I had been asked to speak about inclusive journalism and media storytelling. I had a version of the talk prepared that I have given many times, and it is built on an assumption I did not know I was carrying until that afternoon.
The assumption is that I would have to persuade the room.
I did not have to persuade anybody. That part was already done before I arrived.
The argument is over. The students never had it.
Every time I have made the case for inclusive journalism to a room of working professionals, some part of the conversation is spent on whether it is a real editorial concern or a nice thing to do when there is budget.
The students did not go anywhere near that. They accepted the premise the way you accept that a story needs a second source. It was not a value they were being asked to adopt. It was just part of what competent journalism is.
What they wanted from me was completely practical. How do you find sources outside the same five organisations that get quoted every time. What language do you use when the subject and the style guide disagree. What do you do when your producer wants the emotional angle and the person in front of you did not come to be an emotional angle. How do you cover a person's work without the coverage collapsing into their diagnosis.
Those are craft questions. They are the right questions. And nobody at that stage of a career asks them unless they already intend to do the job properly.
So the gap is not what we keep saying it is
We talk about inclusive media as though the obstacle is attitude. It is not, or at least it is not any more, and it certainly is not in the generation about to walk into these newsrooms.
The obstacle is pipeline.
It is who gets the internship. It is who is on the WhatsApp group where assignments get handed out at six in the morning. It is whether the outside broadcast van has a step somebody can actually use. It is whether an editor, choosing between two reporters for a story that matters, has ever seen someone like you file one before, and therefore has a reference point for imagining it.
None of that is hostility. Most of it is not even a decision. It is accumulated habit, and habit only changes when something visible interrupts it.
That is what I told them. Your role starts now not because the industry is waiting to be lectured, but because the industry is waiting to be shown, and you are the ones who get to do the showing.
Four things I said, in case they are useful to you
Report the work, not the condition.
If you are covering a DJ who mixes with her feet, the story is the set she played and the room she moved. Her cerebral palsy is context in paragraph four, not the headline. The moment it becomes the headline you have written about a condition instead of a person, and you have also written a worse story.
Widen the source list before the story, not during it.
Nobody finds a fresh voice on deadline. You find them in the six weeks before, when nothing is urgent and you are just talking to people.
Ask what access actually means for that specific interview.
Not in general. For this person, in this venue, on this day. It takes one message and it removes most of the problems that otherwise arrive at the worst moment.
Do not let anyone tell you this is a soft beat.
Disability policy is fiscal policy. It is procurement, employment law, transport infrastructure, health budgets, education spending. Cover it as a hard story and it behaves like one.
Why I keep saying yes to these rooms
I run a media agency. I host conferences. I am building a political interview series. A morning in a lecture hall is not the most commercially useful thing I can do with a Tuesday.
I keep doing it because the pipeline problem does not get solved at the top. It gets solved by there being enough people entering the profession who never internalised the idea that certain stories, or certain reporters, are exceptions.
The students in that room did not think of themselves as exceptional for taking inclusion seriously. They thought it was ordinary.
That is the whole thing. That is what winning looks like. It just takes a few more years than anyone would like.