Interview with Peter Judd

Peter Judd has been editor of the Geelong Advertiser since 1998. Before that, he edited another daily, the Ballarat Courier, and a pair of community-focused weekly papers, the Geelong News and the Geelong Echo.

In his current position, Judd manages more than 50 full-time staff. His list of career highlights include the Geelong Advertiser’s move from broadsheet to tabloid in 2001, PANPA’s Newspaper of the Year award in 2005 and the Geelong Advertiser’s sustained circulation growth during the past five years, in which period the paper has grown Monday-to-Friday sales by 11.2 percent and by 7.2 percent on Saturdays.

“Central to our thinking must be the expectations of the reader for quality, accurate and balanced journalism,” Judd says of his basic philosophy. “Time is our immediate competitor,” he adds, “and we must not waste our readers’ time. They require news and information that enriches their lives.”

Judd also places a priority on time when it comes to his staff and aims to use technology to help his journalists work more efficiently. He arranged for Microsoft’s database package, Access, to be available on all desktops so people can use it to manage content and ideas. Story lists are mapped against production deadlines to track spare staff capacity. “It’s a deadline management system,” he says, and adds that it “gives our sub [or copy] editors more time to manage stories.”

Reporters also use calendar databases to schedule stories and each reporter receives an information sheet, which Judd wrote, explaining how to set up and use news filters such as Google Alerts.

News filters are software programs on the Internet and commercial services designed to help people find information. They all work pretty much the same way.

Reporters assign keywords to the news filter about a topic they seek information about and the filter returns e-mails with links to web sites or news groups that contain relevant information. “Alerts are a simple, but highly useful tool,” Judd says.

Furthermore, he aims to marry production as closely as possible to the arrival of copy, so staff resources are used appropriately. This is essential because of one of the problems with being a regional daily is the relatively low numbers of editorial staff compared with metropolitan newspapers.

Story by newspaper techniques correspondent Stephen Quinn.

Page first published: 28.08.2006