Following the Circus: Melissa Lawton on Her Career From the Olympics and Meta to SailGP

Following the circus: Melissa Lawton on her career from the Olympics and Meta to SailGP By Heather McLean

Wednesday, June 21, 2023 - 09:07

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SailGP's season two finale happened in San Francisco on 26 to 27 March

Melissa Lawton, SailGP's chief content officer, has enjoyed an intense career in which she has forged a path following the routes less travelled by women in sports broadcasting. As an Australian native, she left home in order to pursue her career, which includes working on several Olympic productions and running the live sports production at Meta, and is now a part of a cutting edge grand prix racing championship that is surging into the future.

On how she first got into TV broadcasting and then sports broadcasting as a career, Lawton says: I had the opportunity to do a lot of work experience when I was in high school and was lucky to work in TV news rooms where I did the odd small story, went out with crews, or worked with the editors in the edit suite. So, I knew of TV broadcasting as a career from an early age, but that wasn't my ultimate goal at the time. I'd had my dreams set on being a foreign correspondent, but mainly through written news which I loved reading and writing at the time.

I guess my first real inspiration to get into TV broadcasting was when I had my first full time job in the industry working on the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for the host broadcast, SOBO. It was that experience where I went from being a diehard print journalist, to a TV convert.

After a degree in journalism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Lawton's first job was writing sports for The Age newspaper as a roving stringer specialising in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. She comments: I took a year off after university to continue writing for The Age and the Australian Associated Press, and it ended up taking me on a global tour to various lead up regattas.

SailGP's Melissa Lawton

When I got back to Australia after this huge period away, I was approached by someone in the industry to undergo a print journalism cadetship with a country newspaper, and in the same week I received the opportunity of a lifetime to move to Sydney and work on the Sydney Olympic broadcasting organisations workforce, she continues. The opportunity came through a work experience contact who I'd worked closely with years before. My career path has always been a strategic one and I was happy that my hard work left a lasting impression to be put forward for such a unique experience. I was prepared and ready to take it. I am a huge fan of the Olympic Movement and I think at that point there was no contest in which path I would end up taking.

So, she was the manager of sports programming for the Sydney Olympics, a role that began nearly four years prior to the Games themselves. She says: It had a massive scope for me to learn and grow from some of the best in the business such as Gary Fenton, Manolo Romero, Caroline Ramsay and Mike Klatt. Also, with such a long time before the Games, I got to do a lot of producing on projects like the Olympic opening titles and technical features.

She continues: I wasn't quite ready to give up my other career path so in my spare time I wrote for Time Life magazine's Olympic programmes to keep my hand in the game. I got to learn and do many things within the Olympic movement and I could see I was becoming more passionate about sports broadcasting than I was about being a print journalist.

On the detour that gradually led her away from print journalism, she notes: I think if you're a print journalist, perhaps you have quite a lonely journey, but when you're part of a sports broadcasting unit, you're part of a really big team that can achieve something. I spent my high school years in a rowing crew and really for someone who loved that sort of team sport, production is a perfect fit. You can only be as good as the weakest person in the team, so it's on everyone to grow and develop and get the best out of the entire crew.

Following the circus

After the Sydney Olympics, Lawton continued working on the major events circuit, from the Paralympics to the World Cup in Korea and Japan, and more. However, in a bid to break out of being a permanent freelancer doing the same roles over and over again, she broke into network television to work on V8 Supercars, taking a more junior role on major events, but I was aware I needed to learn the industry from the ground up to have a meaningful career , she says.

It was the right opportunity and thing for me to do, she continues. I spent three and a half years at Network 10 and loved it. Again I worked with really passionate and talented people who were generous in leading me forward.

Then the Beijing Olympics came around. While working on motorsports I decided to do my MA in International Relations and focussed that on the business of sports in China. Honestly, this was another opportunity I couldn't miss and I got to work with some close colleagues from the Sydney Olympics. I rejoined the Olympic movement, but by then I'd made that step upwards and I was able to use the knowledge I gained from domestic broadcasting to increase my role there.

After that, I went from the Beijing Olympics to being a coordinating producer of the Delhi Commonwealth Games, as I found myself in India for an opportunity that my husband decided to take for his career. After an adventure-filled 2.5 years living and working in India, we returned to Australia with our baby and no real direction on where to go next in the sports industry.

However, she says, fortune favours the brave I guess, and not long after the birth of my second child I was approached by Salzburg Austria to take an unmissable opportunity to work for Red Bull Media House as head of live content (not

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