By Lucy Beaumont
Age journalist
March 2003

“The features section had just gone on-line but the news section still had the old hot metal, typewriters and copy paper,” she remembers. Jones would also “get the chief-of-staff’s lunch, pick up his dry cleaning, buy his lotto ticket once a week and run errands”.

As a pay-off she got to write book and record reviews and put herself in line for a cadetship on the tabloid. She combined work with her journalism studies at RMIT, a natural progression of her efforts to create a school magazine that was actually worth reading. She was also inspired by the action-packed tales told by her uncle, a news photographer on the Melbourne Herald.

The period that followed took her to Canberra for a year, then on a backpacking trek through Europe. On her return she accepted a research position with Derryn Hinch’s Channel 7 public affairs show, home of the infamous “shame files”. A few on-camera appearances convinced Jones to focus on the written word and she returned to print journalism. She began covering education issues, the reintroduction of VCE among them, for the Sunday Sun (later the Sunday Herald Sun).

In 1993, she became The Australian’s Melbourne higher education reporter. “(Higher education) was starting to move from an elite system to a mass system, with so many more year 12 students going on to uni,” Jones says. “It was a time of change. There was a group of vice-chancellors at the time who were becoming quite political.” Her hard work in covering the sector – her brief eventually extended to covering schools as well as tertiary learning – was recognised in 1997 when she was awarded the Nuffield Foundation Commonwealth Press Fellowship.

This honour, awarded annually to four journalists from Commonwealth countries, provided a four-month fellowship at Cambridge University’s Wolfson College. The fellowship enabled Jones to explore technology and its impact on education. She also attended seminars and lectures by people as diverse as Germaine Greer and the professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, Edward Said. “It was such an exciting time to be in Britain then because Blair had just been elected. The whole ‘Brit pack’ thing was starting to develop and there was this resurgence in British music and fashion,” she says.

In 1998, Jones finally joined The Age as its education writer, some 15 years after she first applied to become a cadet on the paper but narrowly missed out on a place. She arrived at The Age just as thousands of primary and secondary teachers went on strike to pressure the Kennett government into reviewing school funding. By late 2000, Jones reported that Victoria’s secondary principals had passed a no-confidence motion in education minister Mary Delahunty over her handling of funding and classroom management issues. She also reported on controversial changes to the funding of public and private schools and the blockading of administration offices by Melbourne University students.

Her education coverage has earned the praise of her peers and several awards. The most recent accolade came in 2000, when she and Rachel Gibson won the best feature article award from the Australian Council of Deans of Education for “He can make your life hell”, a story about the impact of bullying. Eighteen months ago Jones became national news editor, a role that requires supreme organisational skills, lateral thinking and a robust sense of humour.

Each day she liaises with the Canberra bureau, national editor Michael Gordon, chief political correspondent Louise Dodson and her editing counterparts on the Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian, plus correspondents in Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart. “It makes my job easier because I am dealing with experienced professionals who have been in the game for quite a long time,” she says. “I work with a fantastic group of people who regularly produce quality news stories, features, comment and analysis pieces under tight deadlines. It’s this dedication and professionalism that gives The Age the edge over our competitors.”

While proud of The Age’s agenda-setting coverage of the children overboard and asylum seeker controversies, Jones says that the Bali bombing was the most rewarding and moving news story she has worked on. “While it was a terrible tragedy, it gave me an insight into the collective effort that goes into the paper, day-by-day,” she says. Like many readers, it took several days for her to take in the horror of the attack and its aftermath. “Everyone on the paper was really conscious of the need to make sure it wasn’t sensationalised.”

The emotional toll of working on such stories makes switching off at the end of the day a vital skill. Jones swims laps to “pound out the day’s trials”. A new interest in yoga also keeps her supple and sane. She is “passionate about Melbourne”, its cafes, food, gardens, music and film culture. It is these broad interests that Jones hopes to one day parlay into a return to writing, perhaps covering or editing material on popular culture. “People on the news desk always joke about me reading Who Weekly,” she laughs. “I probably will go back to writing at some stage, but at the moment I’m enjoying a different side to journalism.”

* Carolyn Jones is currently The Age's foreign editor.