I have held a number of jobs since graduating from school at the end of 2019, working mostly in hospitality, media and sport, but none have been disrupted as quickly and as drastically as my journalism cadetship in 2020, where I worked for independent newspaper The Monaro Post in Cooma. My main role was as the sports journalist, and as a team we would produce a weekly newspaper and a number of seasonal magazines throughout the year.
I started in January and took a while to find my feet and make my contacts, but after the first couple of months I was finding my way. It was then that the far-off virus we’d been hearing about became our reality, and COVID meant that our advertisers, printers and readers would suffer in what was a time of great unknown. As journalists it appeared that we would also struggle to find stories to cover with events and sporting competitions canceled almost overnight. At first I was worried I would simply lose my job, and that I would be surplus to demand.
Thankfully I was kept on full-time and asked to carry on as normal, whatever normal now was.
With no sport locally and no live sport on TV I found myself watching a lot of old footage, whether it was on YouTube or on long-forgotten DVDs hidden around the house. This nostalgia inspired ideas for the paper, and after discussions with my editor we decided to go retro with the sports pages, while covering any sporting news as it came in locally.
I was able to change my role, which was becoming obsolete for a full-time employee, and open up a whole new range of angles for me. I began trawling through the fantastic archives available at the library next door to our office, on the hunt for significant moments from over the years; grand final wins, visits from sports stars, successes of locals overseas, and from there trying to track them down to tell their story upon reflection.
I was exceptionally lucky to have been supported in this and not just shown the door, as so many people were during this period, and I am very grateful for the opportunities that a year as a cadet showed me. With such a lack of sports news occurring, I was actually able to interact with more outsider witnesses to help me with stories for future papers, and new angles and ways of attracting an audience. As established by Hugh Fox in Carey and Russell’s Dulwich Centre writings, “outsider witnesses help to meet these two purposes – acknowledging our identity claims as valid, and sharing stories about what is important to us in life,” and with this audience engaged and giving me leads and positive feedback, support coming from my superiors and enjoying the work myself, I began to feel as though this was an area I wanted to continue in. I was also able to learn more about the profession and its progress and changes by researching these old newspapers, and the other historical resources I was accessing.
As well as outsider witnesses, I was glad to have my club of life handy at this time, living at home with my family around me. I have since learnt in this subject through the work of Michael White, as quoted by Carey and Russell that “re-membering practices provide a context for people to revise or re-organise the ‘membership’ of their ‘club of life’’.
The same people supporting me then are the ones helping me push forward with my career now, and I hope to reward them with quality work in the future. There is also a reassuring feeling that while my former employers are not as closely connected to my club of life anymore, I have retained a close relationship with my former editor, who is an experienced journalist herself, to lean on if needed in the future.
The current editor of the Monaro Post, Nathan Thompson, is another close friend who I shared my first ever long form feature article and audio piece with last year for tips before I published it, and like to think that I will be able to do the same in the future.
I hope to continue to work on pieces like this for the foreseeable future, regardless of my job title, as it blends storytelling with searching through archives, which are two of my favourite things. My time as a cadet will always be something I look back on fondly and proudly, especially when considering what I was able to learn about myself in a professional capacity looking ahead.
References
Russell, S., Carey, M. (2002). “Outsider-witness practices: some answers to commonly asked questions.” The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work: Dulwich Centre Publications.
Russell, S., Carey, M. (2003). “Re-membering: responding to commonly asked questions”. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work: Dulwich Centre Publications.
Russ Haylock Sportswriting 