brief reference in a book (‘Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture’ edited by Ann Curthoys and Juliannne Schultz) and went hunting on the National Library’s Trove website. “And it went from there,” he says.

Perversely, the lovely Leonora (and the picture suggests she was a ‘looker’) ended up in Faversham, UK, where (and at the time) I was running a local newspaper prior to escaping to Oz… and I never knew!



Rod, meanwhile, continues to dig, coming up with amazing nuggets of newspaper history.

A recent discovery was a new contender for the title of ‘first NSW provincial daily’… the ‘Braidwood Daily News’, established on February 10, 1859. By 1862, it had become a biweekly.

A lesser fate however than that of the ‘Inverell Dispatch’, which had its offices burgled, pages ripped into ‘pie’ and type thrown into the street. The already sick proprietor died ten days later and the paper did not reappear.

All of that, incidentally, from the newsletter of the ‘Australian Newspaper History Group’ of which Rod is editor. It’s regularly a good read.



And finally, back to staff turnover: I’ve been getting further into social media, in anticipation of the launch of our new GXdigital website at the end of this month. So far that’s meant Twitter (follow us at @peteratgxpress) and LinkedIn... Facebook can wait.

The euphemistically-named ‘status change’ reports show just the tip of the movements in the industry.