30 Years of CommsDay: Past editors discuss their insights and reflections

Music.

Welcome to Comms Day Live and this short series celebrating the newsletter that has charted the Australian telecommunications sector for the last 30 years, Communications Day. I'm Tim Marshall, a former Comms Day editor, and it's a pleasure to be with you here today. Today, something a bit different, possibly an overload, certainly an experiment, and hopefully something at least somewhat entertaining.

Joining me now is what might best be described as a conference of editors from over the years, a gathering of hacks who've helped keep comms day reliable and trustworthy over the years. It's a panel that may well have the potential to get out of hand and maybe that's a good thing. Feels like it could be great for a listener call-in format, this one,

but we don't have that. So I'll do my best to guide a bit of a journey and get a few insights from behind the comms day banner from those who put it all together. First of all, and welcome to our panel of former editors, albeit a very blokey bunch, but nonetheless a top group of scribes. And I can see them here on a video call and it kind of does look like a bit of a boy band reunion, it could be said.

First of all, Petrok Wilton, joining from Japan, currently on break following some time running communications with the World Food Programme in Africa. Welcome, Petrok. Thanks, Tim. Good to be here. Jeff Long, just off a boat, back on dry land after an exercise in his role as Public Affairs Officer for the Australian Navy. Thanks, Tim. I'm Luke Coleman, Head of Government and Corporate Affairs at Focus, and recently announced as the new Chief Executive of Communications Alliance.

Welcome, Luke. Great to be back with you, Tim. David Binning, Founder of an independent PR and marketing agency. David, good to see you. Good to be here, Tim. Looking forward to it. And of course, Graham Lynch. Hi, Graham. Hi, Tim. And hi, everyone. on. And as I said, I'm Tim Marshall. And for my part, I'm currently consulting in communications and reputation management. You can find me on LinkedIn if you need help with your communications needs.

And before we start, I'd like very much to acknowledge everyone who's contributed to the success of Comms Day over the years. It wasn't just those on this panel. We did a count the other And to the best of our collective memory, came up with a list of at least 30 editorial staff over the years, an extraordinary number, as is the 30-year milestone for the newsletter itself, it has to be said.

Graeme, first to you as founder and publisher, we've spoken before about your original vision for comms day and what you did or didn't anticipate back in the day. How does it feel to have spawned a newsroom with so many contributors? And what, if anything, can you tell us about a comms day reporter? What sets them apart? Okay, well, I'll start with the second half of your question, if that's okay. I think the key to a publication like comms day is it's a subscription newsletter.

So you have to keep people engaged and feeling they're getting value for their reading, which means as a journalist, you need to develop sources. You need to get the inside context on why things are happening. You need to look at places where other journalists might not necessarily look.

You know, the ephemera of regulatory regulatory documents the appendices of submissions to government consultations and explanatory memorandums of memoranda of legislation you know and looking for that little morsel on the second last page of a document that becomes a lead story so i think you know that they're the types of skills that make a comms day journalist and you know if i look you know the the uh the assortment of gentlemen here who've all,

you've all gone on to do amazing things in lives outside of comms day. And that's because, you know, there was a, you're all talented in the first place. You know, it wasn't just about comms day. It was, we've, we've had this wonderful track record of identifying latent talent in people. I mean, most of the people who've worked at comms day started on a kind of a trainee type basis and developed their skills while they were with comms day with a couple of exceptions obviously.

Where people were perhaps a little bit more experienced when they came in but you know it's a team of alumni if i can use that word who i'm incredibly proud of you know and you know the track record of what they did at comms day and what they've done since speaks for itself i think, Kind words. Thank you, Graham, and some very interesting insights there, no doubt. I wasn't there at the beginning in 94, but I did enter the scene in the relatively early days around the late 97, I think.

And I guess I kind of was a bit of a trainee at that time. I remember my job was to just write briefs, get the media releases as they would come in and turn out these short pieces that would fill the back of the newsletter. letter. Frankly, look, I'm happy to say it. I had no real idea what I was getting myself into. It was certainly my first experience with business reporting and first in telecommunications.

But just to reflect on taking that job, I was super happy to have it and even more excited having just moved to Sydney from Bathurst in country New South Wales. The office was in this fantastically old school building, Bathurst House by coincidence, on the corner of Bathurst and Castle Ray streets, next to a fire station.

And it was this tiny shared office situation with another daily newsletter, Media Day, and the Australian branch of the Hollywood Reporter, of all things, which I thought was very glamorous. And it's worth saying, one of Australia's first ISPs just downstairs, if I remember rightly.

Jeff Long, first to you, you spent some time in Asia before clocking nearly a decade with Comsday in Australia. What drew you to look at covering the internet and telecommunications in the first place and what kept you interested in that beat over the 20 or so years that you were on that journey? Yeah, so it's fair to say I was probably one of the exceptions in that I sort of had a bit of a telecom writing background before I came to comms day.

And I think it was a bit of a chance thing that got me into telecoms and internet in the first place. And, but I, I've also found that with a lot of reporters on the tech beat that they sort of fall into it by chance and then, and stay with it because they realize it's, it's pretty good. But there were, there was two sort of landmark moments for me that got me into that. And the first was, I actually followed a girl to Switzerland.

And when when i got there this was in the the late 1980s in switzerland they speak four languages but none of them are english and so apple was looking for someone that could do things in english and i was their their fellow on the ground so i landed a job at apple computers and that got me into the new wave of desktop publishing and all things computers. And I came back to Australia.

And the second thing that happened was I was at university up on the Northern rivers with all the, with all the hippies and they just happened to have this. They referred to it as Australia's first ISP, and it was based in Byron Bay, an company by the name of Pegasus Networks.

And if they weren't the first, they were one of the first, and they had this link through a global NGO chain, and I happened to be one of their early customers, and dialed in with my 2400 board modem from Lismore across the Byron Bay, and I was one of the first people on the internet in the early 1990s because of that company. And there's a guy there that was the technology guru at Pegasus Networks.

