Crikey

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum: three cheers for Crikey

Dear Crikey,

First, I’m sorry for all this fuss. I wasn’t talking about a revolution; I just wanted to get paid, and you picked the wrong guy at the wrong time to ask for a charity donation. I’ve had one foot in and the other foot out of journalism all year, partially as a result of the prevalence of this kind of malarkey. People who don’t feel they’ve got a lot to lose are dangerous. And what am I losing? The opportunity to write for you for nix? Woe!

I couldn’t have anticipated, though, that my screed on The Daily Review asking me to write for free would attract such attention. All it took was an entry on a blog that hadn’t seen much action lately, a reprint on mUmBRELLA and a mere 380 Twitter followers. It hasn’t resulted in any more food on the table, or enabled me to quit my night job, but it did start a conversation about for-profit media organisations exploiting writers – especially arts writers – desperate to get their names out there any way they can.

That’s a conversation writers and editors have needed to have for a bloody long time, so props to you for eventually responding to the fracas in your editorial on Friday.… Read more..

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You can’t have me: why I said no to Crikey

Nearly 20 years ago, my first piece of journalism was published. For a music fan, it was an auspicious beginning: I saw a young You Am I supporting rock behemoths the Beasts of Bourbon at the Mansfield Tavern, one of those great suburban beer barns that gave up on live music long ago. One band was at its peak; the other scaling theirs. My review appeared in a Brisbane street paper, and I was paid $35.

My path was set. Before the cheque had cleared I had spent it, down to the last cent, on an anthology of rock & roll writing. In it, I was introduced to all the greats of the genre: Nick Kent, Lester Bangs, Deborah Frost, Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus and the godfather of music criticism, Crawdaddy! founder Paul Williams, who had a significant personal impact on me. Collectively, these writers taught me everything I knew.

I could always string a decent sentence together, but it still took me years to find my own voice. Like most writers, musicians and artists, I derive little enjoyment from looking back at early work. There can’t be too many rawer forms of growing up in public, and while I still enjoy writing about music, it’s not often these days that I write straight reviews of records or shows, as I did with this piece on Television.… Read more..

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Gina buys the chook run

In the early part of his political career, former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen – aka The Hillbilly Dictator – had a jaundiced attitude to the pesky officers of the press corps. “The greatest thing that could happen to the state and the nation is when we get rid of all the media,” he said. “Then we could live in peace and tranquility and no one would know anything.”

No one, maybe not even Joh, knew exactly what he meant by that – you could say that about a lot of his most famous public utterances, actually – but it’s widely suspected that he was serious at the time.

It was Joh’s press secretary, Allen Callaghan, who convinced him that the press, if manipulated effectively, could be used as a political weapon. And Joh, as reactionary a figure as any to have appeared on the Australian political landscape, proved he could adapt. Soon, he would refer to the media as his “chooks”: “I have to feed them every afternoon,” he said.

“Feeding the chooks” has long since entered Australia’s journalistic lexicon to describe the relationship between politicians and their interlocuters. But what if you simply bought the chook run?

Bjelke-Petersen’s good friend, the Western Australian iron ore baron Lang Hancock (who also donated large sums of money to Joh’s political campaigns) understood this.… Read more..

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