You love it. You hate it. You can’t live without it. I am talking about the media. We all have our favourite shows, publications, podcasts, blogs, etc, and we all have ones we hate.

I have worked in this exhilarating and frustrating industry since 1986, as a journalist, announcer, script writer, news reader, talk-back host, editor and producer. In that time I have conducted more than 40,000 interviews with actors, singers, politicians, sports-people, scientists, and ordinary, everyday, garden-variety people!

Although most of this time has been spent in Australia , this industry provided me with countless opportunities for travel and allowed me to live and work for extended periods in Hungary and the UK .

It is sad to see the “gutting” of newsrooms and news services in the Australian industry, especially because the general public is unaware of just how under-resourced and restricted many of our journalists are. There is a lot of “non-news” and “spin” being substituted for “real” news, as networks and publishers devolve their media channels into sideshows, using tabloid tricks to grab our attention, so that we will watch/read the ads that fund their services.

I will try not to be too sombre in my blog about the media and I invite you to join me in this discussion.