An incredible year of The Journo Project
What an incredible year for Streets of Your Town—The Journo Project!
As we all emerge from our Covid-induced slumber, and wonder what on earth comes next, I just want to thank you all for your support through this toughest of years.
What started as a dream to interview Australia’s best journos and celebrate their commitment to the craft in the face of increasing pressures on press freedom, is now more than two dozen episodes strong.
And if you need reminding, here is a roll call of the 27 brilliant journos from across our wide brown land and links to each of the episodes which have inspired us over the past year: https://player.whooshkaa.com/shows/streets-of-your-town
Or you can revisit the archives with the newsletters: https://soyt.substack.com/archive
And the last four episodes were talking to journos as Covid-19 started to wreak havoc across Australia. What an incredible slice of emerging Aussie life you have enabled and brought to life my friends.
This is important oral history for the nation, and could not have happened without you. The Journo Project is all because of you my subscribers.
I can’t thank you enough for believing in me, and spreading the word to your mates and colleagues about the importance of celebrating the great journalistic achievements that have given us freedom and democratic rights as a nation.
While I too took a hit through Covid, with a troublesome tooth and flooding hot water system still wreaking some havoc, it was knowing that you all kept subscribing that helped pull me through. Truly. And to keep producing top podcast content for you to continue to spread the word. That if we take our press freedoms for granted, they will continue to dissipate. And in this era of Covid, combined with cutbacks to media across the nation, we need a robust fourth estate more than ever.
So I thought I’d end the financial year with a story of hope in the face of the regional media cutback tidal wave of late.
It comes from one of my other podcasts, Remarkable Tales, which I produce for Griffith University.
Sometimes it’s the stories of people starting out in the face of such great obstacles that gives us hope.
In this podcast I speak to Taylah Fellows, who has snared a highly prized cadetship at Scone in the Upper Hunter Valley, to kick off her journalism career.
And I want to let you know that if you decide to continue to support me with a paid subscription through this coming year, not only will you get Wandering Journo merch, but you will also get first dibs on The Journo Project book that will pull together all of these interviews and insights from the journos you’ve enabled me to interview.
I’m also going to do my bit for regional journalism, where my career began with the ABC in a one room office in Port Augusta covering two thirds of South Australia’s outback. I'll continue producing the Streets of Your Town podcast doing interviews from all the small towns I travel to in Mildred my cantankerous kombi. Know that your support puts petrol in my van, and toasted sandwiches in my kombi to help bring you the stories from beyond the everyday stories in our capital cities.
If you are a paid subscriber, your renewal will come any day now. You can resubscribe for a year or monthly. Please support with a paid subscription if you can, to keep my storytelling from the road alive.
And please, share this newsletter widely to spread the word about the Streets of Your Town podcast.
And if you can, please review Streets of Your Town in your podcast provider of choice so that the word spreads and it gets into more earholes.
Feel free to reply to this email and you will get me—not someone else but little old me! Tell me what stories you’d like to hear more of, what your concerns are about press freedom in Australia, or even just say g’day—I’d love to hear from you!
Thank you all my great Journo Project supporters!
Nance