Tom Steinfort: 60 Minutes reporter on Brussels terror attack close call
From terror zones to breakfast TV, Tom Steinfort is no stranger to a battleground. In a revealing interview, the journalist reflects on the close call he kept from everyone (including his parents).
Stellar
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Fifty countries in two years. Tom Steinfort’s former life as Europe correspondent for the Nine Network couldn’t seem any more foreign compared to the realities of 2020. “On my 32nd birthday, I was in four countries in one day.
We ended up flying from Turkey at 2am, to Switzerland, then to Germany and then on to Italy,” the 60 Minutes reporter tells Stellar.
“Looking back, you realise you take it for granted. Now to go to the Gold Coast would be the most exotic trip I’ve been on in six months.”
For someone who got into the industry so he could spend his days “going here, there and everywhere, meeting fascinating people and going to far-off places”, his promotion to the post in 2015 was the apex in an already successful career in which he’d covered several major stories, including the Black Saturday bushfires, the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 and the murder trial of South African paralympian Oscar Pistorius, to name but a few.
But it came with a reckoning, too. “When I took over the Europe bureau from Peter Stefanovic, he took me out for lunch and said, ‘It’s the best job in the world and it’s all yours!’ I thought, if it’s that bloody good then why are you leaving? But by the end of my stint, I got it. It’s an awesome ride, but you have to get off,” he explains.
As the youngest of five in a tight-knit Melbourne family, Steinfort says “living overseas was kind of a wake-up in terms of how much my family meant to me. To be separated from them for so long... You realise that’s what makes you happy.”
It was also a period in which Europe was grappling with the rise of ISIS, and Steinfort came very close to his time being up.
“I remember we flew through Brussels airport and the next day we turned on the news and ISIS had blown it up. We saw photos of the exact counter we’d been at 24 hours earlier,” he says.
“It’s fair to say that if that [detail] goes to print, it will be the first Mum and Dad know about it.”
So, in 2017, Steinfort swapped the terror zones of Europe for a different kind of battleground: breakfast television, where he would host Weekend Today and file reports for 60 Minutes.
“The beauty of this job is that one day you’re sitting down with [basketball player] Ben Simmons and are courtside at the NBA; the next you’re standing in the middle of [the North Korean capital] Pyongyang talking about the missile crisis,” Steinfort says.
“It’s like a buffet. Who wants to eat the same meal for dinner every night when you can try a different cuisine?”
Two years later, he was promoted to the role of newsreader on Today alongside the ill-fated pairing of Georgie Gardner and Deborah Knight, after Karl Stefanovic was dumped (temporarily, it turns out) from the show. Suddenly, Steinfort unwittingly found himself in the eye of a media storm.
“You don’t become a journalist to become a story. You become a journalist to tell other people’s stories, so it’s a weird dimension when the lens is focused back on you,” he says.
“There might have been a day when there were five stories on a web page [about the hosts of Today] and I was like, wow, people care that much!”
And when the ratings started falling, the criticism started flying. Steinfort, however, opted to handle it with pragmatism. “The game of TV is a popularity contest, because if you don’t have ratings, you don’t have a job,” he says.
“So of course you have to worry about what people think about you. That being said, the only real opinion that I worry about is my boss’ and my colleagues’. The rest will sort itself out.”
Which it did, when Steinfort was moved to a full-time position with 60 Minutes at the start of this year. The show’s executive producer, Kirsty Thomson, tells Stellar, “I couldn’t have been happier to have him return. He’s a brilliant journalist… and such a nice bloke.”
Peter Overton, a fellow Nine Network news presenter and 60 Minutes alumni, agrees. “Over the years, I’ve had a front-row seat watching Tom develop into a fine reporter. I love his storytelling and his willingness to give anything a go. If I could single out a highlight, it would be his reporting from North Korea.”
While the work in North Korea was “surreal” for Steinfort, the stories that hold a special place are more local. “My dad got an Order of Australia medal last year [for his services to the Melbourne construction industry and his volunteer work], so to sit down and interview him about all of his achievements over the decades was what you do the job for,” he says.
He also covered his brother and sister-in-law’s experiences as frontline healthcare workers during COVID for the show.
“It seems like I just interview my family,” he says, laughing. “But the stories that have the most impact on you are sometimes the most simple.”
Shared family values are also what drew the now Sydney-based Steinfort to his wife, style editor Claudia Jukic´. The two wed in Croatia last year after a romance that started with a blind date in 2017.
“We had a really fun night, but then I got sent away for work, so there were nine weeks between our first and our second dates. But from then we got on like a house on fire,” he says.
Now his personal life is just as, if not more, rewarding than his work. “In my 20s it was all about the next job, and so career-focused. But now it’s probably more life-focused in terms of next chapters in life.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s not dreaming of the day he’ll use his passport again. “One of the beauties of working at 60 Minutes is that you see the world, but because of COVID this is the first time in eight or nine years when I haven’t been living out of a suitcase or getting up at 3.40am,” he says.
“My bucket list job at the moment is just to go overseas.”