When we were young, I was infatuated with you. I needed to know everything about you, the good, the bad, the disturbing.
As we got older, I realised that you could be manipulative, that you could have an agenda, that you could mislead me.
When I had a baby, you became terrifying.
So News Cycle, it’s time for a change.
Watch the trailer for Mamamia’s upcoming daily news podcast The Quicky below.
I’ve been a journalist for over a decade and part of the reporting process is getting into the nitty gritty details of a story no matter how awful they may be, and then deciding how much of that information to share.
I remember like it was yesterday the first time I saw a dead body at a crime scene, the first time I watched raw footage of a building collapse where people were trapped inside, and the interview with the firefighter who told me that the woman in the house behind us was just one metre from the front door when she collapsed from smoke inhalation. All of that will stay with me for life.
Reporting the news can be quite an ordeal, but watching it can be so much worse.
When I was young, my family used to sit down in front of the tele at 6pm to watch a quick wrap of the local, national, international and sporting news neatly packaged into a 30-minute block. If the topics were a little too adult, the newsreader would give us a warning that it could be disturbing and Mum and Dad would usher us out the room or use it as an opportunity to discuss something beyond our years.
If you wanted more detail, you read the paper.
Now, we are on a 24-hour a day news cycle where the line between reporting and sensationalism is blurry. You have to understand who owns the news service and what their political agenda is as much as the details of the story itself.
It can be a confusing, scary avalanche of information which, thanks to auto-play video and graphic pictures, can also be scarring.
A colleague was reading a story a few weeks ago of a baby who had died after accidentally being locked in the car on a hot day. While she was reading, the auto-play video began showing her the mother of that child screaming in grief as she found out she’d lost one of her 22-month-old twins.
The next day that colleague told me she was still so affected by that footage that she wished she’d never seen it, that now she can’t stop putting her own child and her own grief in place of that mother’s like she’s second-hand reliving that awful moment herself.
I remember the feeling of panic and horror when a Facebook friend of mine posted a link to a story which included graphic scenes of animal cruelty. That was years ago and still every now and then those pictures will randomly pop into my head.
So now I’m 40 and I’ve been closely attached to this news cycle for over 15 years, but thanks to a new job opportunity, all that’s about to change.
The old reporting slogan of ‘If it bleeds it leads’ doesn’t apply to Mamamia’s new podcast The Quicky. In this space we can discuss things of importance without so much detail that we’re terrified to leave our homes. We can still know the cause of a bushfire without hearing about the intimate details of the victims and how they lost their life. We can learn things together, discover new things together, help each other navigate the why’s and the how’s of all of this without the trauma.
So if you love knowing what’s going on in the world but don’t want to continue the abusive relationship with the news cycle, then come join us on our new adventure at The Quicky.
We’re going to educate ourselves, not traumatise ourselves.
The Quicky drops on Monday, February 18. And you can subscribe now, right here or in your favourite podcast app.