Discussing ‘Lonesome Highway’

Let me tell you about ‘Lonesome Highway‘, my first feature for The Weekend Australian’s ‘Review’ arts + culture lift-out. The story - which you should read (or glance at) here before continuing - discusses the challenges faced by Australian country musicians in 2010.

I spent the week beginning Monday, 18 January 2010 playing the part of ‘freelance writer without work’. I was pitching stories every day, and none of them were sticking. By Friday - after alternating between liaising with editors, and catching up with some friends in the Brisbane music scene - all I had was an approval to interview a hip-hop act for an online publication.. who don’t pay for online content, as I learned soon thereafter.

Earlier that week, I’d sent a Dirty Three/Laughing Clowns tour-related pitch to the editor of the Weekend Australian’s ‘Review’ arts and culture lift-out. I’d been email-introduced to her by a helpful fellow editor at The Australian a few months ago, when I was pitching the idea of a story around the Robert Forster book launch/conversation at Avid Reader. (That one didn’t stick either, obviously.)

Fevered as I was in my determination to get a story idea - any story idea! - accepted, I sent that D3/Clowns pitch and promptly forgot about it. I’d prefaced it with a reminder stating that I’m a writer for Rolling Stone, jmag, etc, and that we’d last emailed in November.

At 4pm on Friday, 22 January - generally despondent, after a week of work with few returns - the editor of ‘Review’ called me. That’s 5pm local time from her office in Sydney, owing to daylight savings.

“I’ve got a problem,” she began.

“Oh?” I replied, wondering a) what I might have done to cause a problem, and b) whether I could perhaps solve said problem.

“I need a story on Australian country music following the conclusion of this year’s Tamworth Country Music Festival. My regular music writer’s just gone on leave. Would you feel comfortable taking on this story?”

I paused for several seconds. “…you know I’m mostly a rock writer, right? For Rolling Stone, and stuff?”

She confirmed, and reiterated the question. The story was due on Wednesday; as in, five days’ time. Word length unspecified; it could be 1,200, or it could be 2,000. I inhaled, and accepted the challenge.

Immediately I pictured myself frantically pushing a library ladder around towering bookshelves that represent the contact details of everyone I’ve ever met. “Which of these people knows something about country music?” I yelled, in my mind. I sure didn’t.

In a gesture that would be repeated throughout the time I spent researching, writing and editing the story, the editor took her time to provide me with some suggested paths of research, historical background, and narrative guidance.

As soon as I hung up, I emailed dozens of my contacts within the music industry, searching for anything resembling a lead with regard to country music-related interview subjects. I put the call out on to my friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. And for the first time, I used a site called SourceBottle, which allows journalists to request sources within a wide range of industries and subject matters.

To my surprise, helpful responses began appearing in my inbox as fast as I could send out requests. My contacts introduced me to experts on the subject. My friends on social networks tipped me off to artists and their managers. And SourceBottle delivered some great offers from watchful PR professionals, who were keen to have their clients represented in a story.

So began a crash course in researching the current players in Australian country music. I read stories filed from the Tamworth festival by The Australian’s regular music writer, Iain Shedden, who I’d interviewed a few months earlier for One Movement Word. I wrote an outline of what I planned for the story to cover, and warmed up with some phone conversations over the weekend. I spent Monday on the phone to country musicians, radio announcers, artist managers, alt-country artists, schoolteachers, historians and record label staff.

All told, I conducted 18 interviews, throughout which I scribbled notes in preparation of listening back to the recorded audio. Tuesday - the 26th, Australia Day - was spent shaping what I’d learned from the experts into a coherent story.

While interviewing, a frequently-recurring topic prompted me to pay more attention to the apparent dearth of  media opportunities available to country musicians. Ultimately, this would become the focal point of the story: what was imagined as a mere discussion on where the genre stands in 2010 morphed into a sympathetic piece highlighting the many challenges faced by country performers. As stated in the story, these are related to image, airplay opportunities, marketing, media attention, and even differences within the community.

I submitted my first draft at 4am the next morning. Upon review, my editor suggested that a couple of follow-up quotes were required from Troy Cassar-Daley to describe the genre in his own words. And somewhere between fact-checking and quote-verifying, I’d forgotten to tighten the narrative structure, so my editor reshaped the piece to improve its flow.

