Memories of the workplace ahead of its time

Six years ago I reflected on the demise of a very special workplace where (at the time) I had spent a quarter of my working life. Ahead of its time in culture and companionship.

A little bit of me died yesterday.

A quarter of a century ago I walked into a nondescript office in Manly for a job interview at a place called, not creatively, Newsletter Information Services. As I walked out of the elevator a guy in a wetsuit carrying a surfboard trotted past. The GM and one of the partners greeted me – both barefoot. They handed me a copy of the publication I was applying to edit – a four page A4 newsletter called Adbrief. It was a curious affair – names all in bold, vowels omitted where possible to save precious column inches (a brilliant, if clumsy, acknowledgement that the human brain inserts them anyway). The job was to write about advertising, replacing an industry veteran and legend, the softly spoken, jazz loving David Mason. Today we would call it a blog.

On being offered the role I asked a good friend for advice. “You’ll die!”, he responded without hesitation.

And so began the next eight years of my life.

Yesterday the global information behemoth, Thomson Reuters, consigned NIS to the dustbin. 10 titles in all – and the journos who sustained them. I left long ago and Adbrief is long dead after subsequent managers I worked for rejected a plan to use it, and its media savvy advertising and marketing audience, as a testbed for an online publishing model (Mumbrella bought what was left of Adbrief for a token sum years after my departure).

Back then my days were spent lunching, gossiping and, as the Friday 2pm deadline loomed, battling to fill the four pages with shit you couldn’t get anywhere else. No pictures, no fuss, no fanfare. Just news you could use. Around the office others did the same, writing about insurance, health, IR, unions and a myriad of special fields mainstream media had no interest in. Roseanne Manns (our erstwhile barefoot leader), David Vincent, Michael Burns, Helen Jones, Bernadette McBride, Karen Gair, Tracy Ong, Stephen Long, Peter Schwab, Steven Andrew, Georgia Lewis, Murray Griffin, Denise Beecroft, Heather Jacobs, Kate Tilley, Anna Lockwood, Matthew Carr and a host others were part of a light-hearted crew who kept the news flowing and the place bubbling. Naps would often be taken on the couch out the back, copy subbed sitting on the beach in Manly, a surf taken when it was up. Office attire rarely rose above boardies and T-Shirts – thongs were optional. Twice a week The Stuffers – an army of local retired women – descended on the office like a chattering of cockatoos to stuff envelopes full of newsletters for postal delivery to our readers. Elsewhere Vlad, our often hungover printer, would pick up the phone demanding “Vere is Adbeef?!” as a line of couriers waited outside his shop prepared to deliver breaking news to agencies who wanted to steal the march on their postal subscriber rivals. All too often, we would see our work replicated in the metros days or weeks later. But we (and our readers) always knew who was first.

One of the quiet joys was being able to use Adbrief as a platform (what a wonderful word? Not!) to announce the birth of each of my three sons.

The world has changed. And so last night we lifted a glass to the end of an era. Yes a little bit of me died, but the memories are eternal.