Hold The Front Page! A Day In The Life Of A Newspaper Editor

Hold the front page! How often have you heard that classic line in relation to journalism? But have you ever wondered what life is really like for a newspaper editor? Wonder no more.

Lisa Davies is editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and I recently heard her describe her typical day at an Affinity Intercultural Foundation breakfast event.

Around 6am Lisa listens to Frank Kelly on Radio National Breakfast and reads four newspapers before she gets out of bed. (She’s usually read her own newspaper the night before).

At 9am Lisa attends the morning news conference with counterparts from other Fairfax publications, her foreign desk, federal politics bureau and digital editor. “That’s the time to really set our focus for the day,” Lisa says. “It’s a good opportunity to talk about everything that’s happened [overseas] overnight plus we talk about domestic [news], what’s coming up, and what we need to be aware of.”

Once upon a time a newspaper had only one evening deadline, but that’s no longer the case. Lisa’s team plans stories for five online and print deadlines throughout the day.

“We try to really focus our attention on the audience peaks,” she explains. “We know there’s a very large audience in the morning between six-thirty and eight-ish, so we set the home page for six a.m. Then we have a nine-o-clock changeover - that’s the time a lot of office workers arrive, and we see a bit of a spike in readers as people check in with the day. Then there’s a huge lunchtime audience. Actually, lunchtime is our biggest audience of the day, so we reset the website again at midday as there’s a big peak between twelve and one-thirty. We have two more editions – around five-o-clock for the commuter peak, and our evening audience which we often call the ‘mum zone’. It’s a way of encapsulating when parents – as kids are either doing homework or in bed – can kind of collapse on the sofa and check in with the world.”

By 2:30pm Lisa’s back at another news conference. This one, with the same people, looks forward to the evening website editions and what will be in the next day’s paper. Lisa says they think of the physical newspaper as “our curated version of the previous day’s events, which also looks forward into the next day”.

In between those meetings Lisa deals with staff issues, writes content for Sydney Morning Herald subscribers, works with the paper’s Marketing and Commercial teams on various projects, monitors and directs any breaking news to the top of the website, and tries to keep up with the rest of the day’s stories.

It’s a busy schedule, she’s on call seven days a week, and every day is different. She also speaks at many public events, keen to explain how the 187-year-old newspaper works.

One way it works is knowing what topics interest its readers. Online journalism – with its ability to track clicks – makes that very clear these days. Lisa cites transport, urban development, health and education as the stories that SMH readers are most drawn to. At the same time, her team must decide when other stories – perhaps not as popular or, at first glance, interesting (think the National Energy Guarantee) – are important enough to take over the front page.

An early adopter of online journalism, Lisa acknowledges that the Sydney Morning Herald used clickbait to gain audiences. “I prefer to say it was a deliberate tactic to get a large audience and it worked,” she says. “What we’re trying to do now is reframe that conversation around what is it that people really want, and what is it that they’re willing to pay for. So in terms of our digital content you may have noticed a shift to bigger investigations that we do really well online – making them schmick, using cutting edge technology and incorporating a lot of media elements – and prioritising our commentators and their insights that you can’t get anywhere else.”

So who is her favourite child then – the paper or the website? They certainly bicker amongst themselves, each wanting the story first. 

“We try to have a real conversation about when will the audience want to have this story most? People use to talk about ‘digital-first journalism’ where everything always went straight to online. I think we’ve adopted now an ‘audience-first’ attitude. When will this be read by the most people and have the greatest impact? We have to focus on getting more impact out of every piece of journalism because we can’t do everything anymore.”

The day before Lisa spoke at the Affinity Intercultural Foundation event, Senator Fraser Anning from Katter's Australia Party gave his racist maiden speech to parliament. I asked Lisa how she felt about reporting racist comments in her newspaper. 

“Our response [to Senator Anning’s speech] must be proportionate to what was said and who will be outraged by it,” she replied. “I’ve asked for a fact check of the speech. I want someone in our opinion pages to take a very large bat and get very cross, and I’m quite sure we’ll do a pretty strongly-worded editorial about it. We had to report it because it was said publicly. But if it’s a one-on-one interview with someone who just says a whole bunch of [racist] stuff then we just don’t report it because really that’s just giving them a mouthpiece – a very big one through the Sydney Morning Herald – for something that’s just irrelevant in 2018.”

What is relevant in 2018 is the future of newspapers. While circulation is falling, Lisa says stopping printing is not the answer. “It’s not the printing that’s expensive, it’s the distribution,” she explained. A deal announced earlier this year will see Fairfax and News Corp share printing facilities and even trucks. Lisa thinks there’s perhaps 3 – 5 years left for a seven-day-a-week printed newspaper service. Which makes digital revenue critical for the paper’s operations. Only 5% of the SMH’s online audience brings in 50% of the digital revenue so clearly that equation needs to be addressed.

“We want to put the journalism at the centre of the commercial proposition,” Lisa says. “If you want our kind of journalism to continue – and we think many people do – then you’ve just got to pay for it. It’s really not very expensive.”

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A former journalist with over 20 years experience, Christine Heard is a Media Skills Network? accredited media trainer, with clients spanning some of Australia's biggest corporate names and well-known brands, SMEs, not-for-profits and start-ups.