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 Netherl..