A typical workday for Brooke Campbell Bayes begins at 5.45am, getting herself and her young daughter Edie ready so she can be at the Nine Honey office by 7.30am.
“I currently work four days a week and have one day off with Edie, so I have to make those four days count,” Campbell Bayes says.
“I finish work around 4.30pm and with a three-year-old and that’s when the real work begins!”
Before she took up the position at Nine Honey, Campbell Bayes worked as executive producer on several shows at Australian Radio Network for four years and as a producer on Network Ten’s The Circle prior to that.
When the network axed the morning television program, Campbell Bayes and regular guest host Katie ‘Monty’ Dimond came up with the idea of launching the media platform Show and Tell.
“The gold that we felt The Circle was really just women on the couch talking about their lives and opening up to the viewers about what they were going through and really relating it to them,” she says.
“We really wanted to try and re-create that magic. At first, we thought we should create a pilot for a TV show but after a few meetings everyone was steering us to online and creating a brand.”
After many successful years with Show and Tell, Campbell Bayes sold her part in the platform in 2017 when she moved to Sydney to take up her current role as style editor at Nine Honey.
She puts a lot of her success down to her drive and eagerness to work for free when she was beginning her journalism career and urges budding journalists to do the same.
“I think in my career, all the jobs I have wanted and I have got, I’ve really gone after and I have cold emailed and cold called so many people and annoyed them.”
“In my last year of university, I did a hell of a lot of practical work experience; I used to go up in my school holidays and volunteer at magazines and things like that.
“Then when I was in my final year of university I got offered a role for a few months covering while people were on holidays at WHO Magazine.”
During her successful career she has worked at NW Magazine, for ACP as a New York correspondent, for Hamish and Andy as a producer, and News Corp as a media manager, to name a few roles.
Campbell Bayes worked in the industry throughout her pregnancy with her daughter Edie and is currently pregnant with her second child. She says there is still room for improvement in gender equality and flexibility in the workplace.
“I think we’re making a lot of progress at the moment in terms of gender equality and flexibility in the workplace but there’s definitely still a long way to come, and I think a lot of workplaces say that they’re flexible, but really it’s not the case.”
“I think we’re making a lot of progress at the moment in terms of gender equality and flexibility in the workplace but there’s definitely still a long way to come, and I think a lot of workplaces say that they’re flexible, but really it’s not the case,” she says.
“I’ve got a lot of friends who are working mums and trying to squeeze five days into three days and that’s what’s expected.
“The workplace isn’t made super friendly for women that want to go off and have kids and for me I found that my career had to take a bit of a back seat for a few years.”
Brooke Campbell Bayes will speak at the 2018 Women in Media National Conference at Bond University.