first person


StartingOut


Steve Evans quit a top-flight career on TV and radio for reporting on a local paper in Australia


T


here just comes a moment when you know you have to move on. I’d had 25 fabulous


years in the BBC as a correspondent in London, New York, Berlin and Seoul. I had covered unions as the BBC labour correspondent before labour correspondents went out of fashion. I had interviewed Angela Merkel (Kim Jong-un was saying no – his elevation to friend of the president of the United States of America was yet to be). So I knew in 2017 that the best was behind me. I had a choice. I could become one of those grumpy old men in the corner, moaning about how everything had gone to the dogs, and growling at the management fools who didn’t realise that I should be presenting both the Today programme and the Ten O’Clock News. Or I could jump. I had a permanent resident’s visa for


Australia through marriage so I applied for every job on offer. Not a flicker of interest from the ABC but the Glen Innes Examiner needed a reporter/photographer/video journalist/tea-maker – so I took it. Glen Innes is a very small, rough


agricultural town in the north of New South Wales.


The Examiner


had been its newspaper since 1874 and it was my task to serve the town and the


18 | theJournalist


newspaper as the tsunami of the internet engulfed it. It is the hardest and also perhaps the most satisfying job I’ve ever had. I came to realise that I had lived in a media bubble for decades. I am reminded of the quote said to have come from playwright, Arthur Miller: “How can the polls be neck and neck? I don’t know anyone who’s voting for Bush.” Glen Innes would have voted for Bush and Trump and Brexit and then gone back and done it again. The people there are descended from the settlers who moved onto Aboriginal land in the 1840s and that brutal side remains. They tell it like it is – and often just as forcefully like it isn’t – nose to my nose. I have had the paper waved angrily


in my face and been called an idiot. A man caught with a loaded gun came and told me I had made him look like a criminal by putting his criminal conviction in the paper. And I have had high praise and


made great and lasting friendships. I have met more interesting people


in a year in Glen Innes than I had in the previous 10 as a national and international journalist. By meeting, I mean really engaging with them, spending time and getting to the core. There is the Vietnam veteran who still has nightmares after being attacked by an American helicopter gunship. He had earlier seen his best


friend shot – they were partners as scouts in the


“ “


jungle and they had tossed a coin to see who would go through a clearing first. The friend lost and was hit by a sniper. Several women confided how they


were virtually imprisoned by husbands on immense farms but finally had the courage to walk away. That openness comes from being trusted in a small community. Small-town journalists have a


contact with people that bigger-time journalists rarely do, and that is very valuable. Glen Innes is not a world of political correctness but it is a world of humanity and kindness. Its values are very different from those in the cosmopolitan media bubbles of uniform opinion, and it is all the better for that.


Local and city papers are a foundation of democracy. The local journalists fighting to save papers are true heroes


Earlier this year, I moved to the Canberra Times because I feared for the Examiner’s future. In the week I left, the Glen Innes paper coincidentally decided to shut the office after nearly 150 years. My successor will work from home. It is to my mind a tragedy. I have learnt how local and city papers are a foundation of democracy. When and if they go, the crazies on Facebook will have the field to themselves.


The local journalists fighting to save papers are true heroes. I am proud to have jumped and become one of them.


@EvanstheAirwave


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