Extract from The West Australian’s Editor-in-Chief Anthony De Ceglie’s speech for ‘The Editors’ series

Good evening everyone. Firstly, thank you to the Judith Neilson Institute for inviting me to speak tonight as part of “The Editors” series. Before I go any further I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we’re meeting, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their elders past, present and, most crucially, those emerging. I do want to make a point of saying that I sincerely believe there is a debt owed among us in the mass media to do as much as we can to end racism in this country. The West Australian received some praise last week for creating the first-ever dual-language Noongar/English front page to mark the start of Reconciliation Week. That cover was just the latest step in a journey we have been on that includes having the only Indigenous-drawn daily comic strip in the nation, a Noongar word of the day in our Letters section and our landmark commitment to design, edit and print a lift-out promoting the work of the National Indigenous Times inserted every month in our paper. All these initiatives are great and we’re really proud of them, but we are self-aware enough to know that there is a lot more to do and that there is plenty more owed to those we’ve let down in the past. I recently gave a speech in Perth that started by saying that editing is more often than not the most ridiculous job you could ever imagine. To set the scene for the audience I gave them a window into how that very night was unfolding for me. It was 8pm and the Thursday before the Federal election. I had held our deadline back because then-prime minister Scott Morrison was due to land in WA to spend his final day of the campaign in Perth. The West had been promised the only images of him arriving and I had kept a giant hole on page one empty where the picture and the headline was going to slot in perfectly. Five minutes before I was due on stage and about 90 minutes late, the image finally arrived. As in literally one image arrived. Now, I was imagining it would be Morrison descending down the aircraft stairs looking presidential for, perhaps, the last time. Instead, we got a shot of him putting his luggage into the back of a car. And, as I told the audience, the only thing that was going through my mind as I was texting a front page headline to my team while walking on to the stage was: “PM packs his bags.” In the end, I went for “Flight of his life”. But, in hindsight, maybe I should have been a bit harsher after all. As I was saying, that talk was two nights before an election in which WA was always fated to take centre-stage. So the truth is I was a bit more ad-lib than I would have liked. And, as I did my best to appear somewhat composed on a range of different subjects, it dawned on me mid-talk that what I really wanted to say was that my job as an editor is make the audience care. To feel our stories in their bones, and in their guts and in their hearts and in their minds. To care so much they talk about our scoops and investigations at the kitchen table every morning, on the train on the way to work, across cubicles in the office, on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, at the pub, at the footy oval, at the dinner table, on the couch at night while they’re flicking through Netflix and even as they’re going to bed. I want them to care so much about our stories they can’t sleep at night and instead they toss and turn because we have them so fired up they’re ready to explode. I have a whiteboard in my office that I scrawl a host of different things on. Mainly it’s a to-do list, but there’s also slogans and catch cries to keep me honest during the week. One of those is “turn it up 1000” and another is “don’t sit still”. On the bottom left I have stuck up a printout of an old cover of the satirical magazine National Lampoon. It’s from June 1973 and it’s the “Death Issue”. On the cover is a beautiful doe-eyed border collie. The kind of dog that would win first prize at the Royal Show. Next to it is a hand holding a pistol with the gun aimed straight at the canine’s temple. The headline reads, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog”. Now, obviously, that’s a joke. But in many ways it encapsulates how I feel about what traditional media must do to stay relevant. The absolute, unvarnished truth is that we are in the fight of our lives. It is a daily war to stay relevant. And we’re not just competing against other media outlets anymore. We’re competing against Instagram and TikTok and Disney+ , and we’re competing against time. People have never been more time poor. If we want them to take notice, if we want them to listen, if we want them to care about our journalism then we need to do everything we can and we need to do it every single day. Most of my conversation tonight will be about that. But, firstly, I will tell you a little bit about who I am and how I got to this moment. Secondly, I will focus on the main challenges facing editors today, how I go about my editing and why I think what we’re doing at The West Australian is working. I will try not to bore you with figures, but West Australian Newspapers is currently the fastest-growing cross-platform news brand in the country with a year-on-year growth of about 20 per cent. No one comes close to that. And we’ve held the title now for a long time, too. Finally, I’ll explain why I believe we’re just getting started. My first role straight out of university was at the Collie Mail. Within a few weeks of being a journalist I found myself in the middle of a national story when two 16-year-old Collie girls killed their 15-year-old best friend, Eliza Davis, for fun. We didn’t really know it at the time, but it was the first real glimpse of what the methamphetamine epidemic would do to this country. Needless to say, it was a baptism of fire for me. I was in Collie for 10 months, then at a slightly bigger newspaper for 10 months before I was headhunted to join News Corp’s The Sunday Times in Perth. My first major metro newspaper editor at The Times was Sam Weir. More than anything he taught me that the harder you work, the luckier you get. The difference in getting a scoop is almost always about the willingness to make an extra phone call or knock on an extra door or read an extra 100 pages of court listings. Sam also led by