...as it was called, has gone. I’m talking about The Bulletin which if you don’t live in Australia may well mean very little to you, but it was this country’s weekly news magazine for 128 years, which is not a short time.
Now, they’re talking about its demise having to do with the internet which is a load of, pardon my French, bollocks. Okay, the internet has weaned some people off good quality journalism, those people who can’t be bothered to pick up a magazine for example, but no it went deeper than that.
If you placed The Bully side-by-side with Time magazine – also a news weekly – it just didn’t cut the mustard. Okay, Time has more people working for it globally but even in Australia, Time outsold The Bully and that’s without all the local content. Why’s that, then? Well, maybe, just maybe, The Bully was too Australia-centric. I'm not sure either that Aussies care for high-quality journalism, after all the surf is up and the beach beckons. Also, if they did we wouldn’t have Channels 10, Seven and Nine, staffed almost exclusively with what the head of Channel Nine recently called, “presenters who have fuckability”. I don’t think he meant they were fuckwits, though I can’t be sure given their onscreen ability, I think he meant they had to look good and have a certain, ahem, appeal, presumably to male viewers. When I worked in TV in the UK we preferred journalists, not vacuous blondes or bouncy brunettes with eyebrows that demand a team work on them before the curtain goes up.
Now, I have - I should say, had - a soft spot for The Bully. I worked freelance for them for almost three years and had over 30 feature articles published on eveything from autism to organic food, to immortality, nanotechnology, and people who can’t use roundabouts properly – I kid you not. Now, I thank them for the 80 grand or so but I’d rather they’d got their act together and kept me and all the other writers gainfully employed. Then again, the publishing company is now owned by a bunch of venture capitalists, not a media mogul – maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with it too...