By Alayna Patterson
Stories are constant, and with what it takes to write them, your attention is the price you pay.
When Mark Gerts was a child, he left USSR-led Moldova and lived in Italy for a year, before making the trek Australia. Along the way, he spoke Russian, Italian and English, the three teaching him the facets of language. Decades later, he is now sub-editor for the Guardian, where he’s been proofreading and fact-checking journalists and writers for nine years.
Sub-editors play the role of proofreader, fact checker and formatter, and can also oversee formatting text for the page whether print or digital. To be a sub-editor, generally you start off as a reporter, and like many journalists, Gerts started in local newspapers.
His interest in news started in high school. As a teenager, he gravitated back to those facets of language by writing fiction and desiring to be a writer in the future.
His first choice, though, was to pursue law at the University of New South Wales.
“I did legal studies, and I got a good enough mark, but not good enough to get into UNSW law,” Mark said.
So, he pivoted. Due to prior interest in news and writing, he began to investigate journalism, but this was short-lived. He switched to psychology at the behest of a particular career advisor who he described as a pompous, aristocratic type. He advised Gerts to not pursue journalism because he’d never find a job: that it was useless.
“After doing psychology for a year and sucking at it,” Mark said, “I wanted to just get back into journalism.”
During that fateful psychology year, he was drawn to the humanities (including politics) as his electives and switched to a Bachelor of Arts (Communications). At the University of Technology, Sydney, he was editor for the Vertigo magazine – still being published today – and wrote stories for the UTS paper and had his own radio show.
He took a year off after graduation, worked at the pub, and, out of his own pocket, printed copies of his portfolio to send directly to editors in the mail.
“I don’t know if I’d advise you to do that,” he said to me: the prospective journalist. I chuckled, and wrote that down.
Gerts wrote for Pharmacy News, a daily newsletter catering to drugs and medications, and the goings-on of the pharmaceutical industry. After, he produced stock news, writing small, little hobby articles about stock prices.
He never did a cadetship, and here he expressed regret. There you’ll learn specific journalistic skills – even during his years as an active journalist, he never learned shorthand, knowing a skill in journalism was to write short and fast.
“One of the other things I was really lacking as a journalist is to be able to take notes. I ended up writing things very quickly and kind of winging it, which is one skill I would advise you to have.”
Gerts reminisced of his time working for local publications, a time for journalism in Australia where papers were independently run. In 2025, one could argue the prospects of local journalism are quite grim, with papers no longer existing, or being completely online and owned by media corporations.
Eventually, Gerts ended up working for Village Voice, where he spent his days walking around Balmain, searching for stories and writing profiles of local businesses. From a woman practicing Chinese medicine, to a pianist who played at Unity Hall for 50 years, Gerts was able to meet people from all walks of life, and build a rapport with members of the community.
“I’d walk around and hand out my card to businesses and come in and chat,” he said. “People would call me up, and I’d just hustle.”
Still, Gerts mentions that networking wasn’t what he found he was best at, which is what you need to be if you’re to be a “proper reporter”.
“Perhaps there are other qualities in terms of being a journalist … but I kind of made up for it by being a good writer and good at language.”
He’s had a longer career now as a sub-editor than he did as a reporter. In 2011, Gerts got his first gig as a sub-editor at the Daily Telegraph and worked across other News Corp publications, before finally landing at the Guardian.
“I was mentored by good people,” he said.
Perhaps he’s better at networking than he’s given himself credit for.
Gerts hated the pressure of constantly coming up with stories, and the anxieties that came with it. There’s enormous effort in producing a weekly paper, let alone a daily: there’s never-ending pressure to fill pages. Even with the thrill of “winging it” or holding the tangible evidence of the camaraderie between you and your cohort – the paper itself – he finds himself pivoting once again. More and more these days, he gravitates elsewhere: alongside sub-editing, he’s been doing graphic design since 2023.
You could argue that’s a language in and of itself.
Mark takes the attention to detail required in sub-editing into Gleebooks Gleaner, an in-house newsletter for Gleebooks, where he plans the layout monthly. A callback to days where words were once cut to fit pages.
Even still, Mark told me that brevity is everything. “Learn to write things in the shortest way possible.”
Nervous to meet with the subeditor, a prospective journalist approached Clare Gerber, his partner: “Don’t worry. He’s a sweetheart.”
Mark and I spoke for an hour, where I asked for the details of his career and we spoke of the climate of journalism in the current age. There’s a humility there – sincere warnings about the media landscape, and what that could mean for anyone looking to make their start.
Asked for photos, Gerber scrolled through multiple photos of him on her phone, glimpses into their domestic life. There’s a gentle demeanour to Mark Gerts. Looking to the books on their bookshelf, walking through their townhouse, there’s still a love for words on the page.
Featured image: A quality required in a good journalist is the art of “winging it” – or so Mark Gerts tells me. Pictures: Clare Gerber