example. And he backed his reporters, which is crucial to the DNA of any decent editor. I remember stumbling upon a great bureaucratic bungle yarn and the Premier’s office did that insanely stupid thing where they went over my head and sent a response to my questions directly to the editor all while trying to talk down my yarn. I was still pretty young so wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not. Then I’ll never forget Sam writing back without a beat, “brilliant! Sounds like Anthony has tomorrow’s front page”. Meanwhile, my first chief-of-staff was the Walkley Award-winning reporter John Flint who taught me one of my all-time favourite sayings about journalism: it’s not a job, it’s a vocation. At the age of 26, I was named West Australian Journalist of the Year. In particular, the award recognised an investigation I did into a spate of suicides among patients at a mental health clinic. In one of those cases a young man desperately seeking help was turned away from the emergency department only to walk across the road and take his own life in a nearby primary school. His lifeless body was found by young kids. My stories led to a landmark report that led to major changes to State legislation. I only bring this up because I vividly remember a crusty old reporter telling me, when I started that series of stories, that mental health patients don’t buy newspapers. Since then, I’ve dedicated a large part of my career to raising awareness of mental health. I was made chief-of staff-shortly after this and was then lucky enough to go to New York on secondment. I got to sit next to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who were the most passionate, but also the most humble of professionals. I remember I joked with one of them once about how nobody seemed to have an ego and that they were bigger heads in the Perth media scene than Manhattan. Their reply was really fascinating and it stuck with me. They said that even the most successful people in New York were acutely aware of how replaceable they could be. Sure, you might be an award-winning and gun reporter with a few trophies in your bag, but you should always remember there’s hundreds of thousands of others out there desperate to do what you’re doing and they’re probably just as good — and willing to do it for half the price. When I came back to Perth I was made the deputy editor of The Sunday Times. I was working for Rod Savage, another mentor of mine. Rod taught me perhaps the most important lesson in my career, which is to remain human and think of your family. You can be a good journalist and a good person. And, at the end of the day, if you’re a great journalist but you’re a terrible human, then what’s the point? I know my brilliant wife Sarah and my two young children thank Rod for teaching me that. It wasn’t too long after this I joined The Daily Telegraph in Sydney where I became the deputy editor to Chris Dore, who is now obviously the Editor-in-Chief at The Australian. There’s no doubt Dorey left the biggest mark on my career. He taught me about pushing boundaries and the lengths you have to go to produce something truly great. I remember I once went into his office about midnight after another spectacularly drawn out deadline. It was one of those nights where Dorey had ripped up everything the team had tried to do and made us redo it about five times to get it right while giving us some not so polite words of encouragement. I was slumped in a chair, exhausted, and I remember saying to him that, “surely every day isn’t meant to be this hard”. He looked at me and said “it HAS to be that hard because that’s the only way you know you’re putting out a great paper”. The Tele is a strange and at times unwieldy beast, but for the three years I worked there I got to learn from some of the best in the business. Maybe most importantly though, I got to learn from the legendary editor Jeni O’Dowd. I probably owe more to her then she even knows. Jeni, who edited The Sunday Telegraph was so generous in teaching me the absolutely crucial craft of putting a newspaper together and being mindful of the flow and light and shade. Again, she was a perfectionist. Mostly she taught me to back my vision and then let it ride. I remember I was quite new to the Sydney newsroom (some blow-in from Perth, essentially) when the Nice terror attacks happened. Dorey was out and I was in the chair. I had devised a concept for page one that was a running list descending downwards from the top of the page of all the dead from recent attacks, starting in 120 point and slowly coming down to 15 point, where the final line rested on a fresh body bag. Lots of people in the newsroom saw that cover and — truth be told — tried to talk me out of it. It was the usual stuff before people became used to what I was trying to do. It didn’t have a proper headline. There wasn’t a kicker. I didn’t have other pointers on page one to Sport or something fluffy in Confidential. It looked like a movie poster, not a newspaper. Jeni didn’t try to talk me out of it. It was a front page that was unique, it hadn’t been done before, and it made the reader care. It went viral. For the next 24 hours every news station in the world was showing it and talking about. In many ways that front page and its reaction really changed how I looked at what a newspaper cover could be. How when every element of a page comes together you can achieve something monumental that lifts the journalism and the brand and the readership. It can also lift the newsroom. There’s nothing that hungry journalists like more than seeing a front page or a 4-5 spread or a page 11 headline as epic as the scoop they’ve worked so hard to get. Just after Dorey got promoted to The Australian, I got a call out of the blue to meet Kerry Stokes (who at the time I had never spoken to). He asked me if I wanted to take over as editor-in-chief of West Australian Newspapers. It was a role that includes The West, The Sunday Times, the popular PerthNow website, 19 regional newspapers and 12 community newspapers. It was quite simply an opportunity too good to pass up. Campbell Reid gave me two bits of advice when I took the job on that I will never forget: one, act fast, because otherwise six months will go by and you’ll realise you haven’t changed a damn thing; and, two, trust your first impressions, you’ll be amazed at how often that first