Monte Bovill Talks Media to Don Students
ABC news reporter and UTAS Bachelor of Media graduate Monte Bovill visited Don College this term, speaking to students interested in a media pathway.
Monte, who recently accepted a six-month contract to work at the newsroom in Parliament House, Canberra, has until now, been working as a reporter for the ABC.
He began working casually for the news broadcaster before graduating, and then accepted a full-time position based in the Burnie office, working across the North-West Coast of Tasmania. He said working for the ABC was a unique situation.
“We work across every platform. We have radio, television, print and online,” he said.
“One of the challenges is that we are losing audiences across ordinary platforms. News audiences are diving because people aren’t watching anymore.”
Despite the difficulty of reaching audiences through traditional means, he said that online access to news was gaining popularity. For reporters like Monte, this means he needs to be across all forms of media, applying knowledge of video, radio and print journalism to create content for their platforms.
Monte said that his time at UTAS as a Bachelor of Media student prepared him well for his career choice.
“University gave me the opportunity to choose units and structure my course in the way I wanted to do it,” he said.
He said that for this degree, in the first year, it was considered a foundation year. Different units were focused on various areas of media. The media production unit, for example, provided the opportunity to film and use a camera. There were also screen writing units and a public relations unit which gave Monte the opportunity to experience different media platforms and career paths.
Monte described the second and third year of the course as an opportunity to refine work from the first two years of the course and to choose a focus for a media career.
“By the end of the course, you can get a huge portfolio of work together to show employers,” he said.
Monte’s focus was to create a folio of news reports to show a prospective employer. This, along with his casual work for the ABC helped secure him a job in the industry of his choice. He said he loved journalism and intended to stick with it for as long as he could.
“Everyday is different, you never know what you are going to do. That’s what I love about the job. I find myself asking, what amazing place am I going to go to? Sometimes something will happen, and you will have to cover it, and then sometimes you have to come up with your own things.”
Thank you to Monte for visiting Don College and answering the questions students had about the course and journalism as a career. Good luck in Canberra!