Upon confirming her final edit, the biggest story of my career was out of my hands. It wouldn’t appear in print for 10 days. (The cover from the February 6 issue of ‘Review’ is below right.)

It was the most exhilarating journalistic experience of my life. Five days focussed on researching and synthesising the story of a centuries-old art form into around 2,000 words. What a challenge. I’m so glad I accepted it. It even resulted in my first live-to-air radio interview for ABC Mid-North Coast the day before the story was published. (At the time of writing this, I’ve not yet listened back to it, owing to embarrassment…)

In a way, the whole experience - the initial unexpected, but not unplanned-for phone call, the willingness on the editor’s part to take a chance with me - justified the time and effort I’ve dedicated to my writing since I changed my mindset and became serious about pursuing it as a career.

Looking back, it seems that this occurred sometime in June 2009. I’m simply thrilled that eight months later, I’ve been published in The Weekend Australian, one of the country’s biggest newspapers. Awesome. If you have any questions relating to this story, I’ll try to answer them in the comments.

Thanks to the following people who helped with the story.

Interview subjects: Troy Cassar-Daley, Adam Harvey, Graeme Connors, Amber Lawrence, Anne Kirkpatrick, Joy McKean, Felicity Urquhart,  Luke Austen, Chris Pickering, Roz Pappalardo, John Elliott, Geoff Walden, Nick Erby, Bill Page, Aneta Butcher, Cheryl Byrnes, and Scott Lamond.

Contact sources, miscellaneous inspiration: Stephen Green, David Carter, Craig Spann, Deb Suckling, Ed Guglielmino, Rick Chazan, Nick O’Byrne, Alison Brown, Dan Stapleton, Deborah Jones, Rachael Hall, Tim Lovett, Blair Hughes, Paul & Deb McMillen, and Matt Weller.

Filed under Writing | Tags: abc-radio, australia, country-music, genre, iain-shedden, Interview, lonesome-highway, mid-north-coast, Music, sourcebottle, the-australian, the-weekend-australian, troy-cassar-daley | Comments (6)

The Australian Review story: ‘Lonesome Highway’

This is my first feature for national broadsheet newspaper The Weekend Australian’s ‘Review’ arts and culture lift-out. Entitled ‘Lonesome Highway’, it’s 2,000 words on the challenges faced by Australian country musicians. [Click the image for a readable version.]

This is by far the biggest story of my career; you can read about how it happened here. Full story text included below.

Lonesome Highway

Once a year country music gets its moment in the sun, then it all goes cold again. Andrew McMillen reports on a neglected genre

The country music scene appears on the radar of most Australians only each January, at Tamworth Country Music Festival time. Television shows brief clips of guitar-slinging performers; newspapers run wide shots of cowboy hat-wearing, denim-clad fans lining the main street and, if we’re lucky, which we mostly are, we’ll be shown “the weirdest busker on Peel Street”, says singer-songwriter Felicity Urquhart with a sigh, referring to the many performers who line Tamworth’s main drag and vie for the attention of visiting news crews keen to shoot and run.

Golden Guitar winners rate a mention in the mainstream media and then country music is put back in its box.

As singer-songwriter Adam Harvey puts it, “people tend to dismiss country music without giving it a go. They think we still sing about the one where ‘my wife left me and my dog died’, or if you play it backwards, it’s where ‘my dog left me and my wife died,’ ” he says with a laugh.

The problems are many: image, airplay opportunities, marketing, media attention, even differences in the sector about what country music should be in a wider music world dominated by glossy pop singers who flaunt skin and layer digitally enhanced vocals over processed beats .

As Harvey suggests, not everyone even knows what country music is.

The Australian’s music writer, Iain Shedden, puts it this way. “Country music, since it was first called that in the 1940s, has evolved and fractured into hundreds of sub-genres, from alt country to cowpunk to pop country crossover, so it’s impossible to attribute one strict formula to all of it.

“In Australia, however, it’s a little easier to define. Stretching back to the pioneering output of Tex Morton and then Slim Dusty, songs have simple folk structures, generally led by acoustic guitar, but accompanied by other instruments also used in the folk tradition, such as mandolin, banjo, harmonica. Most often the songs are in waltz or 4/4 time,” he says.

