NOT THE CONVERSATION JOURNOS WANT

                                                    How academics are killing freelancers           

Thou woldest han oure labour al for noght. The hye god, that al this world hath wrough Seith that the workman worthy is his hyre.

Geoffrey Chaucer:  The Summoner’s Tale.

What fools we journalists are to study the father of English literature and not harken to his ‘little treatise.’  Now we harvest the sowings.

The journos ‘let go’ by the ABC and other media might ponder freelancing along with the 3,000 who’ve lost jobs this decade past. Can they put food in their school kids’ lunchboxes by staying with their trade? Unlikely.

How about that long-promised book?  Possible if you’re M B Turnbull or M L Trump  but the one I’m still hawking is knocking on the doors of deskless offices, unplugged cables dangling from ceilings.

Much of what you now read in the media is unpaid work – and that includes this rant.  My excuse is that Pearls & Irritations is a not-for-profit maintained by people of repute, concerned public discourse is dominated by philistines shouting louder and reasoning less.

Some journos have survived downsizing: The smarties got out before being told, swapping newsrooms for sandstones. Respected names like Michelle Grattan and Peter Manning saw the press was facing a tsunami of change and debt, so headed to the uplands of tertiary education and the safety of stipends.

A few turned from loss to boss.  After leaving the big chair at The Age in 2008, Andrew Jaspan hired sub-editors to clean and sharpen turgid academic papers for an independent non-profit free website. The Conversation was a bold idea that’s thrived, thanks to a claimed 20,000 donors.

Unfortunately Jaspan’s gown-to-town deal is killing the hopes of those who think chasing the story to witness and tell is what our trade once did well. We’re following lamplighters and town criers into extinction.  

Newspapers, the ABC and this website cherry-pick The Conversation’s Creative Commons copy from screen-bound scholars.  

The Conversation is blessing many academics. Rather than being published in some obscure quarterly with a double-digit readership, they can have their work read by thousands.  In the free-fire zones of academe, it’s be cited or blighted. 

(After 14 years with the University of Technology Sydney, business academic Dr Lucy Zhao was fired for not meeting research publication targets.   She won her unfair dismissal claim through the Fair Work Commission this year.)

The West Australian (aka Harvey Norman Times) is where I started as a cadet and left long ago. Last year it sought to republish a recent story.  The features editor wrote:  “I’m afraid I don’t have a budget to offer you payment!’ The exclamation mark was his. 

I replied: “Journos not getting paid?  We should have become plumbers.”

The tabloid is owned by Seven West Media and like other traditional media is in strife. The company’s shares are now worth 12 cents. In 2007 they traded at AUD 13.57.  It’s chaired by Kerry Stokes with a reported net worth of AUD 4.7 billion.

Presumably he pays the plumbers who unblock the toilets in his Dalkeith mansion.  Cheating on tradies is an Australian cultural crime.  Unfortunately people who tap keyboards rather than pipes are excluded.

Parsimony isn’t parochial. The Diplomat is a prestigious international online current affairs magazine started in Australia, now in Washington.  It’s sometimes bought my words. 

Now it includes a question to contributors:  Do you want to be paid?  Tick ‘Yes’ and guess the result.

The ABC reportedly buys freelance copy, but don’t expect a reply to your inquiry. Likewise with The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and almost all the rest.  They’ve pinched Centrelink’s ICS (Ignore Client System) minus the lie:  ‘Your call is important to us’. 

The Web is full of traps for the new jobless, baited with fairytales of thousands paying to read aggregations of lifted stories peppered with the author’s thoughts, what used to be called ‘vanity publishing’. There are e-mail list platforms which claim to help freelancers thrive.  

Here’s one spiel: ‘Our top writers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by doing the work they care about most and serving their communities of readers.’  Added are examples of newsletters on parenting, music and psychedelics supposedly maintained by subs.

For narrowcasters delivering inside info, or expert at decoding government decisions on issues like superannuation, there may be a market.

 If you write about alleged celebrities’ wardrobe malfunctions, or gush about travel, some may contribute what one critic called ‘digital tip-jar’ payments.

Though not for news and current affairs when there’s peak quality journalism for a pittance.  Just 25 US cents a week will get the New York Times in your e-mail box. The latest Washington Post offer is $29 a year.

The average annual wage for Ozzie journos is AUD 54,000.  Anyone expecting to make even a tenth freelancing is fluttering in the land where cloud cuckoos dwell.  Better off finding a red-brick offering a wrench-ready STEM subject, government subsidised.

If you’ve spent your career handling leaks, then plumbing should be just right.

 Duncan Graham was ‘let go’ by three publishers in one week when Covid-19 hit.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 22 July 2020:
https://johnmenadue.com/how-academics-are-killing-freelancers/

FRANK PALMOS - JOURNO ISTIMEWA

Siap! (Ready!) The battle cry of the 1945 pemuda. Dr Frank Palmos (centre) with East Java Governor H Soekarwo and Western Australian Trade Officer Martin Newbery at the thesis handover.

FROM RAGAMUFFINS TO REVOLUTIONARIES

Historian Dr Frank Palmos’ claim that the 1945 Battle of Surabaya was ‘Indonesia’s Gallipoli’ might leave many Indonesians puzzled.

