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dolorosa_12It's the end of another working week, and that means it's time for a new open thread prompt. I was inspired this time by a series of 'Friday 5' questions that I saw several Dreamwidth friends answering last week — feel free to answer all five questions, or just use the spirit of all five in a more general way:
Talk about your engagement with news media, past and present.
1. Did the house where you grew up have a newspaper delivered regularly?
Yes, very much so. Both my parents were journalists, and my father was a political journalist for the vast majority of his working life, so having a regular stream of daily political news was crucial to his job. He used to get print copies of virtually every Australian broadsheet newspaper, which were delivered to our house in a massive roll, wrapped tightly in clingfilm, every morning. He would then spread these out across the whole table, reading the political and opinion sections, with a glass of strong black coffee at his elbow, and the radio blaring at full volume playing one of the news-based ABC stations. On weekends, this cacophony was supplemented with the morning political TV interview shows.
2. Have you ever subscribed to an actual print newspaper?
When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I wrote book reviews and features articles for the broadsheet newspaper of my hometown, and I worked as a subeditor for this paper for two years after I graduated from my undergrad degree. During those years, employees of the paper got free copies delivered to their houses every day, including weekends, so technically I had a print newspaper subscription. That's the only time I've done so, although I avidly read the newspapers that my parents subscribed to, without paying for them myself.
3. When was the most recent time you physically picked up and read a newspaper?
I flicked through this week's issue of the (free, delivered through our letterbox every week) local 'newspaper' (sarcastic quote marks very much deserved), but it's hardly worthy of the name — a mixture of advertorial masquerading as news, local Conservative councillors presenting their own take on local politics as if it is unbiased news reporting, and (the highlight for Matthias and me, read with much hilarity) the 'Soham News' section which appears to just be a local woman reporting on all the bingo and raffle nights she attends each week.
4. Do you pay for news online now?
I have a subscription via Patreon to the Kyiv Independent, plus a number of other independent Ukrainian media outlets. I also donate regularly to Byline Times, and have subscriptions via either Substack or Patreon with a handful of freelance journalists and commentators (although obviously this is opinion writing rather than news reporting). Via institutional subscriptions, I have access to a substantial number of other media outlets (mainly British and American), although that's obviously my employer paying, not me.
5. Do you have any saved newspaper clippings?
I have a copy of every article I ever wrote during the thirteen or so years I worked as a book reviewer. I'm slowly transferring them to my![[wordpress.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/1225b00cee13/-/s.wordpress.org/about/images/wpmini-blue.png)
dolorosa12 longform blog, but the project has stalled due to lack of time on my part. When I was an undergrad I also used to cut out newspaper articles of stories and opinion pieces that seemed very important at the time, but I fell out of the habit after I stopped living in a household that got print newspapers delivered.
Honestly, looking at everything I've written behind the cut, I think my relationship with the news was a lot healthier back when I engaged with everything in print, in a circumscribed manner, even though a) I'm the daughter of two journalists, and lived in a house in which political news reporting was literally spread out across the breakfast table every morning and b) I came of age during the 'global war on terror' era (9/11 happened when I was 16) and my entire early adulthood felt like one long raging fury about American foreign policy and its repercussions and reverberations in Australian politics.
Talk about your engagement with news media, past and present.
1. Did the house where you grew up have a newspaper delivered regularly?
Yes, very much so. Both my parents were journalists, and my father was a political journalist for the vast majority of his working life, so having a regular stream of daily political news was crucial to his job. He used to get print copies of virtually every Australian broadsheet newspaper, which were delivered to our house in a massive roll, wrapped tightly in clingfilm, every morning. He would then spread these out across the whole table, reading the political and opinion sections, with a glass of strong black coffee at his elbow, and the radio blaring at full volume playing one of the news-based ABC stations. On weekends, this cacophony was supplemented with the morning political TV interview shows.
2. Have you ever subscribed to an actual print newspaper?
When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I wrote book reviews and features articles for the broadsheet newspaper of my hometown, and I worked as a subeditor for this paper for two years after I graduated from my undergrad degree. During those years, employees of the paper got free copies delivered to their houses every day, including weekends, so technically I had a print newspaper subscription. That's the only time I've done so, although I avidly read the newspapers that my parents subscribed to, without paying for them myself.
3. When was the most recent time you physically picked up and read a newspaper?
I flicked through this week's issue of the (free, delivered through our letterbox every week) local 'newspaper' (sarcastic quote marks very much deserved), but it's hardly worthy of the name — a mixture of advertorial masquerading as news, local Conservative councillors presenting their own take on local politics as if it is unbiased news reporting, and (the highlight for Matthias and me, read with much hilarity) the 'Soham News' section which appears to just be a local woman reporting on all the bingo and raffle nights she attends each week.
4. Do you pay for news online now?
I have a subscription via Patreon to the Kyiv Independent, plus a number of other independent Ukrainian media outlets. I also donate regularly to Byline Times, and have subscriptions via either Substack or Patreon with a handful of freelance journalists and commentators (although obviously this is opinion writing rather than news reporting). Via institutional subscriptions, I have access to a substantial number of other media outlets (mainly British and American), although that's obviously my employer paying, not me.
5. Do you have any saved newspaper clippings?
I have a copy of every article I ever wrote during the thirteen or so years I worked as a book reviewer. I'm slowly transferring them to my
dolorosa12 longform blog, but the project has stalled due to lack of time on my part. When I was an undergrad I also used to cut out newspaper articles of stories and opinion pieces that seemed very important at the time, but I fell out of the habit after I stopped living in a household that got print newspapers delivered. Honestly, looking at everything I've written behind the cut, I think my relationship with the news was a lot healthier back when I engaged with everything in print, in a circumscribed manner, even though a) I'm the daughter of two journalists, and lived in a house in which political news reporting was literally spread out across the breakfast table every morning and b) I came of age during the 'global war on terror' era (9/11 happened when I was 16) and my entire early adulthood felt like one long raging fury about American foreign policy and its repercussions and reverberations in Australian politics.