And for the last 20 years, he's been the director of the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center, so APNIC. And they're the organization that gives out every internet number within the Asia-Pacific region. And so from humble beginnings in, in Byron Bay, he sort of almost has control of internet in, in Asia Pacific.

So yeah, it was a, it was a good little outfit and those two things, the having the, the background in the publishing process and having a interest in internet has pretty well kept me employed ever since. So I've had, uh, jobs in, first it was on magazines and then in newspapers in Australia and in Asia. And yeah, look, I still love the tech meat and I'd still sort of fall back into it if I had the chance.

Great story, Jeff. Clearly captured your attention that first time you were online as one of the first Aussies there. Do you reckon you had any concept at the time of what would take place afterwards so far as the internet goes? No, I don't think so. I think I'm pretty bad at predicting the future. So I think I've consistently got it wrong. So I remember when Apple first brought out their iPhone, I thought, you know, they'll never beat the likes of Nokia and all these companies in the

mobile phone business. And there you go. I was wrong about that as well. There you go. David Binning, welcome. If I'm right, I think you might be the one amongst us. Well, Jeff's just given a pretty interesting insight on his background, but the one amongst us with maybe the most traditional technology journalism background in the late 90s in particular.

What were your reflections on joining Commerce Day when you did and how the newsletter and publication fitted into the broader tech media ecosystem back in the day? Yeah, well, I started out in trade press, like with IDG and Computer World and stuff like that. And like a lot of young journos, I was very keen about joining the mainstream and I was very lucky that I was poached by Fairfax when I was working for Computer World and CIO Magazine in the late 90s.

And I always remember that comms day was kind of present. It was always, funnily enough, this is something you're going to touch on later, but it was on the fax machine along with Computer Daily News. And you would always look at it. It was always something that was taken seriously, especially if you wanted to, you know, be taken seriously as a telco reporter. But of course, it was the only publication where they already had telco reporters. And so then I left Fairfax, came back to Sydney.

I went to school with Natalie Postolo, who I think is going to come up on these reflections. I went to university rather with Natalie Postolo. And she was the one that brought me on board. And I must say, there wouldn't have been any other trade publication that I would have considered joining after being with The Age and The Herald because the others didn't, to me, have that sort of professionalism. So there was always that.

And I think that comms day journos, you know, just blow smoke up all of our butts, had a certain cachet, I think. You know, there was a confidence and a kind of camaraderie that we always kind of had, you know. I think we were reflecting on that. And I felt that immediately when I joined, you know. So, yeah, I mean, how does it fit into the broader landscape?

The other thing I remember being on comms day is that when we broke big stories, the dailies noticed them, you know, and we would get cited and that would never happen on Computer World or CRI Magazine at the time. You know, you wouldn't get like AFR reporting as reported in computer.

You never saw that, but you saw that with comms day and, you know, other things that would happen when I was working with you guys, like I'd get calls from radio stations to interview me about, you know, mobile trends. I think back now, I think that was just nuts, you know, like me talking on radio about mobile trends in my 20s, you know. I remember I have a similar memory, David, and also the memory, I think it was with Natalie who appointed me to my first role at Comms Day as well.

She was a classic newsbreaker in her day, Natalie Apostolou. There was. Luke? Yeah. Congratulations on your recent appointment, although I guess that could be a bit of a shame in timing given perhaps you'll be all the more diplomatic today than you may well have been having taken this role.

In a similar vein to Jeff, and I'm going to come to Petroc on this, I've long banged on about the net good of telecommunications in the producers more good than not, although that's a very live balance that we can measure on a daily basis, I think. Do you share that view and how do you reflect on the importance of this sector, telecommunications, broader communications, to everything else that goes on across the economy and society?

Do you think you had any sense of that consequence when you first walked into the comms day newsroom for your first gig back in 2007? It's amazing looking back just how much has changed since then. So, 2007, I went back ahead of the recording of this podcast to look at some of the old ACMA reports from that era. The majority of Australians were still on dial-up internet back then. ADSL 2 Plus had only just launched as a technology.

Most people were still on ADSL 1, which had a maximum speed of about 8 megabits per second. I remember I had at the time a Nokia N95 smartphone, which I spent an absolute mozzer on. And I loved that thing. I've always been a bit of a technology nerd. So, it was pre-iPhone, which was really a defining moment when the iPhone launched, I think, in my first year as a journalist at Comsday. And Telstra's NextG network had only just launched back then in 2007.

The CDMA network was still alive. The original GSM 2G network was still going as NextG had only just been switched on. It's just remarkable now where here we are almost 18 years later, 100% of Australian premises have access to the NBN, 100% of premises have access to Starlink, which delivers broadband speeds even faster than the NBN.

We have three 5G mobile networks in this country, all of which are faster than the broadband speeds that were available on the best fixed line networks when I started at comms day. And if a single mobile network has an outage for six hours, it is front page news of every single newspaper in Australia. It is that essential a service. And so, it is remarkable to look at just how far connectivity has come.

I often think of, there was a headline by the New York Times economist and writer Paul Krugman who said, we will look back, this is in the late 90s, he said, we'll look back at the internet and we'll see that it didn't really change the economy all that much. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's so stunning that in the early days of the internet, people were saying, ah, this thing's all just a bit of a fad. And today, it is impossible to think of life without it.

I was having this conversation with my wife recently when we were signing up to yet another subscription streaming service. We've been married for 13 years next month, and we have never plugged in a television antenna in the 13 years that we've been together. We have only either streamed content or had downloaded content. We have never watched broadcast content.

That is an absolutely remarkable change that not only is it broadband in the sense of surfing the internet or working, but the way that we are entertained today, that you can live very comfortably without ever accessing free-to-air television via traditional broadcast methods. And I think that we're just getting started. Yeah, fascinating. I think that's right, Luke. And just to touch on what it was like for you personally back in 2007. What did you think you'd be doing in 20 years from then?