“The connection to the land is probably Australian country’s strongest lyrical characteristic, with John Williamson one of the leading exponents of that form. Lyrics often have a narrative, although at the pop end of country (taking Taylor Swift from the US as an example), they can be more abstract (or banal) with no ties to rural life at all.”

Amiable superstar Troy Cassar-Daley calls country “the story of everyday people. Vocally, it’s sincere; instrumentally, it’s proud to wear sounds like banjos and fiddles in the mix. Other music steers clear of those because they don’t want to be labelled, but we proudly use instrumentation that has the feel of the hills that cover this great land,” he says. “Lyrically, it’s pure home-town pride. And you know you’re listening to country - not pop or rock - when you hear songs for the common man. There’s a lot of people living, loving and dying in Australia, and this music is about them.”

Following this creed, Cassar-Daley won six Golden Guitars this year, including album of the year for I Love This Place, taking his career tally to 20.

“Afterwards I got a text from Keith Urban asking, ‘Can you just leave some for someone else?’,” he says, laughing.

Cassar-Daley was a popular winner, but there were questions elsewhere when writer-photographer John Elliott, a festival veteran, gave a lecture titled Let’s Get Real: The Need for Authenticity in Australian Country Music. “Great country music tells stories about our country; about who we are and where we come from. I think a lot of younger artists have lost this focus,” Elliott argued.

He also said performers needed to have an appreciation of what had come before. “Without that respect it becomes very bad pop music,” Elliott said. “And it has to have more of a connection to the country than wearing a hat, having a twangy guitar and getting your clip played on the Country Music Channel.”

Dusty’s widow Joy McKean, who celebrated her 80th birthday with a concert on January 21 at Tamworth’s Capitol Theatre, agreed. McKean is a songwriter who managed her husband’s career for more than 50 years. “As yet, no one has crystallised what it means to be country like Slim did. He was the point of reference for country music, and I don’t think we have that now. A lot of people are paying lip-service to country music for their own means, without having a genuine feeling for the music.”

The variety of music styles being presented in Tamworth this year gave some force to this argument, although Dusty’s daughter Anne Kirkpatrick, while warning today’s performers not to get “too wound up in the image to the exclusion of the heart and soul”, acknowledged the stature of Urquhart and Cassar-Daley in the business.

But no matter how good the country artist, there is still the matter of getting them heard. Aneta Butcher, who manages Australian country music at the nation’s largest independent record company, Sydney-based Shock Records, says: “I don’t know if we’re ever going to get mainstream radio to pick up what we market as country music. If we’re taking a country act to radio, we generally have to provide a pop mix of their single and hope for the best.”

In the US - where Urban is a huge star - there is a vast network of country radio stations, something Australia lacks. Urquhart, who won female artist of the year last month, has been sitting in as host of ABC radio’s Saturday Night Country program while regular host John Nutting is on leave, and says that in the absence of other outlets, “all we can do is try our best to promote, expand and educate the listeners of our ABC program … I truly believe there’s something in country music for every Australian.”

Scott Lamond, who was raised in Bundaberg on a healthy diet of Dusty and Williamson, has reported on country music events for the ABC for the past five years. “I know ABC radio takes country music seriously, but generally speaking there are limited broadcasting opportunities for country artists outside of community radio,” he says. “I spoke with [2010 Golden Guitar winner for group of the year] Jetty Road, who mentioned that there’s around 70 commercial stations in Canada playing country music 24/7. Australia just doesn’t have that; the platforms on offer to artists who want to share their music are limited.”

Harvey has tackled the issue of attracting attention by inviting performers from outside the country realm - including pop singer Guy Sebastian - to sing on his 2009 release Duets. Sebastian headlined a show at this year’s Tamworth festival, which was one of the first to sell out. The presence of such an unashamedly un-country artist was the talk of Tamworth, but as Harvey sees it, there has always been a diverse array of acts on display at the festival, where this year an estimated 2500 acts played across 10 days.

“The old guard tend to forget that the traditional Tamworth crowd’s getting older,” he says. “I understand we’ve got to respect our heritage, but we’ve also got to make sure we’re encouraging a steady influx of young performers. And if we’ve got to drag a few people with us to move the industry forward, we’ll do what we have to.”

