Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, , 5:19:43 to 5:24:44
The committee discusses the minimum qualifications and training required for ABC journalists, debating the necessity of university degrees versus practical experience and cadetships.
Topics: Public service staffing, Integrity
Speakers: Gavin Fang, Senator The Hon Sarah Henderson, Hugh Marks, Unknown Speaker
Bacchini?
Ms. Pacini. Who's also left the organisation? So we have made substantial changes. Investigative journalism is a really fundamental body of work, and it's so important to the future of our democracy. We have to get it right. It has to be done at the highest standard. Standards. And I think we've taken a number of decisions and put people into important positions that I think will reflect the body of work going forward.
And what about the training and minimum standards of training that are expected at the ABC? I've raised continuing concerns about the very disparate requirements when it comes to journalistic standards and training. Have you changed your requirements in that respect?
Yeah, it's an important area that Mr. Fang leads, so I'll let Mr. Fang respond.
So look, we're following up on the specifically on the reports of the Ombudsman about this matter and about some of the work I just mentioned before about anonymous sources and our guidance, and we'll do specific training around that. We continue to do uh broad editorial policy training across all of our staff. I think we've spoken about that before. We just ran a week of intensive training over the past week, um looking at a whole variety of different editorial policy issues. Um we have just um rolled out and have piloted a new training module which is designed for investigations and investigative leads and editorial leaders to really focus more clearly on the responsibilities and the editorial issues that will come up there. Um Mr.
Fang, what about the qualifications of journalists you hire? What's the minimum standard? Because Mr. Vizar did not have any formal journalistic qualifications.
Well, I think Senator Um there are a wide what we try to do at the ABC and in the media more generally is to try to access the skills and experiences of a broad range of people in the community.
Can I just ask you to address that question though? What are the minimum journalistic qualifications required to be a journalist at the ABC?
When you say qualifications, what do you mean, Senator?
Well, what are the minimum qualifications?
Well, every person that joins the ABC in a journalistic role needs to complete basic editorial policy training to start with. Um they many people come through a cadet ship process or other processes. They're generally put into roles that are uh junior in nature and they're mentored by senior staff.
When they when they apply for a job, what are the minimum requirements or qualifications of the role? Are they meant to have gone through a cadet ship program? If they're a graduate uh is is if university qualifications are not required, is there any other sort of tertiary qualification that is required? What are the minimum qualifications for journalists when they are hired at the ABC? Because I say this because I believe that there are certainly through your TikTok journalism, there are a number of so-called journalists who have got no formal journalistic training at all. So do you have minimum journalistic requirements insofar as the qualifications that are required before you are eligible to join the ABC as a journalist?
Well, Senator Firstley, I don't think there's any difference between journalists who work for TikTok platform for content makers that are making content for social media platforms. I wouldn't suggest that they have any less qualification just because they're generally.
No, but I'm asking you what are the minimum qualifications because I've raised concerns.
We do not have a minimum university qualification. We look to uh engage with people that many of them do have qualifications, might it be in journalism or different fields, but other people, if they bring a level of experience, if they bring um other skills, it's possible that we could bring them in and train them on site.
So do you have any way of benchmarking whether someone would be appropriate and suitable to be a journalist at the ABC? If they're not required to have university qualifications, are they required to have work experience? Are they required to have uh you know formal cadetship training? Are they required to have worked in an equivalent field? Could you are you saying to me that you don't have any minimum threshold as to the other side?
No, I'm saying that these these are you know the roles are competitive to to qualify or to to apply for, and we would of course weigh up people's levels of experience as it relates to the media. Um, and we would uh if we were looking to bring in somebody that had limited media experience, we would absolutely hope that they had or expect that they would have some other experience in writing or some of those fields, or maybe they would bring in some other skill set, but we we don't have uh a list of um standardised qualifications that we expect every journalist to bring to a hiring process.