I remember my first interview with Graham. I had responded to a job ad on seek.com or something like that. This was my first real grown-up job. I'd been through university and done a journalism degree, went backpacking for a couple of years and knew I wanted to be a journalist.

I had never heard of comms day and uh and when graham interviewed me he was trying to sort of test me on my knowledge of telecommunications and from memory i think i said to you graham look i really don't know a lot about the telecommunications industry but i'm a bit of a nerd i love smartphones i love what they can do i would love to write about them and graham said well i'll give you a job and we'll see how you go so i would never have expected

almost 20 years later that i would first first of all, still be in telecommunications, but that it would be an industry that intellectually turns me on so much. It is such an interesting space 20 years later, even more interesting 20 years later than it was at the time, more essential than it was at the time. And, you know, when I reflect on. What it was like as a journalist back in 2007. We were competing against every Tuesday the Australian IT section would come out.

And I remember I would wake up in fear of who's dropped a massive story to the Aus IT section, or I think that the Financial Review had its own telco section. I can't remember what day that came out. Similarly, with the Fairfax mastheads at the time of the Herald and the Age, there was such a vibrant competitive media environment at the time. If you went to a Telstra Analyst Day in 2007 or 2008 or 2009, you might have a dozen to 20 journos show up.

You'd be lucky to get five if you did that today. And I think that is just such a testament to the staying power of comms day in this industry. The AusIT section is gone, as is the Finns, as is the Heralds. They still do occasional coverage of the sector online.

Line but comms day is the the consistent industry bible that despite the absolute bloodbath we've seen in the media industry over the last 18 years comms day is still going strong yeah certainly is 30 years extraordinary hey petrock it's terrific to have you here and i'm actually fascinated to put this question to you it's a bit of a change in tact from where we've been for the last few moments, but given your last five years in Uganda and Somalia doing amazing work in what's

the world's largest humanitarian program, tell me about the impact of connectivity and what it enables in parts of the world where so much of what we take for granted in a country like Australia and some of the things Luke's been talking about is literally non-existent.

Yeah thanks tim so um yeah working for the un for the last five years has given me the chance to do a lot of deep field work like you say in sort of far northern rural uganda and all over somalia really and those are contexts where there really often isn't much infrastructure at all and definitely there's no history of you know pervasive landline internet but what there is these days is almost ubiquitous and fairly fast mobile and fixed wireless coverage and to your question that

that really makes some amazing things possible like it can literally save lives so for example in somalia we spent most of 2022 in this awful race against time to try and stop a looming famine amid the longest drought in that country's history and one of our big challenges was getting food aid to people in some of the areas that were hardest hit by the drought but that we couldn't physically access because of the security risk

even with our normal sort of armed vehicle armored vehicles and armed escorts but those places still had a functioning local markets and all of the families that we needed to reach had access to mobile phones. Even if they had almost nothing else in some cases. And so we used mobile money transfers to send them enough cash each month to buy the food they needed to survive.

So that mobile connectivity in conflict-wracked, drought-affected Somalia played a major part in enabling our massive humanitarian scale-up, which ultimately did help to prevent a famine that otherwise could have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. I guess on a lighter note, right? We also relied internally very heavily on the fixed wireless and the mobile networks to connect with each other, to communicate with each other.

We had like 12 offices scattered all over Somalia, So like six in my mind in 2020, we won the Nobel Peace Prize and it sort of, it came up quite suddenly. HQ, it's based in Rome, wanted to get all these reaction videos from our field teams, right? And thinking about like Somalia access is so difficult, mobilizing like a convoy can take, you know, can take days to get all the approvals. There was no way I could go shoot stuff with our guys in the field, like all over the place.

So basically that meant what's happening all of our field office team leaders getting them to get their cell phones hop out to the field grab basically some tiktok videos of all like the colleagues celebrating and then banging them back to me to get them off to rome that like that just wouldn't have been possible without that connectivity so yeah like both in the work that we were doing in those contexts and just in pulling the teams together yeah like connectivity productivity absolute game

changer transformational really how much of what you learned from i guess covering the scene and the industry as an editor of comms day have you taken forward into into that role and has assisted you in i guess understanding the context of what the technology is and can enable has that it was that a great benefit to you yeah it certainly was and and i think what What was interesting, like there were some of the companies that we were reporting on in our sector,

right? Like Motorola sticks out as an obvious example. They were often talking about like the need for like ruggedized comms, right? Like kit that would sort of survive a bit of a bashing. And I guess in the Australian context that that was being marketed, what maybe some of the resource industries and to maybe some of the sort of people living out in more remote areas.

But yeah bouncing around bouncing around the field in in somalia in uganda like that took on a whole new meaning for me like it was stuff that i'd been writing about as being you know marketing point for some of these companies but seeing the importance of having you know links that won't go down even when conditions are pretty tough that like contextually i knew or For a technical standpoint, I kind of understood it, but sort of seeing it actually in action in the deep

field context, that was, yeah, that was quite the revelation. Yeah, for sure. I feel like we probably should come back and do some justice to this. There's probably a whole series and multiple topics within it we could cover, Petrop, but just to bring things back a little more locally, I'd love to give listeners a bit of a flavour of what it's like in the comms day newsroom.

One of the things about comms day, setting it apart from the rest of the business and tech media, I think we've had a bit of description of that, was that it would almost cover the big industry news of the day and absolutely everything else from the sector. I think we each had experiences regularly producing 2,000 words a day or more, multiple stories, going to media conferences, interviewing executives, breaking news, flipping tech media releases.

I remember there was a seriousness, but also very much an informality about the whole thing. Luke, maybe back to you. I remember interviewing you for your appointment at some cafe down the road from one of the early office location. What was a typical day like in the comms day office? And did your mates at the time, assuming you had any, have any idea of what you were doing? I think my mates had a limited idea of what I was doing.

