Intelligence from Little Darwin contacts in the media world here and overseas does not paint a glowing picture. Freelancers and casuals are finding it hard to find outlets in Australia as media companies continue to tighten their belts and shed staff.
It is the same situation in New Zealand where some scribes may have to resort to sheep rustling to survive . Over the silly season there, for example, The Dominion newspaper ran boring unpaid for articles by amateurs about their best ever holidays , what their best teachers taught and how they spent Christmas as children. As one top Kiwi journo said, this avoided the need to pay freelancers to write real articles of interest. He predicted that there would be an outbreak of this kind of cheap reporting in Australia.
In America the prospects for journalists is truly grim , unless you fancy ranting like a rabid dog about President Obama on TV or in certain anti Obama papers. Incidently, US President George W. Bush's "brain" and the "turd blossom" of the Bush grey matter , tricky Karl Rove , who escaped justice , got a run in the Weekend Australian in an article critical of President Obama .
One healthy area of a kind of journalism , some of it dodgy , is the blogosphere . There is a beaut Best of Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau showing a dejected Washington Post reporter who has just been made redundant being consoled by a workmate who tells him he can start a blog with the "golden credit " that he was formerly of the capital's newspaper . The reporter newly thrown on the scrapheap points out there are 110 million blogs . His friend says : "Exactly-it'll make you stand out."
A longtime observer of Australian media says while it is customary for newspapers to run slim books during the silly season, some major newspapers and their inserts, including magazines, seemed exceptionally thin this time . He has also detected a growing tendency to pander to advertisers by running what were plainly advertorials or gormless PR handouts which would have been spiked or binned in previous years .
