Leigh Sales and Rick Morton on Journalism These Days
An excerpt from Leigh Sales' new book, and a conversation between Rick Morton and Bri Lee
News & Reviews Magazine
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This piece also features an in-conversation with Rick Morton. Rick is Senior Reporter at The Saturday Paper and the author of My Year of Living Vulnerably, On Money, and One Hundred Years of Dirt. He also edited Growing Up in Country Australia. Rick’s own fantastic Substack is
.Our original plan for this month’s non-fiction book pick article was for Leigh Sales to answer some of my questions about her new book, Storytellers: Questions, Answers and the Craft of Journalism, but in the end she wasn’t able to get replies to me in time, partly because she was busy preparing for her Andrew Olle lecture. After reading her introduction to the book and the transcript of her lecture I noticed some recurring themes. I’ve also been thinking about the state of journalism these days because I’m reading the Heston Russell v ABC judgment for my PhD in defamation law. The judge in that case spoke very harshly about the ABC being engaged in ‘culture wars’ that inhibited their ability to do responsible and measured public interest journalism. On top of that, I’ll be going to the Walkley Awards ceremony in a couple of weeks. I wanted to chew on some thorny questions about the profession, and who better to do this with than my friend and fellow first-time Walkley nominee, Rick Morton?
So, here we go. Read Sales’ Olle lecture transcript here, an excerpt from the introduction to Storytellers below, and then finally the big chat between Rick and I.
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