Life in the comms day office. It was such a happy period of my life. We would roll in at about 10 o'clock in the morning, which I look back at now and go, God, what a luxury that would be to be able to roll into the office at 10 o'clock in the morning again. It was a fairly petite office. Tim, there was you and I. There was our office manager, Sally and Lorraine. And between the four of us in that little office, we all got along famously.

There was a good bit of banter. What did a regular day look like? You'd come in, see what pictures had landed in your inbox overnight for the first hour or so. There'd often be a press conference of some sort mid-morning. Maybe it was a financial results. Maybe it was an investor day. Maybe there was a speech on at lunchtime that you'd jag an invite to, to go and get the story.

And that was always a great chance to go and shake a few hands and meet people and hopefully cultivate a few sources while you're out meeting people. Back in the good old days where people used to do things in person and then come back in the afternoon, maybe do a phone interview or two. And then three o'clock, I remember three o'clock was when I would kick into gear and start writing. We typically work to a 6 p.m. deadline.

Graham at the time was overseas and so had a bit of a time lag that meant that we could get it off at 6 p.m. and he'd then be able to go and put the issue together. And from 3 to 6 p.m., it was head down writing mode. And as you say, you'd typically pump out between 2,000 to 3,000 words and you'd clock off at 6 o'clock. And I think a highlight, Tim, was every Friday, you and I would religiously make sure that we went down to the Edinburgh Hotel for a cold beer.

And that was a tradition that Petrock and I kept alive forever. The Friday beer was a great one just to go over the news of the week, decompress, and it was always just like working with mates. That was the greatest thing about comms day. We all had a mission, but just good people that I loved working with. It really was just one of the happiest periods of my life. It was good. It was good. I think just a slightly extension on that reflection of the Fridays.

Perhaps this was the late 90s kind of vibe, but we used to kind of, we would roster someone on to come on a Sunday to put the Monday episode edition to bed. Fridays was very much about long lunch, which I guess so were the 90s in general. And that was a fantastic perk of the job and has to be said.

Petra, I think when you joined in 2008, you'd just arrived from Australia via Japan, where you are now, and Hong Kong. What are your memories of that newsroom and what it was like to jump into an industry which at the time, given the NBN focus, was front page news? What was that? So I guess the audio recording won't show this, but I was just furiously nodding along with Luke because he was really spot on. Like it was such such just a genuinely nice place to work with genuinely nice people.

Yeah. The starting to work at 3 p.m. is also spot on. I think if we'd been on a weekly deadline, I'd have been stuffed. It would have been everything last minute on a Thursday. Anyway. So, yeah, like yourself, Tim, I was I was super excited when I joined Comstay. I had just moved from Hong Kong in a very different job that we don't need to talk about here. Comstay was my first break into like professional writing.

And like yourself, I joined comms day knowing virtually nothing about telecoms at all. But I have this very vivid memory of walking across a park to meet Graham for that, you know, that job interview to start off with. Just wondering, is it really possible to get a whole newsletter every day out of just ANZ telecoms?

And then also like you said very quickly finding out that there was often more than enough news to fill the pages and just getting all in was you know daily challenge and also that if you join comms day day one you're pumping out some of those stories so it was a really steep learning curve like picking up all the ins and outs of the sector that was a lot to a lot to take on when you started but the industry i would say especially in the context you're describing the industry made it easy uh not

just uh working with luke and graham who were for the record the best bosses i've ever worked for but almost i think everyone i ever interviewed was so generous with their time and so genuinely articulate but also like passionate about their subject whether that's.

Policy whether it was regulation whether it was uh emergent technology it made it it made it a real pleasure and also kind of easy to learn on the job and like you say the industry at the time was legitimately front page mainstream use and that was incredibly energizing i'm not sure if you'd ever have quite the same experience in a lot of the telco markets but yeah in in australia in like what the sort of 2010s yeah it was it was absolutely an exciting place to be working here.

Guys i'm just going to cut it here because we're going to run out of time on the zoom as i mentioned just picking up on something that that petrock was saying that so when you're reflecting petrock on the fact that recording in progress, Petra, you were reflecting on the fact that it was your first sort of professional job in journalism and you were so delighted how generous people were with their time and everything.

That's a testament to the respect that Comma's had in the market in that you had apps. And I hadn't experienced that previously outside of the mainstream. Like if you're from the Sydney Morning Herald of the age or the FI or the Australian, typically people get back to you. But it's not that common in the trade press. But it was in Comma's day. So you guys were quite spoiled, actually, having your first jobs in that. That was amazing.

Kind of anybody you wanted to, which was, yeah, a real testament to Graham. I guess that's true. There's something in there that Petrok was saying as well, though. I always kind of reflected that for one reason or another, the communications sector seemed to be a sector of communicators. There were a lot of people willing to put their view. Sometimes that manifested as conflict. Sometimes it was just general commentary or willingness to put their sales pitch up or whatever it was.

But there was something communal around it and communicative across the sector. Yeah, so true. I think also because telecommunications is actually an indigenous industry in Australia. So I'd come from writing about tech. So you write about Microsoft or Cisco or HP or IBM. And in telco, if you're writing about Telstra or Optus and all the issues and the government regulation and so forth, there's a real indigenous telco industry in Australia, whereas back then there

really wasn't an indigenous tech sector more broadly. So people were very invested in it. Yeah, it's an interesting thing about telco in general, isn't it, coming from that national infrastructure standpoint in each of the different countries. Yes, you're talking about regional telcos and farmers, all of those real stories were, you know, that's I think why it had that sort of real importance.

So just coming back and keen to get a bit more insight from inside the newsroom and comms day, I was just chatting to Graham the other day and he mentioned to me a characteristic of a comms day editor was simplicity. I don't think he meant simpleton, but that if someone had a good idea, just get on with it. Simple. Maybe that's ethic is one of the reasons why the comms day layout has changed so little over 30 days. 30 years. Coming to you, we haven't had, what's that, Graeme?

