Associate Producer

Ben Johnson

It takes years of hard work to break into the competitive world of TV. Ben Johnson reports.

TV news and current affairs jobs are hard to crack but can lead to fascinating careers. Just 11 cadetships are offered by Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, across the country each year. These are slim pickings for communications graduates considering there are more journalism schools than cadetships. Manager of Staff Development for the ABC, Heather Forbes, receives about 400 applications for eight positions offered each September.

“I used to get about 3000 applications (when it was just a letter), but it’s more taxing now as they have to fill out an application form and only people who really, really want to be journalists get through,” she says.

“News and current affairs are the only part of the ABC that offers annual cadet intakes.” SBS offers three cadetships each year for a training program in Sydney. “Last year I think there were about 350 applicants across Australia,” a spokeswoman says. “The main criteria is that you have completed or partially completed a communications degree.”

SBS program producer, Lisa Main, gained an ABC cadetship after majoring in sound production at Charles Sturt University’s Wagga Wagga campus. Main, who gained work experience through a high school radio station and at the ABC while at university, received a comprehensive grounding in producing and making radio and television programs.

“It was amazing,” says the associate producer of current affairs program Insight. “That was where it all began.” Main lists Insight’s coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which relied heavily on an Iraqi commentator outside Baghdad’s green zone, among her career highlights. “We had Salam Pax and he became the commentator on what it was really like in a city being bombed,” she says.
“We had Sunni and Shiite politicians in the green zone.”

Main’s career detoured to London during the dot com boom, but the adrenaline and intellectual stimulation of current affairs drew her back to her roots. “It’s being able to participate in the national discussion that challenges us,” she says. “It’s about the importance of having a robust discussion about who we are and where we are headed.”

Private television networks offer even fewer cadetships than their public counterparts. Channel 9 reporter Ben Fordham completed a radio cadetship with Sydney network 2UE before making the jump to television. “It was all hands-on work and no time to think about what I was learning,” says the A Current Affair reporter. “It was the best training I could have had.”

Fordham says television is not as glamorous as it seems, but he cannot imagine another career with such appealing perks. “Back when I was at school, if someone told me I’d be paid to travel to amazing places with a couple of mates meeting interesting people, I would have told them they’d lost the plot,” he says.

“I can remember Ray Martin turning to me one day with a big smile on his face and asking, ‘Can you believe we get paid to do this?”