Carmen Braidwood has worked in radio and television for the past 22 years, starting out in Western Australia as a radio producer on 882 6PR and Hit 92.9. Carmen had a seven-year stint as co-host of 96FM Perth’s breakfast show, “Carmen and Fitzi”, and has had guest appearances on Sky News Australia, Nine News, The Project and The Today Show. A presenter on Nine’s Destination WA, Carmen now draws on her commercial broadcasting skills to offer media training to the business world.
Q1. What’s been your best career move?
While I was working part-time on a weekend radio show here in Perth, I used my downtime during the pandemic – when all of my in-person TV presenting and MC work dried up – to start my modern take on media training. Almost all of us need to do media training for our professional and personal brands. Once it was just footy coaches, CEOs and politicians, but these days, everybody needs competence on-camera. I’d hatched the business idea when I taught my chiropractor husband to speak on camera, and when my radio show was axed in 2018, I thought, “Right, I'm going to go out there and do this.” I realised I could deliver the content online. The business has been a massive lifeline, allowing me to continue presenting and producing as a freelancer because, realistically, there just hasn't been enough work for me in the media. It has future-proofed my career.
Q2. Given your time over, what would you do differently?
I'd get out of my bubble sooner. I was 21 or 22 when I started and, even in my casual jobs at Perth’s 6PR, producing and doing afternoon shifts on local radio, I wasn't consuming enough other media to be as well-informed as I now know you really need to be. If I went back, I’d expose myself to a more diverse range of media; understanding my audience a bit more, and the things they care about sooner. That also helps you prevent mistakes on air. Like, I'd be a bit uninformed and say the wrong name of a cricketer on air. I had a lot of confidence issues along the way, but I missed the memo about being broadly knowledgeable about a lot of things.
Q3. Do you have a professional hero?
There are a lot of people I've had thrown in my face and told that I should emulate as a broadcaster, but the one that I genuinely admired, particularly at the peak of her career, was Gretel Killeen back in the Big Brother days. She had probably the hardest broadcasting job going around: it was live-to-air, the talent was unpredictable, she needed to engage that studio audience and us at home watching, and she did it in a very authentic way. She was put on the spot a lot and just had to make it work. That really set a benchmark for me. Someone who just read the autocue wouldn't have been able to do what Gretel did. She understood that the audience were watching for a reason, and she really wanted to know why.
Q4. What do you think the media will look like in 10 years’ time?
I believe those of us who are content creators and have spent time in newsrooms will just work for a multi-platform media company in some other shape. These big pillars – the way that Nine and Seven have gone, where they’re just owning multi-platforms, and more and more of them – will have their own social media and their own streaming platforms. And maybe the Facebooks of the world will create original content of their own, rather than just user-generated content. They will create newsrooms and bring us to work for them instead. There’s so much debate around that space, but I think that if you can create content that the platforms are asking for, then you'll always be employable. The media will be merely a reflection of where the eyeballs are: if the audiences are watching through their phones, then the media will be producing stuff that you can watch on your phone.
Q5. As a media trainer, what do you think people most need to learn?
There’s a lot of chronic overthinking. When people are confronted with the need to put themselves out there to grow their personal or professional brand, there's a massive confidence gap between women and men. A lot of men will just go out there and have a crack, whereas many women say, “I’d better get training before I put up my hand to even take that media engagement.” There’s a fear of being critiqued for their looks. Even in this modern media landscape, they're still feeling as if their body shape or their gender or their background isn't being represented in the media that they're seeing, so they feel like they don't have a place. But your voice is just as worthy as someone else's, and your perspective deserves to be part of the discourse.
Interview by Susan Horsburgh