There’s recently been a lot of discussion surrounding jobs in journalism, and the disillusionment many people feel about their chances at getting one.

Because I walked out of uni – prior to receiving my degree (It’s okay, I have it now. God bless RPL) – and straight in to a full-time job at an (inter-)national glossy magazine, quite a few questions have been directed my way.

Primarily the question being asked is: What did you do? How do I do it?

Peripheral questions have been concerned with the fact I am a female… Did I have a problem in this ‘male-dominated’ culture, have I experienced difficulties since imposing myself on that culture, et cetera.

First off, I don’t know how you will get a job in the ranks of our ‘crumbling’ media empire, but I am happy to shed some light on what I know, what I did and how I’ve found the experience.

To begin with the last point, I’ve never had a problem in any ‘male-dominated’ culture. Not when it was journalism, not when it was music, not as a student and not as a professional. I don’t mean to betray the sisters here, I really don’t. I’m not even saying the problems I’ve heard about don’t exist – they’ve just never existed for me. As to why, perhaps I’ve been lucky. Perhaps I’ve been blessed with evolved male peers. Or perhaps I just never pre-empted my male ‘opponents’, so they had nothing to prove.

If it eases your apprehensions though, lady friends, most of the people I deal with at the top of the communications chain are women. Government media advisors, big five music label PR executives, the big movie PR executives; they’re all women.

Question two: What did I do?

I gained whatever experience I thought was meaningful. Anything that caught my interest was usually a good bet. I ignored every piece of advice given to me about Best Practices and Recommended Pathways and I guided my hand with two precepts: Practice your craft and stay curious.

Number one is the main game. It is the aspect you need to best understand. Firstly, journalism is not writing. They’re best friends, but they’re going different ways. Journalism is a question, a uni-directional enquiry that never quite ends. Writing is a one-way answer that leaves its victim wholly satiated and preserved. Some people will switch those two out and say that journalism is the answer, but at the end of the day those people will be making the same point as me: There are two parts.

I had never practiced the journalism part all that much, but the writing part is something I’ve co-habited with since a precociously young age.

I’m not telling you this just because I like pronouns. You need a context for my choices.

You will hear often that you need to get as many by-lines as you can, that you need to blog and pimp your shit from day one if you have any hope of surviving in media. Twitter and network, and then Twitter your network the tinyurl of your work, far-flung and hanging in every corner of the blogosphere 2.0 socio-webverse. OR FAIL.

I did not. I started Twittering in earnest AFTER I got my job. I didn’t send links out, I didn’t pitch anyone, I didn’t serial-ize my blog, or capital-ize it or ..update it. Because I hadn’t practiced one part of my chosen craft to a point where I could happily defend its quality.

THAT’S RIGHT, I got my job with maybe a handful of by-lines, some of which lived in the musty archives of STREET PRESS. I had no Twitter presence and my blog contained mostly swears.

Go collect the broken bits of your mind, unibots. They’ve been blown, I get it.

For me, practice is mostly observation and analysis. Long-time readers of this blog will know that there was a point at which I developed an interest in journalism quality. I spent my time devouring all kinds of publications, identifying what I liked, what floored me, what best illustrated the story and also what I thought was cheap, paltry and uninteresting. Eventually I developed a profile of what I thought was good journalism. I stick to it, so I now feel comfortable defending the quality of what I write. But it wasn’t until I reached that point that I contacted anyone with samples of my work and a link to my blog.

Enter Penthouse.

I contacted Penthouse in the hopes of interning with them as part of my degree. They said yes. I flew to Sydney for a week to spend some time in their office. I was invited back to cover the staff writer while she was on holiday. I flew to Sydney again. Then I was offered a job.

That’s it.

I thought about journalism for awhile, contacted one person, did an unpaid internship, did a paid week, accepted a job.

Summary: I am heavy on research and heavier on longform considerations of ideals and principles (ie: wanker). A big part of that is discussion – throwing questions at people I think will have the answers and the right amount of lube to slip them my way. And a big part of THAT is disproving and discarding whichever part of the answer doesn’t sound right to me.

I recommend this approach completely. While it meant I spent two years enduring the BURDEN of my incompetent lecturers’ disapproval, I have never pitched or submitted something that has been turned down and I have no shameful by-lines that are floating around the ether simply for the sake of floating around the ether.

My second consideration: stay curious. I have engaged only in what interests me, and I have gone against all advice several times to make that so. This is where most people fuck it all up for themselves, I think. Ignoring this is how you end up in a staid small business writing memos and pamphlets about 3-ply toilet paper.

My university record shows a “less than 10%” attendance rate in my final year. I turned down and avoided internships at broadsheet and Government publications so that I could intern at places like 4ZZZ and Penthouse. I bowed out of a semester-long internship with one of the biggest companies in the world so that I could do PR for Brisbane label Mere Noise Records.

I made these choices because I had already paid my dues in terms of doing what looks good but feels pointless – I did that during my superfluous private school education, where wearing the uniform well in public was more important than not using Class A drugs, and then again when I studied PR at Griffith, where leather binding was more important than EVEN THE SMALLEST SEMBLANCE of content. Every person I encountered told me the choices I was making all led to one place: ultimate and insurmountable failure. I couldn’t bring myself to believe them, because I still have faith in the romantic idea that knowing your shit and being MVP on the figurative team means you will get paid somehow.

How YOU go about this stuff is entirely up to you: that’s the point. Tailor your own education, and deliver it to yourself. Don’t rep anything that doesn’t tear new arseholes every time it drops, and don’t take any advice on board that doesn’t fit. Talent gets paid.

My lunch break is over, so you’re going to have to tune in later for my thoughts on RELEVANT JOURNALISM SKILLS and some other loose, barely-lucid thoughts I just had when I pressed publish.