There was more to Anthony De Ceglie than a call to drop Australia’s commercial TV broadcast fee when he spoke to the Melbourne Press Club this week.

Beyond the call that “traditional journalism doesn’t sleepwalk into oblivion” were insights into “the man from The West” who is reorganising Seven’s newsrooms on the east coast… and a lot more.

The Seven West Media director of news and current affairs and editor in chief spoke of the toll journalism places on families – acknowledging the contribution of his lawyer wife Sarah, present at the event, son and daughter – and the stress that comes with the job, sometimes including frivolous lawsuits over months or years.

He spoke of his as the whiteboard culture with the bunch of quotes and mottos he says helps keep him and his team honest. Calls for ‘total non-stop innovation’ and ‘don’t sit still’, and to ‘turn it up to 1000’, ‘ignore the noise’, and that ‘risk is for the taking’.

The 1973 National Lampoon cover with the dog, the gun, and the message that ‘if you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog’.

“I love that cover for a bunch of reasons,” De Ceglie said, “but I keep it on my whiteboard because in my mind it epitomises the fight traditional media is in. TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and now even our online websites are in a 24/7 battle to survive.”

He said X owner Elon Musk had become the biggest threat to Australian media, “no longer Seven versus Nine… or News Corp versus Fairfax”.

“We need to grab our audiences by the scruff of the neck and shout in their faces that they MUST buy or view our products as a matter of life or death.

“It used to be that we were just competing with each other. And that was hard enough. But now our biggest threat is TikTok, X, Instagram and ChatGPT.”

The battle for audience time was the background to his introduction of star signs, satire and ‘good news’ on the nightly 7News… ideas aimed at broadening reach , and “the crazier the idea the better”.

He spoke of his early gigs as a regional journalist in Collie and Mandurah, where “every story counts” and you’ll be accosted in the street if you get the bowls results wrong. Nor is it lost on him that the paper he started at no longer exists.

“And the paper that housed my second job no longer exists either. They are among hundreds of news publications that have closed down in recent years – leaving our communities far worse off.”

De Ceglie progressed from the (then) News Corp Sunday Times to a secondment in New York, “loved every minute of all of it”, but couldn’t avoid the regular staff notices about forced and voluntary redundancies, a ‘lottry ticket’ enthusiatically anticipated by some senior journalists.

“What frightened me most was that hardly anybody seemed in a hurry to change anything,” he said. “I saw news people literally willing to sleepwalk our industry into oblivion.”

Working with then editor Christopher Dore at the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph, he developed the idea that print front pages had to be timeless, valid “even if you walked past the newsstand at 2pm and had already heard or read about the story hours earlier online”.

An example was the picture of a body bag and list of the 500 casualties of terror attacks in Nice, France, which led to global exposure, an ‘anti-terror’ music clip, and eventually a call from Seven West boss Kerry Stokes.

Home to Perth as editor-in-chief of the West Australian and now SWM-controlled Sunday Times, he says he pushed the boundaries, sometimes getting into trouble as a result, “but you need to be bold to win”.

He says the innovation mantra is also one that never utters the phrase “that’s how we’ve always done it”. Lately that’s seen the birth of a grassroots live-streaming platform for community-generated sports videos, and of course, “digital evening newspaper” The Nightly, which, he says, “already has a bigger unique monthly audience than the Australian Financial Review and it is breathing down the neck of The Australian”.

Recalling the advice once given to him to “move as fast as possible in the first six months of a new job”, he listed the 11 new appointments which make Seven’s news leadership look “almost entirely different” from when he started, six months ago

Still in place, he notes, are “the exceptional director of morning TV, Sarah Stinson, and the brilliant Morning Show executive producer Chloe Flynn”, while “the fearless Ray Kuka” has becoming his deputy.

“I couldn’t be prouder of our new team or feel more inspired about what we are about to achieve together. Our leadership team philosophy is simple: no games, have each other’s backs, leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of excellence and be honest and accountable to each other.”

He also outlined the need for a ‘no dickheads’ policy, and credited boss Ryan Stokes for the ‘owner’s mindset’ leadership philosophy, ten guiding principles of which are also on his whiteboard.

Among them ‘doers over delegators’, ‘value pace over analysis-paralysis’, to be ‘crystal clear on drivers’, and that ‘everything in leadership is personal’.

“Some industry insiders have commented on the relative youth of the team, with one columnist even dubbing us The Romper Room after the classic children’s TV show. Of course, the irony was that most of us are so young we actually had no idea what they were talking about.”

He urges teams to stop worrying about the ratings, and instead worry about the journalism. “The most important measure of success is being able to look at yourself in the mirror each night knowing you’ve done your job as a journalist well.”

The message to prime minister Anthony Albenese – to recognise the contribution of journalists, and of Seven and Nine and 10, and the ABC and the SBS, “which have so much to be proud of” – has already been well reported. De Ceglie also called for a rebate for the cost of producing news and current affairs, similar to that for production of Australian dramas like Home and Away and for Australian documentaries.

“The government has already decided that it’s so important to have this local content for our national psyche that is should be subsidised. I would argue that it’s even more important for our residents to safeguard the future of Australian news.”

Notably the need to support “the one true antidote” of the fourth estate: “If the prime minister is genuinely worried about the toxicity of Facebook and Meta and X and TikTok… then bloody well give a helping hand to the journalism that fights for facts,” he says.