Harvey’s willingness to test boundaries, is, he says, just “a bit of common sense. I’m aware of how important it is that we plan a long-term future for our industry.” Performers needed to remember “that we’re product who’re expected to sell records”.

Twelve-time Golden Guitar winner Graeme Connors says the country industry is in something of a trough.

“From my perspective, the music business cannot function without artists who are creating interesting, challenging, and diverse works … The business has this constant demand for large-selling records, and not every artist can do that with every release.” A powerful, individual voice is what’s missing, Connors says.

“That void will be filled in time, if only because the human spirit is incapable of staying in a lull. In the interim, there’ll likely be someone at the young end of the spectrum who’ll find a voice that reminds us just how good music can be.”

This year’s anointed up-and-comer is Luke Austen, winner of the 31st annual Star Maker talent quest. It’s a title previously held by Urban and Lee Kernaghan. Austen, 28, isn’t exactly a neophyte, having spent four years on the road with lauded bush balladeer Brian Young and six years as bassist for Cassar-Daley. He also co-wrote a song on Cassar-Daley’s I Love This Place.

“We prefer to select a winner who’s already working professionally in the industry, because they get it,” quest co-ordinator Cheryl Byrnes says.

A cautionary note is struck, nevertheless, by Geoffrey Walden, founder of the Gympie-based Australian Institute of Country Music. He contends that the Tamworth talent quest programs tend to build artists who don’t appeal to the younger demographic of potential fans. “It’s about marketability from the perspective of what the industry sees as the future of country music. They’re generally after someone who’s marketable and who’ll appeal to a wide audience, but not necessarily a young audience.”

Austen is acutely aware of the expectation thrust on him. “There hasn’t been a major star in a long time, but I’d like to put that pressure on myself because I feel that I’ll perform better. It inspires me to dig in and really make it work. I’ve won the respect of my peers, and now I just have to concentrate on backing it up with good product.”

Nick Erby is a Tamworth local who has attended all 38 country music festivals. “Competitively, contemporary Australian country music is the best you’ll find anywhere. We’re not backwards, we’re just underexposed,” he says.

Erby has a long history of broadcasting country music on radio, but now works online. He points out that terrestrial licenses for Australian radio are restricted and finite, but thousands of stations exist online, each broadcasting to niche audiences. “Online technology is shaking up the radio industry. Once the cost of access drops, the option will become more attractive to a wide array of listeners.”

He sees this as a potential answer to the lack of exposure for country music: his Country Music Radio online simulcast of this year’s awards overloaded his US-based server. “You watch,” he predicts. “In the next two years, the awards will be streamed via live video.”

Industry insiders also point to the success of the 20-year-old Swift, whose career and style could entice young Australian performers and fans. Swift’s second album, 2008’s Fearless, has sold more than seven million copies in the US. Butcher voices a hope shared widely: “Swift appeals to younger girls, who might be influenced to give country music a try,” she says.

Traditionalists may squirm, but this could be the future. As Urquhart says when despairing of the limited view of country music held by the media at large: “What about our shining lights and our new discoveries? There’s so much more to country music than footage of a hay bale and a guy with a chook on his head.”

And even someone as successful as Cassar-Daley half-jokes as he helps out with phone numbers: “Good luck with the story, mate. Keep it positive. We need it.”

This story originally appeared in The Australian’s ‘Review’ lift-out on February 6 2010. A link to the story on The Australian’s website is here.

Filed under Published Writing | Tags: adam-harvey, aneta-butcher, anne-kirkpatrick, cheryl-byrnes, country, culture, feature, felicity-urquhart, festival, geoffrey-walden, graeme-connors, guy-sebastian, iain-shedden, Interview, john-williamson, joy-mckean, luke-austen, Media, Music, nick-erby, Published Writing, Radio, Review, scott-lamond, slim-dusty, tamworth, the-australian, the-weekend-australian, troy-cassar-daley, Writing | Comments (2)

A Conversation With Andrew Ramadge, news.com.au and music journalist

Here’s a conversation I had in August with Andrew Ramadge [pictured right], one of my favourite Australian journalists. He writes about consumer technology for news.com.au, and music for Mess+Noise and The Brag. He came to my rescue when I was humbled by Hungry Kids Of Hungary. He’s written a lot, but my favourite article of his - the one that really brought him to my attention - is ‘Tall Tales And True‘, a look at the state of Australian music journalism for M+N in March 2009.

