Kate Tilley
July's meeting report by Simon Sandall
Some might think that writing about forklifts for Forklift Action News, or publishing a newsletter for an insurance law association, AILA News, might not be that interesting. But freelance journalist Kate Tilley said the readers of these newsletters loved her articles.
Kate spoke about her 30-year journalism career at the last meeting, on 6 July. Her company, Kate Tilley Journalism (KTJ), is based in Spring Hill, Brisbane, and has four permanent employees including Kate. KTJ also employs part-time journalists when there is a heavy workload. Working on trade newsletters had taught her a new writing style: be as brief as possible and packed with valuable information, using lots of abbreviations. She also kept one eye on legal issues, and had avoided defamation writs. Kate brought along a portfolio of her work, which included newsletters for JMD Ross, an insurance broker, for whom she produces a client newsletter every six months; Dexta Update, a quarterly newsletter on professional and financial risk; and a brochure for HBM Lawyers, a law firm specialising in the insurance industry.
KTJ provides a news writing and editing service for a range of trade publications; producing corporate newsletters, annual reports, brochures and other printed documents for a range of clients in diverse industries; and also handles public relations work.
Kate commented that some of the articles in the newsletters were worthy of the mainstream media, which is where her background was. At 16, she did work experience at The Mercury in Hobart, and she started her cadetship there, spending six years at the paper. Typewriters were used and journalists supplied their own (Kate still has the Facet portable she used at work). Copy was written on little sheets of copypaper with a carbon copy, called a black, so journalists always had an original copy. The sub-editors had their own room, sat around a kidney-shaped desk, and marked up hard copy, making corrections in red ink. The subs would mark what font each piece of copy would be in, and the point size. Then they would send the copy through a pneumatic tube to the typesetters downstairs. She remembered when one sub sent the body of a rat through the tube with a note attached: ‘body copy, head to follow’. The typesetters would key the stories into their hot metal linotype machines. The stories would be output in lead and laid into wooden forms, but were reversed. Final proofing was done by inking the form and putting a sheet of newsprint over it, but, if it was right on deadline, the journalists would read the copy straight from the form in the compositors’ area: ‘the stone’.
As a cadet, she would write hard news, and do commercial rounds: visiting the stock exchange, getting harbour information, collating TV viewing programs. Kate started picking up the skills she has found useful in her own business, such as writing fair and balanced articles, and grammatical correctness.
As a young journalist she worked as a court reporter for 18 months, and later was on police rounds — monitoring the two-way radio and often arriving at the scene of a crime or accident at the same time as the police. Then she moved to The Morning Bulletin at Rockhampton, mainly because they had computers and Kate could see that computers were the future of journalism. Also in Rockhampton, she earned a Bachelor of Arts (majoring in communications and sociology) — most starting journalists have tertiary qualifications now. Kate said university did not always teach the essentials of writing and editing, like grammar, and one thing she didn’t like having to do was correcting basics in copy that had been written by someone with a journalism degree.
In late 1986, she moved to Brisbane, working for The Daily Sun and The Sunday Sun. She said that it was a shame these papers were discontinued, because they provided opposition for The Courier-Mail.
Kate talked about time pressures on sub-editors, and how it was not the sub-editor’s job to correct people’s names and spelling of names. The transition from general news to writing for trade publications was quite easy to make. With her own freelance journalism business there were no daily deadlines like in general news, but the pressure was high on deadline days.
Kate started freelancing from home to supplement the work she was doing at the newspapers. She wrote articles for The Bulletin, Who Weekly, and in-flight magazines for companies like Qantas. She said she had identified trade newsletters as a niche area and won the contracts to write for Foodweek and Inside Retailing, for which she was Brisbane editor for over ten years. By the time the contracts to produce Foodweek and Inside Retailing had ended, Kate had identified another big area: insurance and risk management, and she now produces many newsletters on these subjects.
Kate Tilley Journalism moved initially to Lutwyche Road, Lutwyche, and then to its current location, in Spring Hill, in 1996.