Kerry O'Brien shares insights into the changing media industry

A flippant comment from an adviser set him on the path, but it was still several years before he had his first taste of a career in broadcast media.

“When [the guidance counsellor] came to me, he said ‘what are you at?’ and I said ‘I’m not bad at English and history’. He said ‘well I’d suggest two possibilities: journalism or teaching,” O’Brien said.

He “roamed around for about three years” and spent time working in the public service, but O’Brien felt he had lost his way.

In desperation, O’Brien’s father contacted Harry Summers, an old school friend who was a journalist and war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald.

“Harry had a connection at the then very small Channel Nine newsroom in Brisbane and got me some weekend work, where I had the chance to prove that I was capable of being a journalist or not.”

He proved his mettle and was offered a cadetship.

“The minute I walked through the door of that place I no longer had any doubts about what I wanted to do - the adrenaline of it, the camaraderie of the place and pulling together, seeing the product go to air, jumping over the hurdles, competing with the other stations and the papers. It was terrific fun and I’m being paid for it,” he said.

O’Brien was paid to interview leaders of politics, industry and culture from around the world.

Those he questioned include Obama, Mandela, Thatcher and Gorbachev, but a favourite interviewee was neurologist Oliver Sacks, who was “an enormously compassionate, but also innovative, scientist who just happened to be a brilliantly gifted writer”.

“[Sacks] wrote beautiful books about the human condition and peeled away not just the mystique, but some of the stigma from mental illness, and found the beauty behind the affliction,” O’Brien said.

“I would have interviewed that man every month, if I could.

“Having the privilege to be able to talk with people like that was a wonderful experience for me, and those are the kinds of memories that I will keep until the day I die.”

A good interview for O’Brien was showing his audience the truth behind the interviewee’s words.

“If you’re doing a television interview you’ve got a very limited amount of time in which to do it, so you [can] get those endlessly long flanneling answers, but when you can cut through that, periodically, you can walk away with some level of satisfaction that you’ve done your job,” he said.

“And if you haven’t elicited anything, but you’ve allowed the audience to see the deceptions that might be going on, then you’ve still done your job.”

O’Brien took his role as a journalist seriously, believing the media had an “incredibly important role in maintaining a strong democracy”.

“Journalism is one of the fundamental pillars of democracy, and Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke – both philosophers, both at different times in history – said the same thing: if they had to make a choice between newspapers and a parliament, they would choose newspapers,” he said.

Media has changed during O’Brien’s career and he laments the impact of digitisation and a 24-hour news cycle.

While he believes the nature of journalism has not changed, the way it is practiced has, because journalists are now expected to cover stories online as well as in print or broadcast, and provide updates as the story develops.

Restructures and job losses affect newsrooms around the country, with both the audience and the next generation of journalists suffering.

“There’s a lot of very promising young journalists coming through, but where are the mentors who are going to guide them in the way people like me were guided and helped?”

“Experience isn’t as respected as it should be. The older journos who walk around bearing the scars and who know the tricks that are played, who know what lessons to learn from the past and who’s wisdom can be distilled for the younger journos coming through – many of them are no longer there.”

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