Andrew: Hey Andrew. I’m mostly interested in how you got into journalism, and how you’ve progressed from print to online journalism. When did you first become interested in writing professionally?

My father was a journalist and he still is. He edits a newspaper now. When I was a bit younger, I swore that I wouldn’t get into the media, that I wouldn’t follow in his footsteps, which as you can tell; I failed at. [laughs]

The first time I realised I really loved writing was when I was at university, in Melbourne. I was doing a Bachelor of Arts. Most people do a Bachelor of Arts when they don’t know what else to do, or when they just want to get on the dole for a while. I was one of those people who really enjoyed it. I loved writing essays, forming arguments, and at the same time I was reading the street press, and reading record reviews. I’ve always loved music. At that point, the street press critics were emerging writers and I thought I could do that as well. I sent in reviews to Beat and that’s how I got started.

So music journalism was your way into the industry?

Yeah, that and the fact that my father was a journalist, so I suppose people would say I always had it in me, anyway. After I finished my degree, I moved to Sydney. I was looking for work and a position was open at News.com.au and I took it. One of the reasons I got into online journalism was because I started my career as a web developer. I sort of had a little bit of experience in journalism, and a lot of experience in online. It seemed to be the perfect synthesis.

Was the opportunity at News.com.au for a consumer tech journalist, or did that role evolve?

I started off as a general news desk journalist. I was doing a little bit of sub-editing, a little bit of production work, as well as putting in calls, and just highlighting the news of the day. After I’d been there about a year or year and a half, I think, before News.com.au put in a new section for technology. Again, because I’ve got a background in computers, and online development, I was kind of a perfect fit. I applied for that job once it became available and I got it.

Do you find it odd that you find you got a job at News without an internship or without that kind of way into the industry, which I know a lot of students do pursue?

I suppose; I’d already been working when I was in Melbourne, for the street press, and also editing the website for Beat magazine online, so I had an online editor experience. Also, I think internships are becoming more rare nowadays. I think Fairfax may have actually suspended their cadetship program recently.

I think the ways that people get into journalism now are different than they have been in the past. One up-and-coming technology journalists that I know is Ben Grubb, who’s also from Brisbane. He will have a career in the industry because a lot of people know him and are keeping an eye on him. He didn’t do a cadetship. He did it himself. He started a blog. He showed he had talent, ambition, and I suppose he went around making good contacts.

Cool. What did you learn during your time writing for street press? You started as a freelancer, I suppose, and then you became a staff member when you were editing.

Yeah, I started out writing reviews and features. At that point, Beat had a website, but it was pretty perfunctory. It wasn’t very good. I wrote a business case for the publishers of Beat magazine to start a new website for them, and then I built it and edited it. That’s that side of it.

What I learned about writing when I was at street press was the same thing everyone learns, really, which is a pretty good introduction: some free CDs, you get to go to a lot of concerts and meet people and figure out how everything works, really. I also eventually learnt not to be precious, which is another good thing. I learnt that there are only so many times that you can get angry at an editor for changing a few of your words. After that happens for a few years, you sort of get used to it, which is a very good lesson to learn, especially for mainstream media where the editing process is a lot more intrusive.

How did you make the transition to Mess+Noise?

When I found out about Mess+Noise, I left Beat. I continued to edit their website but I stopped writing for them, by and large, and threw myself into Mess+Noise, which was the best experience I’ve ever had. It was wonderful.

I joined them for issue two of the print magazine, after I’d seen issue one. That changed the way that I think about everything, really. I went from doing the regular street press thing, which is 400 word reviews and 1,000 word features, to just having free rein to do whatever I wanted. What I wanted to do for Issue 2 was write a 3,000 word piece, not about a particular band, but about a genre and scene in Melbourne, which at the time was the art rock scene, which was centered around the Rob Roy Hotel. That’s what I did.

It was really liberating to just be able to do that. I also realised that anyone could do that. It’s if you have someone who promises they’ll publish it as well, you’ve got an extra impetus.

When I joined Mess+Noise, the editor at the time was Danny Bos, and he really opened up a huge amount of possibilities for me. A bit later on, Craig Mathieson became the editor, and I learned a lot from him, as well.

