After 104 years with a member of the Robinson family at the helm of the Editor’s chair, this week The Leader officially announces the appointment of Mrs Melissa Siri as new Editor of the newspaper.
After 50 years with The Leader and 35 years as Editor, I have decided to step down from the role.
However, I still intend on staying on with the company for as long as I possibly can.
It is rather co-incidental that just a few weeks ago The Leader won the award for best newspaper in South Australia for Best Newspaper Over 4,000 Circulation for the first time ever, so I am certainly going out on a high.
There comes a time in one’s life when they realise they simply can’t go on forever, and in this case I feel it best to hand over the reins to someone else while I am still able to do so.
Plus, I will still be there to assist Mel wherever possible during the settling in stage.
I have worked with Mel for nearly a month now and can see that she brings new enthusiasm to the role.
She is certainly a very dedicated person with a great deal of experience.
Mel has a warming personality that will allow her to become quickly appreciated in the community.
She is keen to make a good impression and is looking forward to meeting members of the community.
When I started in the business in the 1970’s there was a staff of around 12. Now there are around 40 working between The Leader and sister publication, The Southern Argus.
Initially I was working under my grandfather and father who were wonderful mentors to me.
They gave me the start in the newspaper and printing industry and made me a company director and shareholder at 18.
Incidentally that was the same age as my grandfather when he started his very first newspaper in Edenhope, Victoria, just before World War I.
I shall never forget the first day I started at The Leader. The building at the time was an iron and wood framed structure with no real heating or cooling to speak of.
In the newspaper industry it was the time of typewriters, hot metal typesetting and letterpress printing.
There was also a world shortage of machine compositors such as Linotype and Intertype operators, so I thought I would solve part of that problem by becoming an Intertype operator.
The newspaper was just 12 pages, with only black and white printing and the reproduction was certainly not as good as today.
Progressively over the years I think the biggest changes that I have been responsible for include the complete re-building of the actual Leader Office building, conversion to full colour offset printing and being the first newspaper office I know of to introduce Apple Macintosh for our typesetting.
We have gone from having the most basic buildings and machinery to the most modern one could imagine.
Our newspaper presses and plate making facilities are today fully computerised and we have a commercial printing section that offers the printing processes of letterpress, web and sheet fed offset, digital printing and wide format printing.
Now I see the same excitement for new technology in the eyes of my sons who now tell me what they think we need to be doing next.
So often I think to myself how proud my parents and grandparents would be to see how their company has grown since their time, as so often I have thought to myself, it is not really my business, I am merely just running it and minding it for them.
Pleasingly, I can say too that as the third generation with my wife, Angela owning the business up to this stage, despite all the doubters, I have been constantly reminded of the Chinese proverb which says: ‘It is the third generation that stuffs everything up’.”