But his apt description resonates with his fellow Australians. They’ll immediately understand even though the ragged, ill-armed Indonesian independence fighters lost. They started as ragamuffins, but they graduated as Revolutionaries

The 1915 invasion of Turkey on the beaches of Gallipoli Peninsula by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was a debacle – but it led to the two countries’ soldiers creating their own ANZAC image and history, independent from Britain.

Likewise the prolonged stand by an untrained force in East Java was doomed when thrown against the war-hardened British and Gurkha troops equipped with tanks, planes and ships, fighting on behalf of the Dutch, desperate to retrieve their East Indies treasure.

The bamboo spear boys were determined not to let their loathed masters back when the Japanese occupation forces surrendered. They fought furiously in deadly street battles, mightily impressing their opponents.

The Allies had been misled into expecting a pushover by the Canute colonisers who couldn’t read the changing tides. The world took note. International support for a Dutch return began to ebb.

“The people of Surabaya were the first to be fully free Indonesian citizens,” said Dr Palmos. “They seized their city from the Japanese, defending it while extending the Republic’s first independent territory.

“They created a functioning civil service that went deep into East Java when Jakarta and the rest of the country was controlled by foreigners, even though Independence had been proclaimed in August.

“They had freedom for 99 days. About 100,000 eventually died, and when the Dutch took over the city was maybe 70 per cent empty.

“Until recently these important events haven’t been adequately addressed by local or international scholars for a number of understandable reasons.

“Most relate to the versions of history imposed by the first two presidents, Soekarno and Soeharto. They used Indonesia’s revolutionary history to portray themselves in pivotal roles and to buttress their administrations. Neither man fought in Surabaya.”

Dr Palmos will present Surabaya 1945; Sacred Territory to Soekarwo, the Governor of East Java to mark Heroes Day. It’s an academic work but Dr Palmos is no sequestered scholar.

After mastering Indonesian in villages and kampong, in 1964 he opened the first Australian news bureau in Jakarta. Few foreigners understood the language so the young reporter became an honorary simultaneous interpreter for diplomats and journalists covering President Soekarno’s speeches.

Later he reported on the Vietnam War. During the 1968 Tet Offensive he was the sole survivor of a Viet Cong ambush that killed four journalists. His book of the tragedy, Ridding the Devils, explores his post-war return, seeking the man who shot his colleagues when it was clear they were unarmed reporters. It’s also a scarifying account of post-stress trauma.

After working in Paris and the US Dr Palmos became an award-winning TV reporter. He also translated The Sorrow of War, the story of a Vietnamese soldier by novelist Bao Ninh. The work has been judged by the Society of Authors in London as one of the best 50 translations of the 20^th century.

Work on his thesis, which may be published as a series of school-level books next year, began in 1996 when Dr Palmos retired from journalism, successfully challenged a near fatal rare disease and returned to study.

He ransacked archives in Indonesia and Britain, translated more than 1,500 pages from Indonesian into English, and videotaped interviews with scores of veterans and historians, like Retnowati Abdulgani-Knapp.

Her father, Roeslan Abdulgani who died in 2005, was a Revolutionary who later became UN ambassador. He bequeathed his papers to Dr Palmos, and these became his research starting point. The author ranks the diplomat’s account of the battle – 100 Days that shook Indonesia - as the best local history.

Other sources included Suhario Padmodiwiryo (Memoirs of a Student Soldier), and Irna Hadi Soewito, author of the memoirs of Brigadier-General Sungkono, the Inspector general in the army during Soekarno's presidency.

These writers and some veterans are expected to be at today’s ceremony, but the restless Australian still wants to meet others who may have escaped his net.

“I’m hoping to draw out of Surabaya, Malang, Mojokerto, Kediri, Sidoarjo and elsewhere memoirs that are probably lying about in family drawers and boxes left by departed veterans, or with luck, by living veterans,” he said.

“My work will bring about massive changes to the Internet ‘histories’ of Surabaya of the time. Almost all the current stories on the Battle of Surabaya have to be rewritten and replaced with genuine, original research. Most of the foreign literature on the Battle is based on counterfeit or flimsy reports.”

Frank Palmos life is a template for a do-it-yourself career in journalism. He was born in rural Victoria in 1940, the son of a Greek shopkeeper. He started work at 14 as a newspaper messenger boy knowing exactly what he wanted – to be a war correspondent. But the stairs were steep in an industry dominated by Anglo-Saxons.

Fortunately he was gifted with compensations; tenacity, curiosity, and the secret of migrant families’ success – a gluttony to learn. His knack of picking racecourse winners raised cash for books and travel.

Australian columnist and broadcaster Peter Russo, who was forever badgering his Eurocentric audience to understand their Asian neighbors, pushed the young journalist to focus on Indonesia.

When his newspaper opened a Jakarta office fresh Frank elbowed aside seasoned correspondents for the job because he’d single-mindedly seized the language and grappled the culture.

He was rewarded by witnessing the great jolts of history, like the coup that felled Soekarno and raised Soeharto, and to be in Vietnam before governments learned how to turn reporters into puppets.

“I’ve long held to the belief that we should add something to the worth of the world,” Dr Palmos said. “We should add knowledge, and it should be lasting.”

Does he think he’s achieved his goals?

“Yes, I do, I’m confident of that.”

(First published by The Jakarta Post 10 November 2011)