30 years. You said 30 days. 30 years it hasn't changed. 30 days. 30 years is a lot longer than 30 days, and 30 years is a long time for a layout not to change. It's proven the test of time. Jeff, coming back to you, what makes a good newsroom? Is there an attitude or a spirit that has to be there to make it work? So I think the newsroom has changed dramatically. I think the biggest change is that it's basically been gutted.

If you go to a typical newspaper, the loss of people is just really stark. But I think in other ways, though, the tech beat has always been a bit removed from the mainstream. So when I was on the Australians tech section in its heyday, we were still just a small bunch tucked away in a corner.

And we didn't really interact in that way with the uh with the rest of the the mainstream journalists like david might have had a different experience but for me we're always off to one side and we used to refer to the uh. The mainstream journos as the poets because they always aspire to some sort of, you know, higher level of writing, whereas the tech guys were just quite happy to do the tech beat and stay in their lane, if you like.

So I've sort of never really, that movie view of a newsroom where it's all hustle and bustle and that, I've never really seen it. Also, when I was in Thailand on the Bangkok Post, Most everyone on the tech section, you know, would just come and go as they pleased and didn't really have any interaction with the rest of the newspaper. Like we didn't really care what happened as long as we got our tech supplement out every week.

That was the main thing. I think because of that, the tech beat and the tech journos have always been an early adopter of the way things work now in in terms of people doing remote work and and sending in copy from from wherever it's funny you know in the comms day since i was never in the sydney office i've never apart from a couple of days here and there i never worked out of the sydney office so i did melbourne and then when i was an editor i actually

did from the gold coast and and i think I think technology. Obviously, we're using it every day and we can do that. We can work remotely. So I think, yeah, we were an early adopter. I think there's only one thing that matters when it comes to the newsroom and everything, and that's just get the copy in. And if you can get your copy in every day, that's the thing that counts. So, you know, the only thing I've ever hated as an editor is when someone is late with copy.

So that's my take. Yeah, I can relate. I can relate. It's funny. It's funny, you mentioned the poets I interviewed and recruited a number of people into roles at Comstay over the years. I tend to ask the same question first each time. It's like, well, you aim to be a journalist. What are your goals or where do you see yourself? And it was remarkable the number of people and with no offense to them at all.

And I hope they've done well that would say my goal is to be on the six o'clock news as either the anchor or a star reporter.

Order so well you're you're going for the wrong job here if that's if that's the aspiration and those that didn't sort of tended to be a little bit more curious and open to what the potential, might be david coming back to you and i guess i'm drawing here on your experience previously and across the the sector is it it's a tech journal and you've given us some great comments already, it seemed to me that the comms day approach was always to take a much broader

and contextual view than most tech reporting. What are the things that stood out for you about the ComState newsroom and the way it worked and the coverage it produced? Well, I mean, you've all touched on the fact that we were kind of, we had to really get into the weeds with all of the minutiae of all of the, you know, so big financial reports from the major telcos and all the minor companies that nobody else reported on. We kind of spread ourselves very thin and had to kind of, embrace it all.

And I think very quickly we've, and this goes back to what I said right at the beginning, very quickly we all became experts. If we think back, within like six months on comms day, pretty much that team knew everything that needed to be, that was worth knowing in the sector. And that gave us a lot of confidence. And it also, I remember Tim, we used to write that column in that, what was it called? That pink thing that we used to do that weekly, What was it? It was not exchange.

I just said exchange. Not that, but it was that weekly. Comms Day weekly, perhaps as simple as that. I can't remember, but it was a compendium over the week's coverage in a printed format. Yeah, and we would bash out like 800-word columns like as precocious 20-somethings, and they were good. We were very well-informed on the sector, And I think that's sort of partly why we had that access and then we had that respect at the press conferences.

And I mean, a lot of us, we didn't interact with Graeme that much, of course, Graeme, because you were just God knows where you were. You were sort of all over the globe. But your presence was certainly felt and we obviously learnt a lot whether it was just from kind of the feelings that we would get, you know. Graeme, tell me how does it feel to know that your presence was felt? Like some spectre, some phantom in the night. I'd rather not go there. This is a scientific empirical podcast.

But are you getting a few insights on how that newsroom actually run oh i always had my suspicions i always had my suspicions tim. Well it's got to be said that every newsroom actually just needs its fodder and thankfully the telco industry has provided in spades over the years with conflicts and characters and milestones and events all the necessary ingredients luke and petrock i thought we might be able to do a bit of a shared reflection here.

You guys presided over what might be the most conflicted period for the industry with the NBN wars and everything that went with it, with Telstra and so on.

What were some of your favourite news moments in your time? Luke, maybe to you first. Sure. It was such a great year, not only because it was, I think, the pinnacle of debate in the telecoms industry. There were such feisty rivalries between the G9 carriers at the time, who later rebranded to Terrier, Telstra, who had put forward its fiber to the Node proposal. You had a change of government in 2007 with Kevin 07 coming in. In the lead-up to the election, you had the coalitions.

What was called Broadband Connect, awarded to Optus and Elders, the Opel Consortium, which was being torn apart by Labor, who had their, at the time, what was a $4.7 billion plan to do fiber to the node. It's also quaint to think back at those times now. But what was great, it wasn't only a clash of ideas. There were such vibrant and colorful personalities in there as well.

So, not only did you have Soltra Heo as the CEO of Telstra, But Phil Burgess, who was the head of public and corporate affairs at Telstra at the time, who was such a bombastic character. Then you had people over at Optus like Maha Krishnapillai, who kind of was the anti-Phil Burgess that he was very colorful at putting forward the Optus view. There was just such a great bunch of characters who were unafraid to get into

the ring and start swinging. It was a brilliant time to be a journalist with those characters.

