Power Grads
Megan Lloyd
I’m Megan Lloyd, Editor-in-Chief of Messenger Newspapers.
After graduating with my Bachelor of Arts in Journalism I started as a third year cadet and spent a couple of years working here, got my cadetship, finished it, got graded, then I decided that I wanted to travel overseas so I did what lots of people do when they’re in their early twenties and I went away. I came back in the beginning of ’92 and there were a lot of unemployed journalists in Adelaide at that time because The News, which was the afternoon newspaper had shut down, so my timing wasn’t that great. Fortunately I knew people, having worked here before, so I got some casual work and thought that I’d last in Adelaide you know, six months, pay back my parents the debt that I had and go away again. Anyway, yeah, eleven years later I was still here and then I went up to the Sunday Mail and was the Chief of Staff up there for about nearly eighteen months and just towards the end of that period, well what foreshortened that was the fact that I was appointed Editor-in-Chief here at Messenger Newspapers.
You know, journalism really has, it has a role in society and I guess one of the things that I would really encourage young people to look at it as a sense of social justice that you are actually delivering information to people that they need to empower themselves.
I think that it’s a really exciting time to be a journalist at the moment because of the transition with online, the way that newsrooms are being integrated, that you can actually go into for example a print newsroom like the Messenger by next February or so and be writing for print and online, maybe making video. It’s just the whole aspects and the applications that our content is going to have is going to be really different.
I always used to describe doing the BA in journalism a bit like a finishing… I found it… not a finishing school, but I felt finished, sort of more rounded when I came out of it because it was a real opportunity to study lots of different areas. My Liberal Studies major was in Australian Studies and within that I got to do you know, Aboriginal Studies, Australian History, Australian Politics, Australian Urban Design, so a whole lot of real aspects which I thought actually gave me a lot of general knowledge. There were some subjects that you could do, you know, just choose your own to make up the rest of the actual kind of the arts side of the degree and I did Life Drawing for the first year because I had done art for year twelve so we never had, I went to a girl’s school and we didn’t have nude models, so there was life drawing there so I did that for three terms, which was absolutely fantastic, I still have all my drawings at home in the garage. So, I did that and I did TV sort of analysis and American politics, so I got to do some areas, Japanese Studies which was stuff that I hadn’t ever got to do at school. So I really got to explore a lot of that. So, I felt when I came out of it that I had a really well rounded degree, I came away with even more general knowledge than probably I’d had because naturally I was interested in world affairs and the media which is why I was doing my journalism degree. So current affairs and things were always something I was interested in so, I felt that that really like supplemented that and I definitely came away with skills, things like you know, ethics which I never really was aware of, you know background in media law which you really can’t just rely on what you learn at uni, you have to really update that all the time. I definitely came away with you know, basics like you know, when we write news stories we write what we call the inverted pyramid sort of system method. You know, stuff like that that’s stayed with me now, you know you learnt it at uni and you still practice it today.
In my school magazine for year twelve it actually says we wish Megan well in her chosen career of journalism. So, yeah, basically didn’t really think of anything else, didn’t want to be anything else, and haven’t been anything else, so I’ve been lucky in that aspect.
On the one hand I suppose if you’re a young reporter, there’s nothing worse than having your editor say “when I was your age” or “when I was at your level” but the fact is, I was and I’ve been there done that so I know what they go through. I know what it’s like to be taken on as a third year cadet and have a real roller coaster year where you think you’re getting better and then suddenly you know, you go backwards and you get told that you’re going backwards. And I know what it’s like to have people who persist with you and mentor you and give you support and then I guess reward that with you know, more you know, more senior roles and more responsibility until finally you get to a role like I’ve got now but I always say to my reporters and my staff that I learn everyday on the job. Like I have not stopped learning and I continue to do that, so never think you know it all.