For my narrative interview I was able to line up friend and Illawarra Mercury sports journalist Mitch Jennings, feeling that he was a good option as he is someone who works in the field I aspire to enter after university, and is also someone I know well and have worked alongside in a professional sense. We arranged to meet up at Lettuce B Frank in the city to discuss sport, writing, journalism, the past, change and other important factors of his work, as well as introducing some concepts of narrative therapy through our chat.
Consent
It should be noted that Mitch gave me permission to use this interview for the purposes of a presentation and blog post, and was helpful in making sure I was accurate and clear when representing his career, values and other aspects of professional life before presenting.
About Mitch
Mitch grew up in Forster on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales and always had a love for sport and newspapers, and says he’s wanted to be a journalist and writer for as long as he can remember. He completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Sydney while attempting to break into the Penrith Panthers NRL system, and when that didn’t work out quite as planned he turned his focus to becoming a journalist. Below is a timeline of his professional career.
Values
One of the main reasons I saw Mitch as someone I’d like to interview for this assignment was that I figured our values in professional life would overlap, and that I would be able to learn more by picking the brain of someone like him in this manner. Some of the main values he discussed that best related to my future of work were related to truth, storytelling and ‘humanising’ in his work as a sports journalist.
Truth goes hand in hand with trust as a journalist, and as someone who is looking to work outside of the metropolitan areas of the country becomes even more important. Newspapers and other mediums are “situated at the heart of local communities”, and honesty, rigour and the ability to gain trust are obvious values journalists must have, but to hear it articulated from someone in the industry’s point of view was refreshing.
The importance of humanising athletes was a really interesting point that Mitch made, for multiple reasons. Firstly for the audience’s sake, to bring them closer to their idols, but secondly for the sake of the athlete, to be understanding of them and their career, and that while they are placed into high pressure environments with hundreds, thousands or millions of people watching, that they are only human at the end of the day. This links together well with another shared value of Mitch and mine, storytelling, and the ability to capture what those who trust us with interviews tell us, and combine them with facts and figures to generate content. Doing this well generates the trust that I’ve already mentioned as being so important, and from there you have a base to create interesting and illuminating sportswriting. I hope that this assignment shows some of my abilities in this field, showing Mitch to not just be someone with the kind of job I want, but someone with their own intricate story that informs their values and how they work, as well as how they plan to go about their work in the future.
Narrative Therapy
We’ve learnt this semester about re-membering, and that “re-membering conversations open up options for people to revise the membership of their club of life.” By having a more in-depth chat about professional life than I ever have with a friend like Mitch, I felt that this affirmed his position in my club of life as a friend and mentor, and hope that I can reciprocate that in some way in the future.
As well as this, getting to have an externalising conversation with Mitch where I also shared parts of my values and experience, particularly when they crossed over with his, and reflect on my actions when working as a journalist, as well as my own club of life and how they support me, and how I hope to make them proud through my actions and values in professional life.
Conclusion
This was a valuable experience as someone who has developed some skin in the game throughout and before university to have a serious conversation about the purpose, ethics and value of what I want to do, by someone who is a part of the industry I want to find a place in. I am very grateful to Mitch for the time he gave me for this assessment and hope to live out the values we share in my professional life as I venture out into the future.
References
Burns, S 2014, ‘The news we lose when we cut local newspapers’, The Conversation, viewed 28 October <https://theconversation.com/the-news-we-lose-when-we-cut-local-newspapers-26621>
Russell, S, Carey, M, 2019, ‘Re-membering: responding to commonly asked questions, Dulwich Centre, viewed 29 October <https://dulwichcentre.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Re-membering_-_Responding_to_commonly_asked_questions.pdf>
Russ Haylock Sportswriting 