And I wonder now, 18 years later from that era, first of all, the heat around the NBN debate has died down considerably because of the changes in the media industry where you've now got a lot more spin doctors and media relations people in corporate world and far, far fewer journos that there are way more gatekeepers now that maybe you don't get as many of those colourful personalities that you had at the time. I think that's a real shame.

And I would love to see a more vibrant debate in the industry. I would love to see some more of those characters come out and really start arguing their case again. I think we do see it to a degree And it is largely, if not entirely, in the pages of Comsday that we see that debate today. And I think that, again, is just a great reflection of Comsday's status in the industry. And I would love to see some more of that again. Petroc, your memories?

Yeah, no, I think that's spot on. and as you were talking luke i was sort of reflecting that um through the yeah through all the time i was at comms day i i i think not long after you handed the reins over to me as editor i saw some of that tempering of what had been this definitely robust robust debate i think is probably how you'd uh you classify in like un language yeah some of the really quite aggressive discourse just started to give way to maybe slightly more nuanced discussion

which probably is healthy but also made it much much more difficult to get like the really explosive headlines you couldn't just go i can't believe that man said that and whack it in the headline and also like.

I guess you sort of took it for granted at the time because like tim said that that's the era that we came into but sort of remarkable in retrospect that you'd get you know policy debate at the highest level that was really inflected by you know quite quite profound understanding of technology in some cases right like i remember um when we were covering some of the stuff around around vectoring when the nbm policy was shifting from what was originally or not originally what had been envisaged

as fiber to the premise all the way through and then fiber to the node starts creeping in but now you can do more things with the copper and you know talking to john choffey and so forth vectoring is quite a complicated technology right like it's not it doesn't sort of fly off the front page but it became this this kind of intrinsic part of the whole thing and that It was kind of astonishing, but you don't realise that until you look back on it afterwards.

To Tim's question, personal favourite moment was popping up on national TV, I think, for the first time in my life, during a 2010 election debate on broadband, getting to ask the Coalition Shadow Commerce Minister, Tony Smith, at that time, about a policy that maybe wasn't as robust as it could have been. It's change, if I remember correctly.

That was an unforgettable press conference that one they were struggling a bit at that one yeah but evidently the honorable tony smith was maybe struggling a bit with what i had thought was a fairly innocuous question and my eyebrows shot up in true roger moore style and a bunch of my friends screen capped it and started spamming on my facebook with various and flattering captions so that was yeah that was definitely a personal favorite very funny very funny yes there was some moments there's no

doubt and some great characters great characters there i just i guess to to attempt to get a little bit of an insight as a as a reporter guys you may stay true to your code here but there is always the case of the backgrounder the phone call or the email perhaps even from an anonymous email account that comes through pushing a particular particular barrow it must be said all every time there's nothing without interest in these things care to share any anecdotes

or particular names who was the who was the pushiest background you ever came mate it's funny you should ask that right so uh stephen conroy the the labor comms minister for quite a while there had uh had this i i i forget his name but uh he.

You know, he's a really good bloke, but he was very fond of the kind of quick side chat at the press conference or the kind of off-the-record background phone call, just, you know, just to indicate the sort of direction that, you know, your story might want to take. Luke, can you remember his name? It's escaping me at the moment. You said he was a great bloke. I thought he was a bastard to deal with.

What was his name again? Of course, for our listeners, we are talking about Tim Marshall, who went from being an editor of Comsday to being Stephen Conroy's media advisor during those early days of Labour government.

And Tim, look, to Petrok's point, you were an extremely effective backgrounder and you weren't afraid to get on the phone and tell us when we had written something incorrectly or question our numbers or tell us that maybe if not a correction was called for, then maybe next time we should cover it this way. For me, the standouts, I'm not going to name any particular individuals, but by far the bitchiest, most outrageous.

Thuggish calls I would get were from the small wireless ISPs, the WISPs, who are often these little regional wireless network operators who probably all knew one another from around the traps and had probably all worked together at some point. But, God, they would leak the most salacious details to try to white-ant their competitors.

And I do remember one particularly bloody campaign where I had a source who was leaking me some incredibly detailed information about a fixed wireless project in a regional area that was not going very, very well. And I remember the CEO of this operator who was the target of this campaign calling me one day and going, what have I got to do to get you to stop bloody writing this bullshit? He was very, very fired up. And I said, well, when I ask you for a comment, you should give me one.

Anyway, we quickly found a good balance of getting this stream of information from a competitor and balancing it with some commentary from this other target. But this other target, I say a target of the source. But yeah, that was always very, very entertaining. Oh, maybe like the background leak stuff was kind of amazing.

Very without any detail so as not to get anyone in trouble we are years after the fact like once going up top floor of a pub having a meeting that never happened and getting some very interesting policy details quickly written down on the back of a beer coaster which we had to keep in the office for a while and the other it was arranged that i would be not far away from from the office on the road at a certain time and a white cab drove past slow down and a certain contract

was slid out the top of the window and then it sped off.

Smoking a cigarette in a car park underground while holding a copy of the wall street journal kind of thing i love it very much like that great stuff thanks for sharing guys and just for everyone to uh i guess defend my good honor thank you very much for the compliments of being a great backgrounder but my my my role in life is just to be helpful guys and if i can ever help in your future please just let me know i was just being helpful then and i'm being helpful now,

hey david the the period around the nbn always takes a lot of focus for the last 10 or 15 years but you and I were reflecting the other day about the earlier years with the rise and the bust of the dot-com era.

It seems like a relic now, even the downfall of OneTel in there. Was it true that some days the stories just wrote themselves in those days and were you ever surprised at some of the twists and turns and rollercoasting writing that went on in that period? Yeah, heady times. Did they write themselves? Yeah, I suppose to a degree, but also back to what we were talking about earlier, like we, I think we saw a lot of stuff coming because we were so immersed in it.

