Conal Hanna Interview
Conal Hanna is the managing editor of the brisbanetimes.com.au, this interview was conducted over the phone.
Could you first tell me about your career in journalism, and how you came to be the editor of the brisbanetimes.com.au?
I started in newspapers straight out of university, and went and did my cadetship at a country newspaper. I worked in newspapers and magazines, and when Brisbane Times launched over five years ago, I was brought in as part of the team that launched that – I wasn’t the editor at the time. But then, having worked here for a couple of years, when one of our previous editors left I took on the mantle.
Is there anything in particular that attracts you to online journalism over print media?
The fact that it’s growing rather than shrinking is a good reason! Seriously though, the internet is probably the ultimate storytelling medium. You can do everything inside it from text to video to photos to slideshows to audio. You’ve got so many different ways of telling a story; it’s the ideal storytelling medium.
As editor, is there a big difference in your role as editor, compared to what it would be at a print publication?
I guess with a print publication, the rhythm of the whole day is geared towards the evening production of a newspaper product. You’re all geared up towards what happens late in the day. With online, the rhythm of the day is very different. We have to be up a lot earlier and onboard a lot earlier. We have a lot of readers on from six in the morning, and our readership really ramps up once people get on work PC’s at about eight or nine in the morning, and our peak time of the day is actually lunchtimes. So, there are a lot of different decisions that have to be made about the best time to use your best content and things like that, which in a newspaper you’re really just laying out in order of priority - the pages. In online you have to think a little bit more about timing and things as well.
I suppose the immediacy of the internet comes into that a lot?
Exactly, and that’s only growing. Peoples expectations are as soon as news breaks you’ll have something on the site, so that can be quite hard. At a resource level, you’ve got to have people available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on weekends and at various times. I think part of being an editor in an online environment is being on call at any time when major news breaks, which in itself is not very different from a paper, but you need to be able to move quickly.
I recently read a report that stated in terms of online revenue, Australian news papers were ranked quite highly on a global scale. Do you find online revenue is much of a problem at all?
Online revenue in Australia, as in the rest of the world, doesn’t replicate print revenue, but the good thing about online is that the cost base doesn’t replicate the print cost base either. In print, you have a lot of costs tied to printing the actual newspaper and distributing it through trucks and that sort of thing. So, you’re dealing on different scales. You’re making less money, but you’re costing less money.
So it almost balances out, in a way?
Yeah. Every news organisation in the world at the moment is searching for new business models that can grow revenues online, that’s no secret, because they don’t replicate print, but as I say, the cost-bases don’t as well, so there’s certainly advantages to digital.
Do you find that with the online environment, journalists have to be more accountable with the facts they report?
I think journalists should always have been accountable for the facts that they wrote. It’s probably easier to get found out now if you aren’t doing your job properly, but I don’t think the journalists job should have changed much in that regard, I think they should have always had a commitment to truth and accuracy.
Do you think that the journalists interactions with the readers have changed a lot?
Yeah definitely. A newspaper is a one way conversation in a lot of ways, you have letters to the editor and the like, but it’s a lot harder to engage with readers and get their input compared to online, where you can comment on every single article, you can run polls, you can have reader blogs in your news site. You can do lots of different things to have a more interactive experience for the readers.
Is there a lot of emphasis on reader blogs at the brisbanetimes?
We don’t have so much reader blogs, but we have the Blog Army, which is a concept we only launched a few months ago which I’m hoping to grow. It’s basically a network of community bloggers who already existed out there in the community. So they are readers I suppose, a lot of them are ex-journalists as well or current journalists that are working in freelance capacity that run their own blogs. We act as a pooling service of those – we curate them into one place and we try and pick the best of them to run on our homepage and give the bloggers some money when that happens. We try and think outside the square rather than just relying on our own reporters for stories.
So it sounds like you’re trying to emphasise the importance of these interactions?
Definitely, it’s crucial to us. We’ve had fantastic stories that have come about through interactions with readers and things like that. Both parties benefit. It helps if we’re more engaged with our readers, giving them the types of stories they want to read. It’s a two-way street, both parties benefit.
Do you think it’s even possible to predict the future of newspapers in Australia?
I’m quite positive that newspapers will continue to exist for quite a long time yet, but I think it’s inevitable that digital is going to increase. The average age of a newspaper reader is about fifteen or so years older than the average reader of online news. But prints decline will probably continue, and perhaps sometime in the not too distant future, you might see Monday to Friday papers as the first to probably disappear. I think the weekend papers in particular have a pretty long future. But they have to change; they can’t just keep reporting what happened yesterday. They really need to be taking the debate further, because everyone’s already read the stuff that’s happened yesterday. They read it yesterday when it happened online. So the style of newspapers probably has to change.