Power Grads
Paul Hamra
So, my name's Paul Hamra and I'm the Publisher of The Independent Weekly newspaper.
I studied journalism at the School of Communication back in the early eighties. It was really small back then, a lot different to what it is now, there was a group I think of only about sixteen of us, that worked out of the front room of Murray House and things have changed a lot since then but it was a small group and good fun, good friends that I've kind of made in that time as well.
It was a very practical course back then, we did a lot of television and radio work in the community and we actually produced a newspaper called Offset I think it was called and in a funny sort of way like straight out of school and learning those skills early, they've stuck with me all the way through my career.
Offset was the local area newspaper for the Magill area and so funnily enough I think we broke some really big stories back then. But, it had it's place and it was a real training ground for a lot of kind of journalists that started there and have gone on to do really big things around the world.
I've done the reverse to what most people do in the media whereby they work in journalism and have a career in journalism and then move into PR and communication. So I've done that in reverse. I actually started in PR and Communication for you know, twenty years and now have gone back into media at kind of like the second half of my working career.
You know, I spent a year or two in politics and then I went and worked for a PR company which was a national PR company that had a head office in Adelaide. And I worked for that company for two or three years and then got posted over to America where I worked for a couple of years.
And then when I came back, I started up my own PR company and ran that for thirteen, fourteen years and that was a national PR company that had offices in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne and we had a lot of kind of national clients and we had twenty five staff and it was good fun.
And then I thought, well you know, what I really should do is start up a newspaper because that would be a really, really difficult thing to do and I need a challenge. So that's what I did.
I think Adelaide needed alternatives. You know, at the time people used to complain all the time about the fact that there was only one newspaper here, there was only one point of view and I felt kind of stronger and stronger over time that we really needed to have an alternative point of view, a different point of view in Adelaide and that would be good for the community, it would help debate and help people feel more informed and more knowledgeable about issues and it would bring issues to more debate.
We've got to be true to our name and we've got to remain independent and if we think that there's an issue that should be investigated or reported on in the community, then we should feel independent and free to do that and that's really the philosophy behind the newspaper.
We produce different magazines and different publications for different markets, we do a sporting publication, we do Domain, which is a property magazine, we do an online news service every day at four o'clock and funnily enough you know, there's other afternoon news services that have popped up in Adelaide since and that's all good too, you know people talk now about how they get different email news in the afternoon and it gives them different points of view and covers different things.
The first thing that you learnt in journalism school was you know, how to identify a news story and that is probably the pure essence of journalism, is understanding and identifying a news story. So, that is one thing that I've learnt that has really stuck with me you know over the last twenty five years. I can actually walk into an environment or speak to someone and think "Aha! That's a news story."
Congratulations to everyone that's been involved in developing the School of journalism and the School of Communications over the last thirty years, you've really created a bunch of fantastic people that have done a lot in the community here in Australia and in the world, so congratulations to all involved.