Like other journos just couldn't possibly be, you know, I mean, and the other thing I was amusing on the other day was the, remember the good old backdoor listings of the .com era? It was always, and it was just constant press releases from mining company one day, something .com the next, which, and it was like, it was comical. And we became experts at that and probably saw the writing on the wall before a lot of the other journos were writing more broadly in tech.

But I think we were definitely on the front foot with OneTel. I think we saw that coming down before.

Most other journos i think i remember the day when the the announcement came through that i think was rupert who first announced there was the first asx announcement that newscorp was pulling its money out i think that's all when it all started coming down and we were running around i think we've kind of we're pretty pretty pretty much first or nearly first in breaking that so i don't know stories writing themselves

yeah well and to uh to mention again natalie apostolou who was a long-time follower and leader in the coverage of that whole OneTel scenario there for a while. Comms Day, for my time at Comms Day, extended to around nine years. It was a terrific entry to a sector I knew nothing about, previously taking me on a terrific career journey. It also left me with an undying instinct for a daily deadline.

Which may well have been an impairment over the years. It has to be said, in corporate life, sometimes a daily deadline isn't the best way to think of things. I do want to add of things that I picked up along the way, I also met my wife, Melissa, indirectly through Comms Day. Speaking of the dot-com rise and fall, we were introduced at an event for LookSmart in late 99 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney when everything dot-com was still heading skywards.

She was with a digital marketing company in the day and was all very bleeding edge so how about that jeff coming back to you what's stuck with you from your days as a comms day editor yeah so we were talking about this before and and there's one thing and you've just touched on it in your intro there one thing that really stuck with me from comms day that is having that discipline from doing daily deadlines and for churning out those 2,000 or 3,000 words every day without fail.

And, you know, you just have to turn up with those words. So I think... Being able to write a story in a set amount of time is a skill that you do develop. And in my current role in defence public affairs, you can always see the people that are sort of used to being able to churn out a story and those that can't. So we have some people that might come from advertising or even public affairs background and they can't do it. They really struggle with getting a story out on time.

But yeah, the funny thing is I always thought that the ultimate, you know, in terms of deadlines was having to get everything out on a daily basis. Then I did a story. It was one of the last ones I've done when I was at Comms Day. And I got to see all of the mainstream news people in action. And I was actually quite stunned that they'd sort of gone from having to do, you know, a story per day to actually having to file multiple times per day.

And I think, my God, I'm glad I got out before I had to, you know, file on multiple times a day because the pressure on them to, you know, file something before lunch was just unrelenting. Yeah. I think one of the things that I didn't realize that, you know, was a key thing, one of the things that I've sort of had to get since leaving comms day is up to speed on all of this social media and video and everything.

And I think every journo these days has to double up and, you know, do the photography, do the video. And I think that's probably one of the biggest trends since I sort of left the mainstream journalism is that need for video and social content.

So in in my current role i'm lucky i'm in a team and we have some young people that you know are really good on that sort of stuff that can do all the video can do all the socials and yeah they're really comfortable with that so i'm i'm there to do to write a few words and that's about it but they do the hard stuff well yeah and presumably though keep them on that disciplined line to get Get it in on time, right? Exactly.

Luke, you and I have had a somewhat similar journey post our jobs with Communications Day. And for me, a lot of the things that I've taken away simply come from the people we met over that time and the connections and the network and understanding the layers and the depth there. You're moving into this new role with the Comms Alliance. How do you look back? What have you taken forward?

The nail that with relationships, the single best start I could have ever wished for in my career was my job at Comsday because it opened doors to CEOs, to chairman, to board members, to senior executives in all of the telcos.

And they were always happy to speak to us. they knew that our reporting was fair particularly when the major papers would often go for a spicy angle that that put the facts of the matter second for a spicy headline first and i think it, Those three to four years at Comms Day built that body of respectful relationships across the industry that I am still benefiting from today. It was at that time that the current CEO of Comms Alliance, John Stanton, was appointed into that role.

Fourteen years he's been there, but I remember speaking to his predecessor, Anne Hurley. I think of people like Rosemary Sinclair, who is currently at the Australian Domain Name Administration, who at the time was the CEO of ATUG, the Australian Telecommunications User Group. So many faces in the industry that were there back in the comms day era, the era that I was the editor of comms day, I should say, are still around in this industry.

It is a surprisingly small industry of people who you can build long-term relationships with. You see the same faces in different places. I even think of some of the senior staff at NBN at the moment who came up through Vendorland that 15 years ago, they were pitching press releases to me for a vendor and they're now in the senior executive ranks at NBN or other places. So, those relationships are just so important.

And we had some bloody good times as well. We just had great fun. You know, I think back to, it was 2008, I'd been taken on a junket to Broadband World Forum, which was in Brussels this year, by Alcatel-Lucent. Which a few years later merged with Nokia Siemens Networks, later it became Nokia. But at the time, Alcatel had just merged with Lucent, the big American vendor with the big French vendor.

We had the most outrageously great time in Broadband World Forum, interviewing their executives, dining out in lavish, stunning restaurants, going out to cigar bars and smoking Cuban cigars and drinking Hennessy afterwards. And I remember on the last day of that junket, packing my bag in my hotel room and putting on CNN. And it was the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. And I remember zipping up my suitcase thinking, that was it. That was the last great junket.

And sure enough, budgets got trimmed very, very badly after that. But it was a great last hurrah. Not only tell that story, because it's similar to people like you, David, who were there in the heights of the dot-com boom with you, Tim, that there was a massive boom and bust cycle in the late 90s that saw companies like WorldCom go under.

There was a similar boom and bust in the 2007, 2008 era of the global financial crisis that really did reshape the entire industry, but it was a great time to be a part of it. Yeah, that's a funny reflection. It was a bit of a gag of mine when I took my first marketing job at a vendor. The cupboards were bare. I'd enjoyed the largesse as a journalist on the receiving end, but by the time I got to administer that department, there was not a lot of budget left. Good times were over. To dole out.

