Features
Erik Jensen wasn’t ready for the Schwartz Media CEO gig a year ago… now, he’s hitting the ground running
Schwartz Media's editor-in-chief and newly appointed CEO, Erik Jensen, sits down exclusively with Mumbrella's Lauren McNamara.
Erik Jensen should be a household name for anyone in the publishing world.
Starting in journalism at just 15 years of age, the editor-in-chief and now-CEO of Schwartz Media is leading the charge in strong, independent journalism.
As a person with ambitious nature, Jensen tells Mumbrella that he’s always been in a hurry, and when he decides to do something, he becomes single-minded about it – and that’s exactly how he got his start in the industry.
“The desire to become a journalist probably started just before I started working as a music critic when I was 15,” he says.
“At the time, it was about an interest in the music I was writing about, but also in being able to find ways to express myself and tell the truth.”
A young Jensen
With a self-described “compulsion” to tell the truth and be believed, Jensen says that during his teenage years, journalism was the most plausible avenue to do so.
Shortly after getting his start, he was determined to do more – so he went knocking on the door of the Sydney Morning Herald.
“I’m lucky that the things I’ve tried, I’ve succeeded at doing. But the incredibly naivety of being a teenager when you start in any industry, and thinking that it’s reasonable to knock on the Herald’s door and ask for a job… I was definitely bold,” he laughs.
Fortunately, the Herald had begun accepting school-aged cadets, and at 16, he was writing for the leading masthead. After school, the paper took him on as a news reporter, a role he stayed in for five years. Then, at just 23 years of age, Jensen became summer editor.
Hs experiences in his formative years opened up his eyes to reality, he explains, and has deeply influenced how he operates and makes his mark on the industry.
During his time at the Herald, he remembers a short-lived project under editor Alan Oakley, and how that has influenced his leadership style now.
“It was about changing the nature of the newsroom, and trying to find ways into journalism for people, about bringing different voices into journalism,” Jensen says of the project.
“Because of the good fortune, the luck I’ve had, I’ve always tried then to find ways to build things for other unexpected voices to enter into journalism.”
Erik Jensen
At the Herald, Jensen met a person who would forever change his career – Schwartz Media founder, Morry Schwartz.
After cold-emailing Schwartz, admiring what he was doing with his political magazine The Monthly, the two met.
“I’d seen some of the best long-form journalism in the country being published by The Monthly – it was taking such a significant place in the intellectual life of this country,” Jensen reflects. “So then we’re emailing, then we started talking, and that’s when I proposed a weekly newspaper dedicated exclusively to long-form journalism.”
His proposal aligned greatly with a picture Schwartz was already painting – and thus The Saturday Paper was born.
While Jensen wouldn’t be where he is today without the Herald, at the time he was feeling like the masthead wasn’t making the best decisions in terms of how it confronted the internet, how it thought of its audience, and how it support its journalists.
And when chatting to Schwartz, who had been a radical publisher in the ’70s and involved in bigger literary and political movements, a shared view of creating a paper that fixes the problems in journalism arose – one that could help journalism take a step forwards, not backwards.
So, in 2014, after nearly two years of development, Schwartz Media launched The Saturday Paper with Jensen at the reins.
The Saturday Paper
Marking 12 years at the independent publisher this year, Jensen has experienced the best, and the worst, the industry has to offer.
Being able to have meaningful interactions with the forces that shape Australia, he says, is one of the major highlights, as is expressing himself creatively.
“It’s easy to forget that there is real flair and fun and creativity in doing journalism, and the excitement for me in the 12 years at Schwartz has been finding different forms to tell stories, to stay connected to the playfulness and the madness and creativity that makes journalism work,” he says. “And to do that inside a company where because of our relationship with our readers and listeners, taking risks tends to work well, is great.”
Jensen has, however, been no stranger to the disruption felt by the wider publishing industry.
Although he can’t recall any one moment that has truly confounded him or the company, he says they’ve often had to find ways to work through challenges.
“It’s always been a question of seeing problems and finding new ways to address them,” he explains.
Earlier this month, Jensen was named the new CEO of Schwartz Media following the departure of Ben Shepherd. And while he was having conversations of taking on the role a year ago – when Shepherd was instead appointed – Jensen says he didn’t feel ready at the time. But now, he’s hitting the ground running.
Choices like these, Jensen says, are about finding the right time and moment – and as he has gotten older, he has also gotten better at taking more thoughtful approaches to opportunities.
“At the early part of my career, I frequently felt ready for things before I really was, and this time I felt I had a bit more I needed to get right on the editorial side before taking on the commercial side.”
In a company like Schwartz Media, Jensen says there will always be crossover between the CEO position and his existing role of editor-in-chief – because it’s a company driven by its journalism. A significant part of the publisher’s revenue comes from journalism – even revenues that come from advertising come because of the kind of journalism it is producing.
“While it is obviously more work to try to do both jobs at once, there is also a really sensible harmony between the two,” he says. “It’s always important to me to approach problems creatively, and I think to remain creative you need to do different things all at once.”
Alongside his dedication to Schwartz Media, Jensen is a published biographer, screenwriter, and poet, and while he concedes that he’s a very busy man, he says he needs it to stay motivated.
Adam Cullen biography written by Jensen
“I need to switch between those forms to stay energized about the work, and the same I think is true of taking a creative approach to the business side of Schwartz Media. If I wasn’t able to be stimulated by the journalistic side, I would be less able to think creatively in the business side.”
Schwartz Media’s guiding principle is that quality is a passport to everything, and Jensen stresses that fact won’t change under his leadership.
He says quality is hard to reach in an area that moves as quickly as journalism, so his vision is to constantly be bringing higher standards to what Schwartz Media does, in order to move the company forward.
“It’s not exactly business as usual because it is about constant improvement, but I’m not going to be doing anything completely radical or unexpected,” Jensen explains.
“It’s more about doing counterintuitive things, spending more on our journalism, having more rigorous processes than other companies. And likewise, holding our commercial side of the business to really high standards.”
The importance of quality obviously manifests itself through Schwartz Media’s titles – The Monthly, the 7am podcast, The Saturday Paper, and Australian Foreign Affairs – for for Jensen, now isn’t the right time to launch another offering, but instead focus on, and evolve, the existing.
“There’s a perception that we are a print publisher, but in reality, as long as I’ve been around, we’re a digital publisher that has print titles. There are things we’ll be doing over the next year that makes that more apparent,” he teases.
“I think we’ll see some changes to the kind of title The Monthly is, for instance.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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