The best news camera in Australia right now is already in your pocket, and it cost you nothing on top of the phone plan.
When Dad wrote his camera factsheet, a press photographer carried a film body, three or four lenses, a bag of spare rolls and a healthy fear of getting the exposure wrong, because you did not find out until the lab did. He cared about one thing above all the gear: the picture. Whether you could see it, frame it, and tell the story in a single frame. That part has not aged a day. The kit around it has been replaced almost completely.
The phone is the camera now
A current iPhone 16 Pro or a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra shoots better stills than the press cameras Dad knew, in a body that fits in a shirt pocket and files to an editor in seconds. The sensors are good in low light, the lenses are sharp, and you can shoot in a RAW format if you want room to edit later.
There are still two things a phone does not do as well as a proper camera. Reach is the big one, because digital zoom past the optical range turns to mush, so you move your feet instead. Fast action in poor light is the other. For ninety per cent of the jobs a working journalist actually covers, a council meeting, a flooded street, a local hero, a phone is more than enough.
The three add-ons worth carrying
You do not need a bag full of gear. You need three small things that fix the phone's weak spots.
A clip-on telephoto lens, so you can get closer without wrecking the shot. A pocket gimbal, like a DJI Osmo Mobile, so your video does not look like it was filmed during an earthquake. And a clip-on microphone, because a great picture with terrible sound is a video nobody finishes. Rode is an Australian company and its little wireless mics are the ones half the newsroom already owns, which tells you something.
That is it. Lens, gimbal, mic. The whole lot fits in the same pocket Dad kept his spare film in, and it weighs less.
Shooting for news, not for likes
Here is where Dad's factsheet does the heavy lifting, so read it next to this one.
A phone makes it very easy to take a pretty photo and very easy to forget you are doing journalism. The honest frame still matters. You do not stage it, you do not flip it to make the light nicer, you do not crop out the thing that complicates the story. You caption it truthfully and you credit it properly. The phone changed the cost of taking the picture. It did not change the ethics of it, and Dad was very clear on the ethics.
If you want the rules for what makes a strong news picture in the first place, that is his factsheet, The Best Kind of Photos. Nothing in this guide replaces it.
Get it filed before it is old news
The old chain was shoot, develop, print, courier. The new chain is shoot, caption, send, and it takes about a minute.
Shoot it. Caption it in your notes so the words travel with the picture. Send it to the editor by whatever they prefer, usually email for one or two frames and a service like WeTransfer for a batch. Back it up to the cloud automatically so you never lose the only copy because you dropped your phone in the Parramatta River. I cover that whole workflow in the companion guide, Your Phone-to-Editor Photo Workflow.
What stays the same
Everything that matters. The eye, the timing, the honesty, the caption. Dad spent a career teaching that the camera was never the point, the picture was. A phone just means the camera stopped being an excuse. Read his original here: Cameras for Journalists.