XOXO, Gossip Girl

I'm doing a radio course at the moment, at SYN in Melbourne. While print media will always be my favourite medium and I can see myself writing for print and online my entire career, I'm also keen to try a bit of radio and maybe some television too. Anyone who knows me knows how crazy I am about music, so I love the idea of having my own radio show. I get to play the tunes I like and force them on listeners, hopefully they will like what I play too, and maybe discover a new band to love in the process. 

I'm not very confident about speaking on air yet, but I hope that practice will help me overcome that and I can pretend that I'm not shy. 

At the end of our four-week course, we're encouraged to put together a demo as an audition to have our own radio show for ten weeks. I already have an idea about what kind of music I want to play and what topics I want to discuss, but I don't have a name for it and I think I need a catchy sign-off too. All my favourite journalists have one. I need a signature phrase, or maybe I'll have a theme and do something like having the last song from my show always being from a certain year, or country. Or maybe I could just end it by saying my name over and over again, in various vocoder tones. Yeah, that'd be real cool. 

Walter Cronkite "And that's the way it is."

Edward R. Murrow (As portrayed by David Strathairn in Good night and Good Luck) "Good night, and good luck."

Ron Burgundy, "You stay classy San Diego."

I'm currently listening to Tame Impala's live set on Triple J. It sounds lovely, I can't wait to see them in October! I love the way they're blending their songs into one another, going from Forty-One Mosquitoes Flying in Formation directly into Half Glass Full of Wine. It's like one long jam sesh. I'm sure there is a technical term for it, but clearly, I know nothing about music. 

Romantic Writes

I have a rather romanticised view of newspaper journalism. In my head, my career is a palate of black and white, full of soft-focus close ups and high-speed car chases. With the pen as my sword, I talk fast, and break hearts. I am impeccably dressed, with rouge on my lips and a closet full of bold-shouldered jackets and spindly high heels. Editorial meetings take place in a room clouded with smoke where I, with a fag suspended between my lips, get sent off to chase that lead. I live on caffeine, guzzling numerous cups of coffee while I sit in front of my typewriter. I am a hard-hitting journalist who doesn't take no for an answer.

"... opening up the newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in democracy -- a newspaper, Kiddo, is about style."

But in reality, everything is different. There is no longer the demand for investigative journalism as there once was - there just aren't the funds any more and readers want short, snappy pieces, not articles that will change a law they never knew existed in the first place. The size of editorial staff is getting smaller and smaller as money is taken away from print journalism and injected into whatever the new media fad is. Though there probably is some truth in the saying that journalists are machines who convert coffee into copy, I just can't stand the stuff, let alone cigarettes. Well, at least I still get to dress up all I like and talk with a Brooklyn accent. 

Two of my favourite writers have dabbled in journalism, so surely they know what they're talking about:

"But what is the difference between literature and journalism?

... Journalism is unreadable and literature is  not read. That is all."

-Oscar Wilde

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."

-Norman Mailer

Ah yes, everybody's a critic.