Petroc, actually the longest standing editor as far as I can tell. The World Food Programme really is a world away from industry media and industry media outlet in Sydney. What did you take from your decade at Comms Day and what sticks with you now? 11 years of comms day, nine as editor, yeah. So what you and Jeff were saying about the discipline of deadlines, that really struck a chord, right?

It seems like such a simple thing, but once you start working in other organizations, other sectors, you know, you see colleagues who they've got all these conflicting priorities. And, you know, it is surprisingly tough to just get the stuff pumped out on time. But if you're coming out of comms day, that is what you live and breathe.

So that was useful. But I think, OK, if I had to pick one other thing, I think especially from Graham, Luke and Jeff, who I work with directly, I was able to develop this incredibly useful skill of getting my head around something very complex, quickly, just enough to accurately distill it down into what really matters for your audience and then present it in a way that connects with them to make some turn the pages.

And that was how I think we always aim to write stories in comms day, whether they're policy, tech stories, commercial stories. And that's definitely stayed with me. So, yeah, I spent the last couple of years as the spokesman in Somalia for the world's largest humanitarian agency at a time when the crisis in Somalia was making world headlines. I did maybe 70 international TV, newspaper, radio interviews.

I briefed people for dozens more. and every time i was relying on that same comms day skill right take a complex situation.

Find the right people to talk to to get your head around it quickly and then craft the headline craft the message that's going to reach your audience i don't think i could have done any of that without the comms day experience so yeah like a massive thanks to graham and the rest of the team past and present including those on the call here today well that's terrific terrific benefits and legacy to take away, I suppose.

And well done with all of that. And Graham, you're left with Comms Day itself. Indeed. These guys have given some great stewardship, but the team's really much larger and there's a great bunch on board right now that we're aware of. What's your hope for Comms Day in the future? Well, it's interesting because you've mentioned before that the format of Comms Day hasn't changed much in 30 years.

But what's been interesting is our business models being very differently out of fashion, but has come back into fashion. You know, if you look at the US subscription publishing, Axios and Semaphore and Politico and all those people, that's all kind of the rage, you know, in terms of preferred business model. So in some ways you just have to settle on something and wait to come into fashion. And then, you know, the world's your oyster, I guess.

But, you know, it's challenging now. You know, we've been talking about the freewheeling days, you know, pet trucking, car parks in overcoats, waiting for messengers to drop him documents and all that sort of stuff. Things are a lot more controlled now. You know, so there's a lot more corporate control over the messaging. Ever since COVID, people don't want to meet up as much. People don't jump on phones as much as they used to. Everyone's hidden away

a little bit more. So, it's a lot more challenging now sometimes to get the inside story on what's really going on. And there's less transparency overall as well. So, that's a challenge for us. But I think there's a big opportunity for us because if you look at the trends in the industry, you know, you've got things like Leosats that are very disruptive. You know, the march of the cloud, you know, the Amazons and the Googles and so on.

We're heading into an era of gigabit access and terabit come petabit transmission, which brings with it all sorts of interesting new opportunities and disruption. So I think the future is bright for us in the telecommunications and internet and connectivity is becoming more central to the economy and society, definitely not more marginal. And it's definitely not in the ranks yet of being a commodified utility. You know, there's still a lot of change occurring, a lot of technology inflections.

It's still a big issue for policymakers in terms of that area where comms day intersects with government and with regulation and so on. So I certainly don't want to say that the next 30 years will be brighter than the last 30 years, but one would hope we would still be here in 2054. Yeah. Well, may it be so. Congratulations on the first 30 years and good luck for the next stage.

All right, so we're going to start wrapping up now. I mentioned there's a long list of those who contributed over the years, and I actually think it's only right that we list them, albeit at risk of omission. We did try to get this right, and we've got a long list. Here goes, and we apologise in advance if someone's missing.

Jeremy Grigg, Natalie Apostolou, Michael Sainsbury, Pip Bulbeck, Blake Murdoch, Tony Chan, Alan Hartstein, Richard Cherguin, Kevin Morgan, David Bone, Duncan Craig, Andrew Colley, David Edwards, Patrick Naley, Hannah Wilcox, Monica O'Shea, Bill Bennett, Miro Sandev, Richard Vanderdray, Simon Ducks, jessica talaga dylan bushell embling rowan pierce gosh it's a long list i assume we've forgotten someone and there were many other contributors who threw in commentary

pieces over the time and of course there's nothing without business support so a shout out also to sally lloyd who really did hold it together for so many years and i think still has a role if i'm I'm right, Graeme, paying your salary or something like this. Lorraine Davis, Veronica Kennedy-Good, who's been responsible for so much of the great event production over the years, Vicky Vo, Linda Salome, Amy Carswell, Dewani Matur,

Mia Huang, and Myra Rock, who I think are on the team right now. What a team overall. But that's about all we have time for on this special reflection on the Comms Day 30th anniversary of a bit of an ex-editor a blokey reunion. Thanks to everyone for listening. And how about a round of cheerios and final quick words from our former Comsday editors, Luke Coleman. Great to be with you, Tim. Here's to 30 more successful years of Comsday. Go for it, Graham.

Petrock Wilton. Great to connect with you guys. Graham, massive congrats on the first 30 years. And yeah, all the best to the next 30. Geoff Long. Yep, thanks for the invite. And I'm hoping for the invite to the party next. And David Benning. Yeah, well done, Graham. Fantastic publication, great legacy and let's see you in 30 more years. We'll see all of us in 30 more years.

And thank you to publisher Graham Lynch. Thank you. Thank you to your, brings a tear to my eye to see you all here and reminisce on all the fantastic times we've had together. Thank you all. And thank you for listening. I'm Tim Marshall. Yes, another former Commas Day editor. Senator, I hope to speak to you all again on Cons Day Live.