How did Mess+Noise come about? I’m not too familiar with its history as a print magazine, only the website.

It grew out of another website, which I’m not 100% clear on the back story of, but it was called Mono. It was an Australian music website that was in the late ‘90s, I think. Danny Bos was a member of the team who did that.

After Mono, Danny started Mess+Noise as a website. In some ways it was similar to how it is now. It was mainly a discussion board. He really wanted to put out a music magazine, so as soon as he got organised enough and got his money together, he started doing that. Then it was put out every 2 months for a bit over 2 years. There were 16 issues.

I read that they were purchased by Destra a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

And as of late last year, they’re owned by The Sound Alliance.

Yeah, that’s correct.

How do you think this site got such a strong following and such a devoted, loyal audience? That’s always fascinated me. Its audience seems to be quite opinionated and quite passionate about the indie scene in Australia. How does that come about?

Some of it was a follow on of momentum from Mono, so a lot of the people who used to talk about music on that website followed Danny to Mess+Noise. I also think it grew a reputation over the years of publishing really high quality music journalism, which if you do it for long enough, then it can get you a lot of respect and a lot of people following what you publish.

Do you enjoy writing for the web more than print?

A little while ago I had my first feature in The Weekend Australian; a full-page feature. I enjoyed writing it and seeing it in print, as well. But I suppose I’m one of those writers who is at the right age to still feel very nostalgic about print, which a lot of writers my age do. I had to come to the thinking that “just because it’s in print means that it’s necessarily better than the web”.

When I opened up the paper that weekend, I still liked reading it and seeing it there, but I realised it wasn’t as important to me as some of the stuff I’ve written for online. I think for me, that sort of distinction between print and the web is starting to go. It’s much more about the quality of the piece itself. It doesn’t matter where it’s published.

You mentioned that a lot of people still think that what appears in print is perhaps more valuable and more valid than its web equivalent.

Yeah.

I think that might be related to the fact that print still pays quite well and it still has that professional reputation, whereas I suppose a lot of other online outlets aren’t..

..don’t have the same reputation and they don’t pay as well, is what I think you’re trying to say? It depends on the magazine, the newspaper, or the news website or whatever. Obviously, street press doesn’t pay very well at all. That’s a print title, whereas the website of Pitchfork Media might pay ten times as much as street press.

Part of it is that. It’s not necessarily whether it’s print or web. It’s just the title that you’re writing for. I can tell you that at News.com.au, we pay our online freelancers a professional rate, the same rate that they would get if they were getting if they were writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in print.

As for reputation, you’re right; with newspapers, let’s continue talking about the Sydney Morning Herald. That’s been around for what, a hundred or more years? I think it has been around for more than a hundred years. Over that time, it has built quite a reputation. If you work a few years in there, then – in a sense - the reputation brushes off on you.

But I guess what we’re going to see now is that websites that have been around for a long time aren’t going to go away. The big websites that are there now, theoretically, are going to continue into the future. If they don’t, another website will take their place. They’ll build their own reputations, as well. Give it another 10 or 20 years and you might end up seeing that websites have a stronger reputation for breaking news or publishing quality journalism than print does.

I guess time will tell on that. You mentioned online freelancers for News Limited titles earlier. Do they employ many of those at the moment?

I’m not really sure how many freelancers we’ve got all up. I know that in the technology section, we’ve had several freelancers.

I spoke to a guy from the Brisbane Times a couple of months back and he said they’d pulled all their freelancers because they couldn’t afford them.

We haven’t dropped any of our freelancers, yet. I’m not sure that we will, either. I think everyone realises that at the moment, online publishers are trying to figure out how to make money, and they’re not being particularly successful. That’s a whole range of reasons, and obviously, that’s why both News Limited and News Corp internationally and Fairfax in Australia have both flagged that they’re probably going to be charging for content soon.

I guess that’s why magazines and newspapers can afford to pay writers 70 cents or $1 per word, in some cases, because they do have a traditional advertiser base who understands the rates, and the magazine editors can apportion rates per what they receive from advertising.

Obviously I’m generalising here and trying to make sense of it, but I can see that website editors might not have figured that out yet, which is where the debate about paid content comes in. They’re trying to monetise the user base.

