The Lowly Journo

A dose of reality and a touch of self-hate
Journalists are the lowest of the low. Aren't they? We are observers of the world when we are working, not participants. Expertise is deferred to the experts, the talking heads, the change-makers and journalists record, synthesise, regurgitate.

Occasionally there's room for opinion, which bends journalism from its original path, the subjective lens presenting the facts. Occasionally there's room for analysis. Those long in the game, or at least with the maturity to understand news history, can give depth to an issue, offer insights that provide context, clarity and a new perspective.

I have never been a news journalist. Somehow I managed to scrape a credit in my final-year News & Current Affairs subject at university but there was no love or passion there—it was pure diligence and a certain desperation to get out of there and get writing. I admire those in the job who feed off the events that occur every day and present them to me, a passive news consumer, in its various forms.

I used to buy the Sydney Morning Herald every Saturday and read the main news and the News Review cover to cover. I figured that if the week's news was sufficiently important it would make it into the Saturday edition. Today, I receive my news via Twitter, following hundreds of media types on my prjournolove list and wait for a weekly wrap-up via my subscription to The Week. I've never considered news 'boring but important' (no thanks, mX) but rather the ink that gives feature writing its shape.

At university I had the pleasure of having media course convenor Willa McDonald as my tutor. She introduced us to the art of creative non-fiction. Until then I'd been disillusioned with my choice of course. One year in, I'd decided not to become a journalist and thought a career as a cultural studies academic looked like the most likely path. Creative non-fiction changed that. It made me believe I could write stories that were not embedded in news, that were instead following a narrative of which fact played only a fleeting role. A career path was saved.

Dealing with rejection
Since then I have been an editorial assistant, copywriter, features writer, and editor of magazines on topics as diverse as cars, shopping, art, design and architecture, travel, business, gifts and homewares, and project management.

My strength is writing about complex, sometimes banal, topics in a clear and engaging manner. I often weave background information with expert comment and have a habit of pursuing the juicy details about challenges. I've interviewed politicians, government officials, CEOs, managing directors, economists, subject matter experts, academics and practitioners as well as celebrities and the general public.

However, I have been to launches for hair products, cosmetics and fashion lines where the glamour girls of the glossy mags snubbed me for not wearing the right clothes or any makeup at all.

I have been to tech launches where IT journos used to look at female attendees with barely disguised disdain (for what would she know?).

I have been to business forums where journalists from the dailies puzzled at my age and dismissed my publication. Once, after being brave and introducing myself to a nearby Fairfax representative, she literally turned her back on me when she discovered where I was from i.e. nowhere of use to her. I was 21 or 22 at the time.

Almost 10 years later still feel the crush of rejection from these people who are supposed to be my peers. What's a girl to do? Do I stop calling myself a journalist and just use the generic term 'writer'? Do I get nasty the next time someone brings out their barely concealed sneer?

I have spent a large part of my career in custom magazines, which appears to be the lowest of the low (or maybe above custom newsletters). I may never score a scoop or win a Walkley, but I have learnt so much about the politics of committees and managing stakeholders it would turn your eyelids inside out.

I have spent the other part of my career freelancing. Titles that have published my work have been as diverse as body+soul, Australian Traveller, and YEN. I'm now the Sydney correspondent for Australian Security Magazine and provide ghostwriting services for a number of PR clients which sees my work in Smart Company, The Daily Telegraph, and Yahoo!7 Business. Apparently there's some discrimination here too. Freelancing isn't a 'real job', so the cliche goes.

Fortunately through the work of some high profile freelancers, this lifestyle choice has gained acceptance in recent years but you can still see it in some journalists' eyes when you speak to them: 'couldn't you get a round in a newspaper?' A news round on a daily newspaper isn't the only fruit on the journalism tree. Can I have a little respect for what I do?

You never lose it

A long time ago in another life I was a finalist for a fairly prestigious writing award, the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year. It was 1997 and I had already had a good year, having come second in a Baulkham Hills Shire poetry competition.

Fancying myself a wordsmith, I had entered the SMH comp before but that year was determined to try for an encouragement award (one step up from a 'participation' award, I was assured). I submitted a piece I had written for class, though I'd worked on it a little more to refine it and promptly forgot about it in the buzz of year 11 exams.

