With the media in strife, I quit my comfy journalism job – what was I thinking?

OPINION: After a quarter of a century on the job, Adam Dudding is ready to go it alone as a freelancer. And he’s really hoping reports of journalism’s death are greatly exaggerated.

We’d all been thinking it for ages, but it was the New Yorker that crystallised it into the perfect phrase. The term we journalists needed when talking about the likely future of our industry was: “extinction-level event”.

The New Yorker piece was published in early February: a long essay surveying the ailments of and grim prognoses for America’s media companies, with an illustration showing a primeval valley full of dinosaurs name-tagged “New York Times”, “Buzzfeed”, “Sports Illustrated” and so on – with a fiery asteroid skimming the treetops, seconds away from vaporising the lot of them.

It was US-centric, but it might as well have been written about us. Just days later, Stuff boss Sinead Boucher was warning a select committee about an “extinction-level event” facing Aotearoa’s media firms. Then the horrible news broke about Newshub’s imminent demise and TVNZ’s proposed newsroom cuts. Meanwhile in print newsrooms, journalists who’d already survived multiple redundancy rounds wondered how many more times they could get away with it.

Me? I had no such fear, but that was only because I’d recently handed in my notice after 22 years as an editor, reporter and podcaster at Stuff and its variously named predecessors (INL, Fairfax) and was readying myself for some adventures in the world of independent podcasting. Walking away from a job, just as the economy slumped and the market braced for a deluge of talented yet unemployed broadcasters, may turn out to be the single dumbest financial decision I’ve made. For now, though, I’m telling myself it’s better to make a controlled abseil down the cliff than stand on the crumbling edge waiting for a sudden shove in the small of one’s back. Plus there are some interesting projects I’m itching to have a solid go at before my knees, prostate, prefrontal cortex and other age-prone parts of the body crack up due to the inexorable passage of time. (And yeah, I think it’s going OK so far, thanks for asking.)

Amid all this extinction talk, though, I still felt like one of those dinosaurs in the illustration. Or more accurately, if you zoomed in close, I guess I’d be one of those beetles that live symbiotically on a dinosaur’s back, obliviously nibbling prehistoric feathers.

Either way – bactrosaurus or beetle – I’m not at all delighted about that asteroid. After more than a quarter-century in the business, I reckon I’m only just getting into the swing of journalism, and I don’t feel like stopping quite yet.

Objectively speaking – and one of my jobs as a journalist is to be objective – we are seriously in the poo. The New Yorker cited 2681 layoffs in broadcast, print and digital news media in the US last year. The Spinoff crunched some New Zealand numbers and concluded that a journalist workforce of 4000-odd in 2006 might soon be only 1450 strong.

Yet media’s imminent death is very old news. When I was working for newspapers in the UK in the late 1990s there was already great consternation about what the internet would do to advertising revenues and circulation. Back home in Aotearoa I vividly remember, around 2005, reading about waves of newspaper closures across the US, and bracing myself for the tsunami to hit me at the Sunday Star-Times. But then it didn’t.

Sure – the company was pouring resources into our websites because that was the future, and management was standing by, ready to smooth the pillow of a dying medium (or simply smother it, if necessary), but somehow all the digital income never really arrived, and enough readers insisted on buying our fusty old paper-and-ink editions in numbers that proved just sufficient to stave off the inevitable. Advertising earnings were, indeed, falling off a cliff as TradeMe took the classifieds and Facebook and Google perfected their targeted ad delivery engines, yet somehow old media persisted both offline and online, where we doggedly optimised our websites to satisfy opaque SEO algorithms.

And sure – it felt a bit grim to be working in a perenially “doomed” industry, but bitter cynicism is like Horlicks to journalists – it actually helps us sleep better. So we kept chasing yarns as our newsrooms fitfully shrank, scratching a tally mark on the back of our bulky CRT computer monitors each time we survived another cull.

By the early 2010s, I was uncomfortably aware that I might run out of job before I’d run out of mortgage, so I made an effort to diversify the old skillset. I wrote a book in 2015, ghost-wrote a second in 2017 and began an initially successful pestering campaign to be allowed to make podcasts for Stuff as well as write newspaper features.

