Chris Pash, the editor of AdNews, has been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).
The journalist, author, information industry pioneer, board director and former CEO is named in the 2024 Australia Day honours list for services to the “media and communications” sector.
“This is an unexpected honour which comes late in the third act of a long career, a longevity that amazes me,” he says.
“I am grateful to be able to still be at the frontline of journalism, to help others with their careers and to contribute to the media industry."
He moved from the Albany Advertiser newspaper in Western Australia to Sydney late in 1978 to the national news agency, Australian Associated Press (AAP), where he was a desk editor, parliamentary reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, editor-in-charge and business manager.
He was the founding chief executive of an Asia-focused news joint venture, Asia Pulse, and a corporate director of a global online information service, Factiva, running content strategy.
He has also been a board director at a range of not for profit organisations, with more than 20 years service, including newspaper industry body PANPA, a decade at the Australian Society of Authors (director and chair), the Copyright Agency and the former Australia Papua New Guinea Friendship Association (founding executive committee member).
“I’ve voyaged in a harpoon ship hunting sperm whales in the wild Southern Ocean, been arrested covering an election in the Solomon Islands, trekked alone in the jungles of Papua New Guinea to make public the plight of starving refugees, been chased by armed men, sat down to chat to with Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, drank beers with prime ministers and rock stars, swam out to a wrecked ship in a storm, wrote the stories of indigenous Australians who were unwitting witnesses to atomic tests, successfully pitched a startup to investors in a Hong Kong hotel room and negotiated multi million dollar deals with suits in the media industry,” he says.
“It has been, and continues to be, a marvellous life, kickstarted by that first role as a very junior reporter. Thank you, Albany, Western Australia.”
Chris Pash wrote The Last Whale (Fremantle Press 2008), a narrative non-fiction book chronicling the end of whaling in 1977-78 and about his time at the Albany Advertiser.
The book looks at whaling from two sides: the last whalers in the English-speaking world; and the environmental activists who fought to end the whale kill.
“I see the story as being about a town, Albany, a clash of ideas as outsiders bring a different viewpoint, disrupting the world-view of locals,” Pash says.
“As it turned out, this direct action -- using small inflatable open boats to place people in front of harpoons to shield whales from harm -- was the first by a fledgling Greenpeace outside North America.
“So Albany has two claims to fame on this score: the last whaling station and the birthplace of Greenpeace Australia and Greenpeace International.
“What I am most proud of is that the book itself brought both sides together. The whalers and the activists made their peace, took on each other’s viewpoint. One side recognised the importance of people being allowed to make a living and the other the need to conserve our natural environment.”
In the mid 1990s he was the founding CEO of Asia Pulse, with shareholders including Australian Associated Press (AAP), Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), Indonesia’s LKBN Antara, South Korea’s Yonhap and the Press Trust of India. He built an industry-specific information service and brought the startup to profitability in under five years.
From 2001, he was director of content strategy and content licensing for Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters joint venture, for more than a decade, building the world’s deepest database of news in the Asia-Pacific, including Australia.
James Harker-Mortlock, the founder of information service Acquisdata and who introduced, and ran, what was then called Dow Jones News/Retrieval to Australia, says the significant business and cultural impact of the information industry is little understood by those outside the industry.
“Through Asia Pulse, and later Factiva, Chris Pash released hard-to-get business information on Asia and Australia to the rest of the world in a digital format,” said Harker-Mortlock. “At one stage, he had more news available online about Australia than the media owners themselves.”
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