Finance presenter Alan Kohler to sign off from ABC for final time

Where to start? Let's try the beginning.

A kid, straight out of school with no real future mapped out, no obvious talents, just a general inclination that he might be suited to journalism.

"The reason I wanted to be a journalist is because English was the only subject in high school I was any good at," he said.

It doesn't sound like an auspicious start.

No grand ambitions to rise to the top of Australian journalism, to edit several of the nation's most prestigious and influential newspapers and to become the doyen of business and economics reporting.

Alan Kohler will walk out the door of the ABC's Melbourne studios tonight after presenting his final finance report, ending a 31-year career at the public broadcaster, 24 of them as the business big kahuna.

"I love the ABC and I do really like going to the studio, but I think it's time to not have to do that," he confessed on the ABC's Business Daily podcast.

"I'm 74."

Life as a hippie

Kohler's media career was well established long before he joined the ABC in 1995.

After a brief period as a copy boy for The Australian in 1969, making coffee and organising dry cleaning, he was hired as a cadet.

His pathway into the heady world of business and finance, however, was entirely accidental.

"A job came up at the Oz and it happened to be in the finance section," he explained to Jonathan Green a decade ago.

"That was it."

He was just as directionless after completing the cadetship.

Hitching to Darwin, he scored a job on the NT News, was caught up in Cyclone Tracy's devastating rampage across the city and helped put together emergency issues of the paper on a "borrowed" printing press on A4 stapled paper.

It took another four years, after wandering around the country, before he became serious about life and work, transforming from "being a pothead, to discovering ambition".

He scored a job at The Age, met his future wife, journalist and author Deborah Forster, and set off for Europe where he worked on regional English papers before returning to Melbourne and The Age.

By 1979, he'd switched to the Australian Financial Review under the tutelage of Robert Gottliebsen, rapidly ascending to penning its premier column, Chanticleer.

Business reporting had found him, rather than the other way round.

As he explains, it's partly because very few want to do it, and so the pay is better. Plus, he realised he had a talent for explaining things.

"People's brains just go to toothpaste when it comes to finance," he told the Daily Business podcast's Carrington Clarke.

But the old inertia played a part too.

"Once you get in a particular role, it's hard to get out of it," he told Green.

But the coasting days were long gone. He taught himself economics, reading until late into the night, put his mind to the intricacies of finance and delved into the daily machinations of the corporate world.

By the time he was 32, he was editor of the AFR, during the heady days of the Hawke and Keating government as deregulation swept the world and Australia opened its doors to the global economy.

A chance encounter

Our paths first crossed in 1986.

It was the decade of greed, takeover fever was in full swing and a then-corporate raider, the since-disgraced Ron Brierley, had launched a massive bid for miner North Broken Hill.

It coincided with a journalist strike at metropolitan newspapers.

As AFR editor, and with no staff on hand, Kohler went back on the tools to write the analysis piece and opted for wire copy from Australian Associated Press for the news story.

I was that AAP author and thrilled to be given a byline on the paper's page one lead story. But it was his work that was instructive.

Rather than the complex, almost unintelligible explainers routinely trotted out by the AFR's senior reporters, Kohler's analysis was simple, illuminating and elegant.

It was a masterclass in communication and forever seared into your correspondent's memory.

Two decades later and he joined the Sydney Morning Herald during my tenure as business editor. In 2012, I joined his operation, The Eureka Report, for a year.

And for the past 13 years we've worked alongside one another at the national broadcaster.

A new chapter?

He may be stepping down from the ABC, but Alan Kohler is not retiring.

Journalism is moving away from organised newsrooms, he argues, and more towards individuals delivering their own content.

In his case, he will be moving away from the ABC at Southbank and more towards working from home.

While free-to-air networks and newspapers still have a role to play, streaming, mobile devices, video and audio on demand and the loss of advertising revenue for the major players have transformed the media industry in the past 20 years.

These pressures show no signs of abating and traditional media is likely to continue to feel the squeeze, both in broadcast and in text.

And then there's artificial intelligence.

"I'm actually starting to feel optimistic about what we do now because with AI, the work that humans do will be more valuable," Kohler said.

"How that plays out, I'm not quite sure. I mean, I think a lot of grunt work of journalism will be done by AI, but I do think that consumers of media will value human work."

Despite the ongoing changes and challenges, Kohler is adamant that if that same kid from the late 60s was transported to the present and scouting around for a career today, he'd still pick journalism.

"It's been so good to me, I couldn't wish for anything better."

Watch The Business, Mondays to Thursdays 8:44pm on ABC News Channel, after the Late News on ABC TV, and anytime on ABC iview