I’d be happy to talk to you about this off the record, but not on record, only because I don’t want my opinions on the matter to come back to haunt me at work.

Fair enough. You mentioned you got your first piece published in the Weekend Australian. How did you get that in there?

Well, The Australian is owned by News Ltd, which is the parent company - the sister company of News Digital Media, which is the publisher of News.com.au. They had an article that they thought I’d be good at. They sent me an email.

They approached you; that’s interesting. I’m sure, over the years, you’ve become familiar with and adept at pitching article ideas. When did you first start to do that, because I’m assuming that during your time at street press, you didn’t get much freedom to pitch new ideas.

You’re right; I didn’t have a huge amount of freedom in what I could pitch. For example, I couldn’t pitch an article on a band that no one else but myself really cared about and that was never going to pay for advertising. Also, I couldn’t pitch for large opinion pieces or in-depth features that would have taken several pages. That’s not the way that street press works.

I did have a little bit of freedom in being able to pitch about local bands. For example, if there was a really great band in Melbourne, I could pitch to the editor and if they ever had a spare half page or something, then I might be able to use that for a small article, which is one of the limitations of street press - and why I joined Mess+Noise was almost evolutionary for the way that I started working.

I still had to pitch articles. What we used to have in the early editions of the magazine was an editorial board; when I say board, we just met at the pub, really. It was a group of writers and editors, and we’d all have to pitch what we wanted to do to the whole group.

There were no limitations. We could pitch whatever we wanted. Half the time, everyone would be like, “Great, let’s do that.” That’s how I came to write 3,000 word articles about a particular scene. In one case, I think there was a 5,000 word article about one musician, or the ’storytellers’ series, where I interviewed different musicians about how they came to write some of my favorite songs. That sort of stuff would never have been in street press, but it still was subject to a pitching process.

You started with verbal pitching at the pub. Do you still pitch articles to your current editor?

Of course. Now that I’m working for a big company like News Limited, pretty much every article that I write has to go through a pitching process.

How does a story idea come about? Do you read something you’re interested in and you think about the angle you’d like to take? Or in some cases, would there would be a news event you have to write on, or your editor asks you to write about?

It’s probably a mix of both, about half the time an editor asks me. There are different sorts of editors; there’s a technology editor, and then there is also whoever is actually running the news portion, whether it is the morning editor or the afternoon editor. Something might be going on that they want a story about, so they’ll ask you to write.

The other half of the time you’ll pitch an idea of your own. You’re exactly right; those ideas come from things that you’ve read or perhaps you’ve had a tip from a source, or whatever. Also, the other thing to note is that your story won’t always come through. You might get a tip off and investigate it but find out later that it’s either not worth the story, or someone told you the wrong thing, or it doesn’t stand up.

What makes a good editor?

I’ve worked with different publications and different styles of publications. Obviously, a magazine editor is very, very different than a breaking news editor. By breaking news I mean somewhere at a pace like News.com.au, which tries to stay up with what’s current 24 hours of the day, 7 days of the week, and tries to be informative about what’s going on at that very moment.

I’ll talk about magazine editors in general, only because that’s where I’ve written a lot more of my feature articles for. In a good editor you need confidence; to not accept any bullshit, either. If someone doesn’t like something, they need to tell you and that’s fine. You also need to be very supportive of your writers.

Do you see yourself becoming an editor in the future?

Yeah, and I think I’d really like that as well, but no time soon. I’m not done with my writing yet. There are still a lot of things that I want to write.

You have News.com.au and you’ve got Mess+Noise occasionally. Do you have any other publications that you write for?

Yeah, I’ve been involved with Mess+Noise for a very long time now, and I used to be an editor there. I was editing the reviews and opinion section of the magazine before it went online. I still write for them whenever I can. It’s just a matter of finding the time now, because I’ve got a full time job and it’s very demanding.

I also have a weekly column in The Brag called Pop In Print. Last year I published an essay for Overland, which is a literary journal. In the future, I’d like to continue publishing pieces in places like Overland and Mess+Noise, which favor in-depth, long-form journalism.

I saw you comment on ‘Tall Tales And True‘ where someone asked you what you got paid for the article. You told them that you’ve long since given up on expecting to be paid for everything you write, and instead you try to focus on what you’re passionate about and telling the best story you can. If you get paid, that’s a bonus. Does that come back to not being precious, which you mentioned earlier?

