“STUFF-MAKER” 

When I left regional Australia at 19, I didn’t imagine a decade later I’d be setting up a circus 15km from the Syrian border and spending my remaining time reading the news on national TV. In Finland.

There’s a lengthy backstory. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that, as a foreign freelancer in Finland, I needed to capitalize on ALL of my skills. Those skills just happened to range from wearing a tutu, to pulling off a passable BBC newsreader impression, both of which turned out to be things people would pay me for.

I was a young Australian living in Helsinki in 2010, graduating a Masters in Global Politics straight into the global financial crisis. As had frequently happened in my globetrotting existence thus far, necessity had been the mother of reinvention. I was working across two fields that I was passionate about – media and social inclusion.

Circus for social good

Sirkus Magenta, the circus I founded with a few friends, is a not-for-profit using circus as a tool for social inclusion with special needs groups in Finland and abroad. I was teaching acrobatics to adults, co-ordinating youth inclusion projects and rolling out our service provision in the humanitarian sector, offering psychosocial support to youth in Jordan with one of Finland’s biggest NGOs.

There was many a joke that my years of studying politics had set me up well for being a circus professional. Yet circus is no laughing matter. My work eventually saw me travelling to Afghanistan to teach and to learn some lessons from an incredible organisation that’s been healing tribal rifts through circus for almost two decades.

When I was back on Nordic home turf I also worked part time for Finland’s state broadcaster Yle. Alongside a small team of loveable misfits, I produced and presented the Finnish news in English for national television, radio and online.

Life had been both incredibly busy and very fulfilling. Then I was back in Oz, and it was a very different gig…

Wage slavery in the land of Oz

After 13 years overseas, a desire to re-connect with both past and family took me back to Australia. My aging joints told me the sensible thing to do would be to follow the journalistic route and apply for a steady media job in Sydney. I realized I didn’t know what to call myself.

In Finland (apart from being an acrobat), I was a “toimittaja”. In common usage that essentially means a journalist. Actually, it literally translates to “deliverer” – a sentiment that encapsulates the Finnish no-nonsense approach to reportage.

In Australia, there didn’t seem to be jobs for journalists. Instead, all the mainstream media outlets were offering newsroom positions for “Content Producers”. “Content” is stuff you put into stuff, right? When had a journalist become a “stuff-maker” in Australia?

Discontented

I didn’t think I wanted to be a stuff-maker. However, I soothed my spooked moral high horse by applying only for “respectable jobs” with non-commercial broadcasters.

I did, indeed get a job with a well-respected studio show at a government broadcaster. It was a professionally useful experience that I’m very grateful for, and I met some wonderful people who I collaborated with years later.

However, the work was ratings driven, cut-throat and emotionally taxing. While the approach to making a show had been whittled down to a formula that had delivered a product fairly successfully for a remarkably long time, like a lot of TV, I felt that it did so at a human cost.

My six-month contract gave me exactly the length of time required to feel that I didn’t fit into this environment in the long term and I chose not to renew.

I was a clown-shaped peg in a round hole.

Something rotten in the 4th estate?

For me, the writing was on the wall when many well-respected journalists started to opt out of the main media institutions a few years ago. I get the feeling Australian media is in a state of crisis, pretty much across the board.

At its worst, news media is brutish to employees (and talent), strongly siloed, hierarchical, competitive and struggling to adapt to societal needs when it comes to information and reportage. Few journalists have time to think, to analyse, to investigate. They are stuck in a cycle of “content production”. The spectre of click-counters, ratings and rolling short-term contracts permeate much of their work.

Not only does the industry not have time to consider how to tell stories but also, most crucially, nobody has time to truly, deeply, ponder which stories should be told. Desperation-fuelled competition between channels supports a feeding-frenzy mentality that sees stories best left relegated to the intellectual scrap heap re-purposed and regurgitated ad nauseam in our news feeds. The least important issues get cacophonous airplay, drowning out the real issues when they arise. This plays directly into the interests of the people who don’t want the media – and consequently, the public – to hold them to account.

Combine this with increasingly bloated media monopolies that are pushing us lower and lower down the press freedom rankings, a government stranglehold on funding for the state broadcasters, and a rising cohort of young journalists whose dire financial prospects force them to be more focused on status-quo’ing their way into a job than blowing up the machine, and you’re looking at a pretty bleak picture.

The bizarre thing is, that I suspect a lot of people realize this. So why isn’t it changing?

Changing the record

The truth is, I think it is changing. There are a lot of people and organisations who are attempting to rewrite the narrative, one story at a time. Social change takes time and sometimes you don’t even realise it’s happening.

There are many in media and other walks of life who have, like me, voted with their feet. And doubtless also their bank balances. We refuse to use our skills and education to become round pegs in a system that we feel already has enough of them.

As a freelancer I don’t have a stable, long-term income. I don’t have job security. I don’t have sick leave, holiday pay, or two pennies of super to clink together. My children consume blueberries but for the grace of my salaried, software engineer husband.

But, mostly, I do work that I love. I write and I make films about people who are doing remarkable things. When I interview them – and I have had the immense privilege of speaking with astronauts, refugees, scientists and factory workers – in that time that we talk, I share their passions. I soak in their enthusiasm and sense of purpose, and when I manage to do this, my life is rich and satisfying.

Stories worth telling

In this world, those who benefit from the status quo have a vested interest in keeping people in a state of fear and distrust. The simple truth is that good people are everywhere, researching, communicating, trying and failing. They are supporting their communities, and their colleagues, sharing their vulnerabilities, discovering, innovating, throwing somersaults and making the world a better place.

These are the stories we should be telling.

So maybe in this country I’m a producer, a film-maker, a freelance journalist, or even a copywriter, but perhaps I prefer that you call me a storyteller. Or you can call me a clown.

But please, in world that’s already awash with intellectual detritus, don’t call me a “stuff-maker.”