Mumbrellacast Interview: Tim Burrowes on new book and more than a decade at Mumbrella
One of the things about writing a book is that it’s a great way to hide work, because you can spend a day going down a rabbit hole just to end up with one paragraph.
This week’s long-form Mumbrellacast episode is something of a farewell, as departing founder and editor-at-large Tim Burrowes joins head of content Damian Francis to chat about his book, Media Unmade, and spending more than a decade leading Mumbrella.
Burrowes, who will leave the company he began in late 2008 at month’s end, dives into the process of research and the extensive amount of interviews he conducted to create a patchwork of interlinked stories about the last decade in the media and marketing industry.
With the full title of the book being ‘Media Unmade: Australian Media’s Most Disruptive Decade’, Burrowes admits that while every decade feels like the most disruptive, the 2010s and years surrounding genuinely saw several of the biggest shifts in Australian media history.
“This was the decade when digital became dominant, and it forced the newspapers to change their business model, and where subscription TV came through as well. So it was the decade in which we swung away from an advertising-led media to a user-pays media. Also, it was the decade where polarisation became a thing like never before,” Burrowes explains.
As well as going behind the process of writing the book, and sharing anecdotes from the past decade, Burrowes looks ahead to the next ten years and predicts what is likely to drive change moving forward.
He tells Francis that global forces are likely to fuel the next big shifts, which we are already starting to see in the battle for sports streaming rights locally.
“The next big shift is driven largely by Silicon Valley-based companies. When we look at the streaming battles, more and more we are seeing global dollars coming in for sports rights in Australia.
“It does feel like the factors that will decide the future of the media in Australia will be more overseas, at least for the next phase.”
And with the announcement on Monday morning that he will soon depart the business he founded over ten years ago, Burrowes recounts the highs and lows of leading Mumbrella through the disruption of the decade to the position it maintains today as the leading media and marketing publication in Australia.
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Music credit: RetroFuture Clean Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Backbay Lounge Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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Zanda Wilson was a reporter and podcast producer at Mumbrella, specialising in radio reporting. He left Mumbrella in September 2021.
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