impression is right. When I arrived, our now very successful website thewest.com.au didn’t even have a paywall. It must have been the only major newspaper in the western world that wasn’t charging people for online news. When I asked Ryan Stokes why, he told me the company wasn’t sure the content was good enough. Ryan, who’s definitely among the smartest and most determined people I have ever met, has a values chart he calls the “Owner’s Mindset” … it listing 10 principles on how to run a successful organisation. That’s also up on my whiteboard. One of the principles is to “value pace”. It’s a mantra that says choose “action over analysis paralysis”. The ninth principle is that “risk is for the taking”. And then, finally, number 10 is that “it’s personal”. I like that last one a lot. When I took on the job editing The West I made it personal from the get-go. That’s why I want my front pages to be so interesting and so timeless that even if you see it for the first time at 2pm, and morning radio has long since stolen the exclusive, it’s been on social media and Sunrise and there’s been chitchat in the office, you still stop and gawk because it’s so provocative. When Mark McGowan broke every West Australian’s heart earlier this year and extended the hard border and we mocked him by making him an old man finally saying WA was open in 25 years, our front page went so viral across the country it had 13 million views on The West’s Facebook page alone. I do things like turn Clive Palmer into a cane toad, or a chicken, or a cockroach, or Dr Evil on page one because I want the cover to be talked about — good or bad. As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But it’s not always about being funny (or trying to be). Like the Nice terror attack front page I mentioned earlier, and as I keep saying, it’s about making people care. During the most-watched presidential campaign in America’s history, two of our Donald Trump front pages took centre-stage in the US. On the very day that people went to the polls, the immensely popular Drudge Report was using The West Australian’s cover art of the Statue of Liberty with her hands covering up to her face and peeking out her fingers and the headline “GULP!” as their main display image. And when the Capitol riots dominated international headlines, it was our Roman Empire inspired front page of the Last Days of Trump that took pride of place on CNN’s Instagram page, exposing our masthead from Perth to its 17.5 million followers. Making people care is also about standing for something. There’s that great line in Hamilton: if you stand for nothing, then what do you fall for? I think a lot of our audience growth success at West Australian Newspapers is because my team has successfully moved the brand from what was traditionally a very conservative newspaper into what I call the “mainstream middle”. I was recently asked two questions about our election coverage. One was how do you know if you’re doing a good job? And the other, what was the most defining moment of our reporting? The answer to the first question is quite easy; I always say that you know you’re doing your job if by the end of the campaign neither of the major parties is happy with you. The answer to the second is a bit more complex. We had some great scoops, some great headlines and there was also the Seven West Media TV debate that we were all proud of. But, for my team as a whole, it was an editorial we wrote that drew a line in the sand for our readers for what was at that point threatening to somehow become a significant election issue that defined our coverage the most. In that editorial we wrote how we consider ourselves an “economically conservative, but socially progressive” newspaper. And we think that this has served our readers and the State well over the past 31/2 years. As such, we felt we simply had to call out the “desperate” politicians trying to create a wedge over transgender girls and women playing competitive sport. Our crucial weekday Fact Checker column by John Flint revealed that not a single sporting body in WA had even raised the issue that was suddenly dominating airwaves. Meanwhile, trans kids are 15 times more likely to self-harm. We wrote how the schoolyard can be an awfully hard, awfully confusing, nasty and lonely place for some. And faux outrage being allowed to be whipped up across the nation would only make trans children more alone, more confused, and more scared. Shifting a newspaper to the mainstream middle can’t be done without the right people around you. Leaders like our business editor Sarah-Jane Tasker, or chief executive Maryna Fewster. Good editing means surrounding yourself with excellent people who will challenge and push you and aren’t afraid to tell you that you’re about to do something you’ll regret or doesn’t reflect the new standards you’re trying to create. So is all this working? Well, the truth is I probably wouldn’t still be in the job if it wasn’t. As I said earlier, we’re by far-and-away the fastest growing cross-platform brand in the country. And we have been for a while. The Latest Roy Morgan figures show West Australian Newspapers now has a bigger total audience at 4.6 million readers across print and online every month, more than The Daily Telegraph. We’re less than one per cent (0.85 per cent to be exact) away from being bigger than the Herald Sun, too. To put that into context, Perth’s population is less than half those two cities. But, I know we can’t be complacent. Going back to Ryan Stokes’ 10 principles again ... another one I like says that innovation must be an eternal quest. I have made so many changes at The West Australian that it can be dizzying to list them all. From introducing a flexible paywall, to launching a morning radio show The West Live, to launching a fully-fledged video department under the brilliant leadership of former Today Tonight executive producer Natalie Bonjolo that produces Netflix-style multipart documentaries as well as our Up Late with Ben Harvey show that is watched by about 50,000 people every night. And we are seriously only just getting started. I think The West’s future is very bright. I see a future where thewest.com.au is your everything when it comes to news for West Australians. From breaking stories and app alerts, to multi-dimensional features to TV bulletins, live-streaming and even round-the-clock radio.