Roger Patching

Roger began his journalistic career in the early Sixties as a cadet on the now-defunct Adelaide afternoon tabloid, The News. He also worked for radio 5DN and NWS 9 in Adelaide before moving to the news agency, Australian Associated Press (AAP) in Sydney, in the hope he’d be sent to Saigon to report on the Vietnam War. (He finally made it to Saigon in 1999).

Less than two years in Sydney, and he moved to Brisbane to join the ABC, where he spent 11 years, rising to the position of Chief Line-Up sub-editor (in charge of the 7pm news bulletin weekdays).

In 1979, after obtaining a BA part-time at UQ, he left daily journalism for tertiary teaching. He spent the next 20 years at what was then Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, later Charles Sturt University, spending most of the time as undergraduate course coordinator.

During that time, with co author Dr Murray Masterton he penned three editions of the broadcast journalism text, Now the News in Detail.

His contribution to tertiary journalism education was recognised in the mid-Nineties when he was made a life-member of the Journalism Education Association.

In 1999 he accepted a short-term contract at Bond, and then spent the next five plus years at QUT. In that time he contributed to the text, Reporting in a Multi-media World (a section on sports reporting), and his major work of late, co-authoring for Oxford, Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases with colleague, Dr Martin Hirst.

Roger’s research interests for broadcast journalism, ethics, sports reporting and international journalism.

During his 20 years in Bathurst he took a number of short-term courses in Malaysia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

He worked for the Olympic News Service during Sydney 2000, helped supervise student journalists at the Goodwill Games in Brisbane a year later, and was also associated with covering the national athletics titles in Brisbane for an internal intra-net news service a couple of years later.