it’s been a shitty week

Saying goodbye to colleagues is always tough. On average, over the course of a career, humans spend roughly 90,000 hours at work. These are people you spend most of your days with, so to have them suddenly not there is an adjustment at best and whiplash at worst.

When I started as editor of Junkee six months ago, I wrote in my first newsletter about how lucky I felt to be surrounded by such an immensely creative group of people, and I stand by that. I want to thank our departing brethren for their passion, and I’m sure you can understand that those who are left need a little time to grieve and figure out what the next iteration of this publication will look like.

I also wrote that, likely to my detriment, I refuse to give up on the industry that quite frequently doesn’t love me back. I myself have been made redundant twice, and during COVID spent eight months “freelancing” (aka pitching into the void) before landing a job for which I was overqualified and underpaid. It seems every day there’s another media obituary, or a LinkedIn post from an out-of-work journalist, or a news story about the consolidation of ownership followed by mass layoffs. Forgive me for sounding reductive, but it’s a real bummer.

So why keep doing this? A mentor of mine once said that journalists are among the few professionals who define themselves by what they do, even if they’re not doing it anymore, maybe because we spend our careers pouring a little bit of ourselves into every piece of work. That’s really hard to shake. But we at Junkee also refuse to believe that the written word is dead. It’s 5,000 years old, for god’s sake. We invented it to track livestock and grain, and somehow ended up with Shakespeare and Twitter echo chambers. You’re telling me we’re done?

Of course, we can’t pay bills and rent with belief and a dream, but what we can do in this next era is commit to publishing’s first principles and surround ourselves with partners who want the same: tell stories that people can’t get anywhere else, champion emerging and diverse artists, and ask great questions. Still proudly independent, of course. - Soph