(It hasn’t escaped my attention that book-publishing and podcasting are facing precisely the same headwinds as print media, and that I clearly didn’t diversify widely enough. I’m still haunted by the advice I received from a fellow soccer dad a decade ago to get into barber shops, because “cutting hair is the one job the internet can’t f*** up”. Then again, I did feel for the guy when a pandemic came along and temporarily f***ed up the one job the internet hadn’t f***ed up.)

Dying industry or no, I’ve managed to squeeze a good couple of decades out of journalism even since those first doomy predictions of 2005, and whether the asteroid hits or not, I’ll remain forever grateful for those decades.

Not long ago a senior news executive said to me, somewhat reproachfully, that having a job isn’t always about having fun. I begged to differ. I’ve been enjoying myself on work time for years now, and I think I detect a correlation between the stories that brought me the greatest pleasure and the ones readers or listeners have contacted me about because they hit a chord.

Perhaps “pleasure” is a weird word to describe investigations into historic child abuse or cold-case murders, or talking to a hospice worker about what makes a good death, or talking to scientists about intestinal worms and covid death rates, or pursuing Vanuatu’s chief of police around Port Vila to ask him what he knew about some deaths in custody and his alleged moonlighting as a witch-doctor.

Yet I think it’s the right word: there’s real pleasure, however sober, in realising that you’re close to figuring out what really happened in a police interview room decades earlier. There’s pleasure in spending time with a reluctant interview subject until they feel ready to tell their important story, even if they eventually choose not to. There’s pleasure in juggling a mountain of words and ideas and interview recordings on your laptop and in your head until they’re in an order that’s going to make sense to an audience.

It’s also been fun in perfectly unserious ways. What’s not to like about getting a phone interview with Michael Caine, John Cleese or Eva Longoria? It’s hilarious hearing a scientist explain how he uses a chemical that smells like shit in his psychology experiments. If I have on occasion been forced to eat expensive food or drink fancy cocktails in service of a very unimportant story to fill a gap on a page, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

Were our readers having as much fun reading this stuff as I was having writing it? For stories I wrote before the advent of real-time data about page impressions and click-rates, that’s almost impossible to say. Yet somehow, between the Reithian imperatives to inform, educate and entertain, and the commercial imperative to churn out enough column inches to keep the ads apart on the page, we liked to think we were doing something worth doing.

If we can’t redirect the asteroid in time, obituaries will doubtless talk about how a diversity of strong media platforms had been essential in our free society because they informed the public about how the world works, and because they held governments and powerful interests to account, uncovered corruption and shone light into dark places. All of which is true.

But we shouldn’t forget that mainstream media was also the place we could discover Michael Caine’s advice for making the perfect slice of toast, and hear a scientist talk about the psychological impact of a truly disgusting fart.

I’ve drifted into the past tense, like it’s already all over. But it’s not. The financial peril facing media companies is undoubtedly way more serious than when we got the jitters in 2005. But there are reasons to be cheerful, even now. Here are few:

Once it does clear, I haven’t a clue what the view will be like. I guess in this metaphor I’m already vaporised so I personally won’t care. But maybe it’ll be like after the real asteroid of 66 million BC where, after a mere 30,000 years of darkness and desolation, life on Earth bounced back. Big dinosaurs were history, but some smaller, reclusive animals (including our own furry mammalian ancestors) had survived by dint of being in some squalid little burrow on Asteroid Day and would, eventually evolve, thrive, take over the planet and invent newspapers.

I realise I’ve already stretched this metaphor well beyond its breaking point, but we’re almost there, so bear with me just a few more sentences.

Is it the case that in a world of lumbering media dinosaurs, we should perhaps be making a careful search of the undergrowth and small holes in the ground, to see if we can spot those hardy, adaptable (and quite possibly cute and fluffy) species of media animal that will hang on through the dark winters that follow, preparing for their day in the sun?

If you go looking, and if you do find one of these remarkable creatures, would you mind asking them something for me? Do they need any freelance stories? And if so, what’s the rate per word?