- Title
- Journalism, A Love Story
- Creator
- Biggins, Felicity
- Relation
- The Elephant’s Leg: Adventures in the Creative Industries p. 276-289
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/978-1-86335-244-4/CGP
- Publisher
- Common Ground
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- I had no intention of becoming a journalist after I left school. I was going to be a pop singer. But Mum, who knew better than I did what it takes to become a pop singer, made me apply for a cadetship at The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate. It was 1976, when an apple was a piece of fruit and the internet hadn't been invented. Being a cadet reporter was fun. There’s nothing quite like the power of the press. As a reporter at The Herald and later the ABC, I was not only granted access to all areas, but paid to write about everything I saw and heard in all those hallowed spaces, recording history as it was being made and interviewing Prime Ministers, rock stars and everyone in between. Back then we took it for granted that journalism was necessary and people would always be willing to pay for it. But by the time I became a journalism lecturer at the University of Newcastle, more than 30 years after that first lucky break, all the certainties that had underpinned journalism had begun to implode. Just as I was gaining a newfound appreciation of the privileged position I’d held as a newspaper reporter and later a broadcast journalist at the ABC, studying my former craft as an academic and imparting my passion for it to undergraduate students, fully understanding its vital importance to social cohesion and to democracy, digital disruption was blowing it up. Journalism was facing its biggest threat since its arrival three centuries ago.
- Subject
- journalism; digital disruption; journalism education; power of the press
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1471375
- Identifier
- uon:48664
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780949313812
- Language
- eng
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