In this week’s column, women in South Australian media, the increasingly meaningless “exclusive” claim, an April Fool’s Day joke imitates life, and much more.

Women in the media

A South Australian chapter of Women in Media is being launched this month.

The mentoring and networking initiative of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance is open to women working in all areas of the media, from journalism to PR and corporate affairs.

The launch on February 18 will feature a speech by Fairfax business writer Adele Ferguson, one of Australia’s best journalists and one of the many great reporters who started their careers in Adelaide.

Ferguson was hired by feared Advertiser editor Piers Akerman back in 1990, specifically as a cadet in the business section. She followed in the trailblazing footsteps of Liz Main who, as a young cadet, had dominated The Advertiser’s front page for weeks with her exemplary coverage of the stock market crash of 1987.

Ferguson joined the Tiser’s business section at a time when it was riding high, led by editor Ian Porter and gun reporter Chris Milne – it proved to be an excellent grounding in business journalism.

Ferguson tells Media Week that the challenges to a young woman weren’t so much within the newspaper office, but in the broader business world (she recalls one stockbroker questioning why she didn’t wear skirts).

“Adelaide’s business community was very conservative back then,” she says.

Ferguson, who grew up in Salisbury East, has gone on to become a triple Walkley Award winner (including the Gold Walkley) for her fearless brand of journalism.

She wrote the unauthorised biography of Gina Rinehart and, last year, joined with the ABC’s Four Corners to expose the Commonwealth Bank financial planning scandal.

Unlike many of her colleagues over the years who have left reporting to take corporate jobs, Ferguson has remained in journalism – with a six-month aberration when she briefly worked for Liberal-aligned pollsters and strategists Crosby Textor.

“It was fascinating, but it just wasn’t me,” she says. “I realised I loved journalism – I really appreciated what a privileged job it is.”

It’s also a job that’s getting tougher, she says, due to editorial budgets shrinking and the vast army of communications professionals employed by companies to deal with the pesky media.

“Companies have become much more sophisticated in terms of legal action and other types of pressure,” she says.

Go here to book for the launch. Tickets are limited.

Exclusive: This is getting embarrassing

Keen readers will have noticed the InDaily very rarely slaps a big “Exclusive” tag on our stories.

It’s not that we don’t have them – in fact, it’s a rare edition of InDaily that doesn’t contain multiple “Exclusives”. If we’re not providing our readers with unique content, then there’s no point to our existence.

There’s also a broader issue: the term “exclusive” has become devalued to the point that it’s almost meaningless. Bog standard reportage gets slapped with the tag, which is used to imply some sort of “quality” when it means nothing of the sort (often, it simply means that the journalist has been the chosen receptacle of a Government media release).

Then there’s the fact that journalists often have no idea whether their story is a true exclusive or not.

Take last Saturday’s Advertiser as an example.

One article which enjoyed the bright red “Exclusive” tag – titled “Parental pause for PM”s woes” – was an almost word-for-word replica of the front page story in the same day’s edition of The Australian. You guessed it – The Oz also claimed it as an exclusive.

The main “Exclusive” story, about a Hungry Jack’s worker badly burned in an industrial incident, will be very familiar to InDaily readers – because we broke it the day before, more than 18 hours before most Tiser readers picked up their paper off the front lawn.

The Tiser journos followed it up and took it a small step further, speaking to the injured worker. Fair enough. But in times past, this would have been considered workaday reporting practice – not reason for a celebratory “Exclusive” fist-pump. In times past, the Tiser would have been sheepish about being scooped by a rival.

Joke imitates life

For more than a decade, former InDaily business editor Kevin Naughton had a crazy dream – to publish a pun-filled April fool’s story about Adelaide’s timezone changing by 30 minutes.

He first tried it on with his editor at the Sunday Mail, Phil Gardner, who initially welcomed it as a great scoop – and then unleashed his famous fury on Naughton when he realised it was a joke.

Last April, he finally found an editor callow enough to allow him to have his way (that would be me).

Most readers got the joke – possibly because the person quoted was one Professor Ali L. Proof (and it was April fool’s day and the story included a wrap-up of other media jokes that day).

The joke was slightly less amusing yesterday when Naughton’s new boss, minister Martin Hamilton-Smith, was tasked by the Premier with consulting with the community about moving SA’s time zone to line up with the east or west coast time zones.

Also on the time zone issue, it was interesting to see The Australian’s associate editor Chris Kenny, a former Adelaide journo of note, having  a crack at South Australian media yesterday for following the time zone story closely.

“So Jay Weatherill resurrects an old SA distraction. Media goes along for the ride,” he Tweeted.

The Australian ran the story prominently on its front page today. Against your wishes Chris?

Naughty corner

We’ll give journalists a break this week and turn our attention to the marketers, whose blunders are many.

For a start, just what kind of message is sent by the Fernwood women-only gym with the posters in Rundle Mall stating: “Nothing tastes as good as being fit feels”?

Eating tasty food and being fit are mutually exclusive? But it’s okay – they also offer “food coaching”.

Tennis Australia has also smashed a marketing ball right in to the net with its new “Hot Shots” ad campaign.

The Australian Masters Games has come out against the campaign which they say “intimates the only sport you can participate in through your twilight years is tennis”.

The ads for the Hot Shots kids’ tennis program show pictures of an older gymnast, high jumper and basketballer failing in their sport with the tagline “Or choose a sport your kids can play forever. Tennis.”

Adelaide radio announcer Chris Dittmar, who is also chair of the 15th Australian Masters Games, said he was surprised by the tennis campaign: “We’ll have 10,000 fit and active people, 30 years and over participating across 60 sports in Adelaide this October – good luck telling them they can’t participate in any number of sports!”

Top of the class

The best news in the media industry this week was the release of Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste after spending more than 400 days in an Egyptian prison on transparently dodgy charges.

Greste, who spent some of his early career in the Channel Ten newsroom in Adelaide, wants to continue his work as a foreign correspondent.

Media Week is published on Fridays.