You co-founded The New Daily five years ago. What has the publication achieved in that time, and where do you see it heading for 2019?
We’ve built a Google audience of 2.6 million monthly users, a daily subscriber base of close to half a million and we’re regularly in the Nielsen Top 20. If you’d offered that to us five years ago we would have taken it with great enthusiasm. It all suggests we’ve got a highly engaged audience who respect our journalism. We’ve got some exciting plans for 2019 around dynamic content, enabling our subscribers to choose what they want to read.

You formerly held senior editorial positions at both The Age and Herald Sun. What have been the biggest challenges / differences in working for an independent publication?
Those publications were drawing on decades of history and audience. The New Daily was coming from a standing start. It’s one thing to migrate an audience from print to digital, but it’s a mammoth task to convince people to try and then trust an entirely new platform. Also, a start-up doesn’t have the resources of The Age or Herald Sun either. If you want something done you have to do it yourself. You can’t just pick up a phone and pass it on to the person or the department responsible for that area of the business. You’re responsible. It’s the challenge and the appeal of the business.

Why do you think independent media is so important?
The concentration of news media in this country has long been too high and it’s only getting worse. The Nine-Fairfax “merger” is further evidence of that. When I launched The Age site back in 1996 there was an expectation that there would be this great flowering of new digital entrants because the barriers to entry - printing presses, newsprint, delivery trucks, etc. -  were coming down. But it hasn’t happened. It’s the same voices we’ve been hearing here for years and years. Often when you look at that Nielsen Top 20 list The New Daily is the only site on there launched this century. Incredible. Sure there’s been an influx of foreign legacy mastheads - The Guardian, Daily Mail, The New York Times - but there’s been too few local, independent sites coming on stream. We should be doing more to encourage them into the market because we need new, vibrant voices.

How does The New Daily maintain its independence?
We have an Editorial Charter that I wrote and the owners (Industry Super Funds) signed off on without hesitation before launch. It enshrines the journalists’ Code of Ethics and stipulates that we must be free to report without fear or favour on all topics. In my experience, once you start fashioning your journalism to protect commercial interests you’re dead. The readers pick up on it in a heartbeat.

Take us through a "year in review" for the Australian media?
Sadly, it’s been a bit of a Annus Horribilis. The Nine-Fairfax merger has already cost jobs and will, I fear, cost plenty more; the ABC has been in turmoil for months, defamations seem to be running at world record pace; Trump and others are feeding the whole ‘fake’ news nonsense and, of course, there was the Khashoggi murder. I think the sooner we put 2018 in a box and then into a bin, the better.

What are your media predictions for 2019?
More media mergers, some long-established mastheads changing hands and possibly ceasing print operations, the continued rise of streaming over cable and free-to-air TV and hopefully some action against Google and Facebook, who continue to plunder the ad dollars that should be going to the people who actually produce content.

Where do you get your news from?
Online mostly. I’m constantly checking the major Australian sites and I’m a voracious reader of the The New York Times and Washington Post just to keep up with the Trump story, which is as fascinating as it is appalling. I go to the ABC for radio and TV news. Regretfully, I have to admit I rarely look at papers anymore.

What does a day in the life of Bruce Guthrie look like?
The pace is a lot more leisurely since I stepped down mid-year as Editorial Director of TND. I guess I’m semi-retired now. I check TND when it lobs in my in-tray around 6.15am. I’m usually reading - and sometimes - correcting for an hour or so. Then I look at the other sites. There might be a phone call or two to our Editor, Patrick Elligett, or our MD / Publisher, Paul Hamra, before I head in. Then it’s usually a bunch of meetings. I spend as much time on publishing and commercial matters these days as I do editorial. It’s just the nature of the business of start-ups… you’re trying new things everyday, searching for traction. It you get some, you keep the idea; if you don’t, you ditch it and move on. At the other end of the day I might take a peek at the next day’s EDM around 11 or midnight, just to see what’s coming up. By then a large chunk of it is done, although our 4am staff put the finishing touches to it.

Most memorable story you’ve been involved with?
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370. It happened in our first six months (March, 2014) and we learnt a lot of lessons from it. Our morning newsletter had already been published when news broke that the plane had gone missing en route to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. So we decided to do another newsletter mid-morning reporting on the mystery. We had a huge response from readers and our strategy of "news alerts" was born. These are emails sent outside our normal AM and PM cycles (6am and 4.30pm). Of course, the mystery surrounding MH 370 continues to this day.

If you could have a superpower what would it be?
Discretionary invisibility. Imagine the conversations you could eavesdrop on and the closed door sessions and events you could witness. The stories would be endless. Not sure where I’d put my notebook though.