Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism by Andrew Dodd & Matthew Ricketson

Author:Andrew Dodd & Matthew Ricketson [Dodd, Andrew & Ricketson, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, journalism
ISBN: 9781742237275
Google: w48ezgEACAAJ
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2021-06-15T23:33:05.423969+00:00

‘The paper’s stance is this and to go further you need to think more about the sort of stories we’re interested in.’ That wasn’t put to me in any sort of, ‘You’ve got to start being unfair,’ or anything like that. It is, ‘You have to think, from your own perspective, what you’re comfortable with, and what you want to be in life, what you want to do.’

The message being sent both explicitly and implicitly in such discussions was that career advancement in this organisation would require Franklin to be comfortable in adopting the organisation’s specific perspective and focus. But Franklin was becoming less comfortable. For example, he had ‘ideological difficulty’ with the Finkelstein Inquiry’s recommendations in 2012 to increase regulation of the news media, and he also had difficulty with the newspaper’s partisan response to them. In particular, he didn’t like what he calls personal-agenda-driven journalism.

‘You can read certain newspapers where you don’t have to read the opinion pages because they’re all written by someone with the same opinion or it’s the same column being written again and again and again.’

He recalls his then wife, Caroline Fisher, saying in this period he seemed increasingly tired and not himself. Franklin was also thinking about his family, as Fisher was navigating the move from journalism to academia, which required a PhD qualification. After 28 years at News, a redundancy package would be a circuit breaker from high-pressure work that was wearing on him; it would give time for his passions – gardening and guitar playing – and it would clear their mortgage. The struggle was over his sense of identity. He remembers thinking, ‘Who am I? … Well, I’m a journalist. That’s what I am. I get stories. I write stories’, and in discussions with his wife saying, ‘I’ve just realised I’m actually a father, I’m also a husband, I’m also this, a guitar player.’

The majority who took redundancy packages in 2012 were journalists with around 20 years’ experience.4 They had worked hard to establish their reputations, but were still up to two decades from retirement. Franklin was 48 when he took redundancy and Jo Chandler was a similar age but an unwillingness to do things a certain way for advancement was not the predicament she faced.

The kind of journalism to which Chandler was committed was falling out of fashion. Trips to Rwanda or Papua New Guinea to report on complex humanitarian and social issues were expensive and funds for them were drying up, as was interest among senior editorial executives, even though Chandler had won a Walkley Award for such work in 2009.5 She found herself fighting not only for the time to do the stories she deemed important, but avoiding those she thought trivial.

‘I would have to enlist some pretty fancy footwork to dodge the daily stuff.’ She recalls an idea emanating out of an editorial conference, ‘Why don’t we send Jo to do colour on the Cup?’ ‘I can’t do this again,’ she thought. She hated the Melbourne Cup, she hated writing about drunk socialites and she had done this story many years before.

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