Facebook and the tradespeople
Welcome to Unmade, written during a stormy dawn at Sisters Beach, Tasmania. It’s one of those wild sorts of mornings where even the lightbulb in the kitchen is dripping. A little indoor rain is fine, right?
Happy National Cheese Curd Day.
Today’s writing soundtrack: Queen – News of the World. I’d forgotten just how raucous it was. But having started it, I feel obliged to let it play through.
Back in 1996, I walked in through the door of a nondescript 19-storey tower in a nondescript town on the edge of London. It was to be the making of me as a journalist and an editor.
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Unmade Substack
Unmade Substack
I joined Business Press International (later absorbed into Reed) in Sydney in 1986, and worked on TravelTrade. We were on the 9th floor of a building on Goulburn Street, Darlinghurst, not far from the Macquarie pub on the corner of Wentworth St. There were some good journalists and we had a lot of fun (especially at the Macquarie) and there was also a lot of good journalism. We were never in anyone’s pocket, but that was the misconception of what was then the “mainstream media”. There was a feeling that we were second-class or not real journalists – like when we went to the nearby Journalists’ Club on Chalmers Street. Similar to how I felt a couple of years later when I was a reporter on the Truth in Melbourne … and the sort of thing that you sometimes leave off your resume. But trade journalists were every bit as good and often better because they were specialists – in two metro newsrooms where I worked, we had aircraft experts who had edited aviation mags, and many others who were experts in their fields, who came from trade magazines – and they made a major contribution to getting it right. This is going to leave a big hole in what’s left of journalism.