We’re slowly emerging from the summer slumber and we hope you will join us for another year of top quality journalism at NM.
Summer is when journalists — and the rest of the country — nod off. What that means is a long month of "summer edition" standard reporting across the media. Not much happens, everyone needs a holiday, why not? (While we’re at it, we hope you had a good one.)
The cricket season might not be over but it’s time to wake up. Indeed, it’s an exciting time to be involved in independent media and we’re starting the year with a renewed commitment to global reporting and sharp analysis.
Last year we promised you more investigative journalism — and we delivered with some big stories including the first publicly available version of the 2009 contract between Serco and the Department of Immigration.
In 2012 we’ll continue to break stories and seek out new angles on current events but we’ll also be bringing you on-location coverage from some of the hot spots around the world.
We don’t have the budget to send in journalists as soon as a story breaks so we’ll be doing it a little differently from the bigger outlets. Instead of fly-in, fly-out disaster reporting we’ll be bringing you new stories — original journalism on a budget from international locations that are being overlooked by the other media.
It’s good news for many Australians that our economy is in such great shape compared to the rest of the world, but that should never mean that we stop looking beyond our own backyard. 2011 was a big year across the world and the reverberations of the upheavals which occurred will continue to be felt for a long time.
At NM we’re not going to batten down the hatches. We’ve loved bringing you the latest news and analysis from safe and sunny Sydney but this year we plan to shake things up a bit and take our laptops on the road. The great thing about being an online outlet is that we can publish from anywhere there’s a reliable internet connection.
And we won’t be the only ones out there. The online news media landscape continues to change and new players are entering the scene in Australia and overseas. Both the Australian version of the Huffington Post and the Global Mail are soon set to launch. Meanwhile, the big players are still trying to work out how to make money out of online news, and fostering a culture of critical independent media is still hard work.
Here at NM, we’re excited about the year ahead and our unique brand of low cost, high quality journalism. We hope you’ll join us for the ride!
Marni and Catri
PS: If becoming a financial supporter of New Matilda was on your list of resolutions for 2012, click here to sign up.