Passion and precarity: producing public interest journalism after job loss

Abstract

Commitment to pursuing stories in the public interest is a longstanding and ongoing tenet of professional journalists and journalism. But what happens when journalists take redundancies and want to continue this work? In this chapter, we meet three people, on different continents, who have reinvented themselves in order to practice public interest journalism beyond redundancy, and in new ways that challenge some of the limitations they experienced in their former, traditional newsroom, careers. The primary data for this chapter is three semi-structured interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020 with Jeanne Pinder in the United States, Michael West in Australia, and Siem Eikelenboom in the Netherlands. All three are successful career-long public interest journalists who between them have accrued major awards, broken impressive stories, and done many of the jobs that journalism demands – from local reporting to international investigations across print and broadcast media. They have all experienced redundancy at major media organisations and have gone on to create websites outside the mainstream that produce distinctive forms of public interest journalism. Jeanne Pinder has harnessed her knowledge of reporting and the business of media to establish ClearHealthCosts, a website with a novel methodology to help readers negotiate cheaper health care in the United States. Michael West has built on his experience as a business editor and popular columnist to launch an eponymous website that tackles Australian corporate tax evasion. And, after a stellar career as a national investigative reporter, Siem Eikelenboom has returned to his hometown in the Netherlands to launch a website that holds local institutions to account.