I don't remember how I was notified, exactly. I'm assuming my diary at the time captured the moment, but suddenly I was one of 15 finalists in the state invited to lunch for the announcement of the award. You would have figured out by now that I didn't win but it truly didn't matter as I had already overshot my objective to achieve an encouragement award.

(Incidentally, I met the winner Mark Bolotin several years later at a private creative open mic night called Magical Theatre held in a garage in Glebe, in Sydney's inner west. It was the same platform that launched the indie band Richard in Your Mind. The world works in mysterious ways.)

Later that year I also took out my school's inaugural senior creative writing award and the next year, won the senior poetry competition.

It was a couple of years later, in second year uni, when I realised that I hadn't finished anything of quality for some time. I had a conversation with my friend, a fellow student called Justin Green (who I thought I was in love with at the time and who was the subject of much average poetry). He knew how I felt - he had been a finalist for the SMH comp in the year before I'd been - but he told me something important: "You never lose it."

I had my annual review at work today. Four years I've been employed at this company. Four years in which I haven't finished anything of quality. But I went to writing group this evening armed with a few hundred words that I'd bashed out between 5.30 and 6pm and those words were accepted. They could be worked, they could be teased into shape, according to my fellow writers (one is a Varuna scholar, she would know!). So I have faith that I will never lose it, but it's almost like I have to set it free, let it run rampant.

On the way home I considered how many words I have typed, how many words I have had published in the years since 1997. I'm a decent magazine journo and freelancer and I've carved a small niche for myself in the business and project management space. All this serves someone else.

I blog and I tweet (and every night I write a longhand debrief of my day). All this has taught me is to become accustomed to writing what I feel. I want to stop this. I want to stop writing what I feel and restart writing what I imagine. Only then will I know that I haven't lost it.

(P.S: I wrote this blog post instead of working on the second draft of my novel or the new 3,000 short story I have in the works. I do recognise the irony.)

Memento: Study desk

I don't recall when I got this desk, but I must have had it when I stopped sharing a room with my sister for the second time, after my brother left home. This makes it about 14 years old.

It replaced a wood laminate one I inherited off my uncle (RIP Eric) that had an increasingly outdated map of the world printed on it. On that desk I learnt how countries could change their names: USSR, Malagasy, Burma.

This desk, this desk was cheap and nasty with a chipboard frame, plastic runners and cardboard drawers. On it, I studied for my HSC, researched uni assignments and wrote the first draft of my novel. My first, second and third laptops got to know it well.

The top drawer was always for greeting cards and letter stationery and envelopes. The second drawer came to be a dumping ground for receipts and invoices to be filed. The third drawer was always for financial documents and tax stuff and the bottom drawer, by the end of its life, had turned a museum of electronic odds and ends: cables that no longer connected anything to anything else, random charging units, wires with double heads.

The cupboard housed everything from my collection of postcards and my handwritten short stories, poems, novels and ideas, to old daybooks with fading appointments and a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings of articles and pictures I liked.

The desk moved with me from West Pennant Hills to Waverton to Artarmon. Then, as a freelancer for the second time, I got busy. I needed more space. I bought a former office desk secondhand that now takes up an entire corner of my downstairs living area.

The desk was picked up this evening after I listed it for free on Gumtree and Freecycle. I hope it went to a good home.

Memento: Alien toy

Received from: a former colleague
Occasion: My birthday, 2008

I work in the media/publishing industry so as you can imagine there's a fair turnover of colleagues. In 2007, I started at my current workplace sitting next to a junior staff writer who gave me this bizarre alien toy for my birthday in 2008. Not long after, she was made redundant.

I never really liked it; I suppose it was meant to be cute or something, but I always found its lack of eyes a bit creepy. We weren't that close but since I have this weird colleague magic that means I get on with anyone I sit next to I felt obliged to hang onto it, even just for show. When she left it was an opportunity to get rid of it, but I kept it because I felt bad about her.

The toy sat on a shelf above my desk. For the most part it was stuffed in a 1-litre Lowenbrau beer stein, which I inherited off a former editor who'd received it as some sort of PR gimmick gift. I've moved desks a few times since then and have kept it in the stein until this last move where I lost a fair bit of space and decided to take a lot of my non-work stuff home.

Due to a severe lack of space at home, alien toy has been donated to my local Vinnies, at which I volunteer once a fortnight. I hope it finds a loving home.

The beer stein, on the other hand, has become the only way I can safely put cut flowers in water...