No, it’s not about being precious, this one. When I first joined Mess+Noise, when it was a magazine, I didn’t get paid for any of the articles that I was writing at that point, only because Mess+Noise didn’t have any money. It was a love job, a do-it-yourself job. Basically, it was just a zine, a very pretty and very high quality zine, but it was still a zine.

Now, I’m really passionate about this; everyone needs to pay the rent, and I suppose I’m lucky enough that I can pay the rent by being a journalist during the day. Even if I couldn’t, I’d still prefer to get a day job and then write about what I want, out of hours, without having to worry about whether or not it’s going to contribute to the rent.

The reason being is that there’s a huge weight lifted. You can write about whatever you want if you don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to get paid for it. A lot of the best things I’ve ever written were for no money and I went into it knowing, and just stopped being concerned. If that’s not a concern, it frees you up to actually prioritise what you really want, which is: “I’ll write this exactly how I want, about what I want.” I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself culture.

It’s interesting because you did that for Mess+Noise and you started with street press, which as you say pays pretty poorly, and in many cases, for all contributors, it’s a love job. The people who write for it love writing about music. Do you find the time to write for pleasure lately? I notice you haven’t been updating your blog very often.

The blog is simply a collection of the things that I publish in Brag, so it’s about 6 months behind the print version at the moment. I don’t have a lot of spare time lately. Hopefully, that will change.

Do you have any daily routines?

No, I’m incredibly disorganised. [laughs] My routine at work depends on what’s going on during the day and what I’m going to try to do in that day. If you’ve got a day where you can go and try to find a new story and break some news, your routine will be a little bit different than when something is broken in North America overnight and you’re following it up.

Are you a procrastinator?

Sometimes, yeah. It’s funny; when it comes to my writing outside of work, the writing I do after 9 to 5, I tend to leave things a little last minute.

Has that been a problem?

Yeah, it can definitely be a problem sometimes. One of the biggest problems it can cause is to add to your stress level. I don’t think anyone would argue that people who are a bit more organised tend to get less stressed out about things and stressed out about getting things in at the last minute. Then again, it depends. Every writer that I’ve ever met works in completely different ways. I’m not too worried about it.

I ask that question of a lot of people, if they procrastinate and how they deal with it. It’s definitely a recurring theme, especially with writers, to sit on a task you know you’ve got until the very end, at the last possible moment. I often think that working that way is possibly sacrificing the potential quality of the piece. If you’re rushing to have it done by a certain time, you’re not fully thinking about the issue, unless you want to argue that by mulling it over for so long it’s just ticking away in your subconscious and you know exactly what you’re going to write.

I believe very strongly in the second model, which is that even if I’m not writing something, if I’ve been thinking about it for a month, what I end up writing in the last day of that month will probably be pretty good. Not probably, actually a lot better than if I’d started on the first day of the month. I can guarantee you I would have been sitting there thinking about the issue for the 30 days before I started writing.

It’s interesting how that works. How do you find new music to write about?

To be honest, probably this year, I’m not writing about new music as much as I have done in the past. As you know, the column that I write every week is about old music. I think that’s probably because when I was editing the review section of Mess+Noise a few years ago, I was totally caught up in everything that was happening that week. I suppose just for a change of pace, when I started doing my column, I started focusing more on what was really important to me and what I was really passionate about. Every record I write about now is not necessarily new but I think it’s got something in it, a reason for people to listen to it, or a reason for people to read about it.

How do you find new music to listen to?

Nowadays I rely a lot on my friends. As you would imagine, a lot of my friends are music critics and they’re probably doing what I used to do, which is keeping on top of things that happen every week, new releases, and who’s touring. Anything they recommend to me I usually give it a try.

So you kind of take the back seat these days and let others drive?

A little bit. I don’t necessarily want to do that forever, but at this point in my career and life, I’m pretty happy having music recommended to me, rather than searching it out all the time, but again, that’s just because of time constraints. I don’t have as much time as I used to, and I’m also no longer a reviews editor, so I don’t get quite as many CDs sent to me.

Thanks for your time, Andrew!

Andrew Ramadge writes for the Technology section of news.com.au. For an outdated list of his writing, check his MySpace and Pop In Print. He’s also on Twitter.

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