When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest. Leigh Sales’s new book, Storytellers, follows a similar line, with the content and even the cover art – a black and white photo of Sales at her news desk, shot from behind, à la Will McAvoy – evincing the same reverence for journalism. Implicitly, too, there is the same nostalgia for the days when everything was just a bit more straightforward.

Some of this feels warranted. Technological change has dramatically reshaped the news media industry, while disinformation and debates about bias in news reportage have washed in atop successive waves of redundancies that left many newsrooms in Australia drained of knowledge and experience. If that drain has been stoppered in recent years by revenue from the News Media Bargaining Code, the people left behind are still, as Sales writes, swamped by information, besieged by deadlines, and grappling with new challenges without the guidance of old hands. In Storytellers, Sales aims to provide that guidance by passing on tips and tricks from Australia’s finest.