Journalists-turned-academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson seek to capture some of these anecdotes in their edited volume Upheaval: Disrupted lives in journalism. Citing the loss of these jobs – ‘once considered safe for life’ – alongside not only ‘mastheads, outlets and production houses’ but also long-established ‘ways of working’, they aim ‘to bear witness to all this change through the personal stories of the workers’ who experienced it firsthand. Their book is thus less about why these changes occurred (or the mistakes that were made in responding to them), and more about what they have meant for the discarded journalists.

Upheaval is based on interviews with fifty-seven journalists whose jobs were, for the most part, made redundant – voluntarily or otherwise – between 2012 and 2016. They were conducted as part of a broader research effort that involved a team of academics in addition to Dodd and Ricketson. These accounts are largely cut up and stitched together in chapters that move chronologically and thematically through the journalists’ working lives, from their early interest in journalism and first jobs to making the often difficult decision to leave (or, in some cases, having it made for them by management) and reinventing themselves in the aftermath.

There is a certain nostalgia in the earlier sections, with the evocation of a world of ‘copy kids’, hard-nosed reporters, and sharp-tongued subeditors, though some interviewees are admirably forthright in sharing both positive and negative memories. (Some of the latter are presented, for example, in a chapter examining sexual harassment and discrimination in newsrooms.) Among the book’s most compelling portions are those that invite reflection on professional regrets and the challenges of reporting on traumatic events – subjects that journalists are rarely afforded the opportunity to discuss in a nuanced fashion.

One of the strengths of utilising the kinds of personal narratives featured in Upheaval is that they can help to humanise complex events. This impact is blunted somewhat by the way the book handles these stories. Its structure is in many ways sensible, given the volume of material that Dodd, Ricketson, and their fellow contributors presumably had to work with. But fragmenting the individual testimonies diminishes the extent to which readers can follow people through the pages and thus get to know them in a way that promotes deeper empathy and insight.

The editors have sought to counteract this by including first-person accounts of specific journalists’ careers: media correspondent Amanda Meade, her Guardian colleague David Marr, and reporter turned ABC strategist and media trainer Flip Prior (who, like me, was formerly on staff at The West Australian). Allowing their stories to stand on their own helps to add specificity to the larger narrative.

Upheaval doesn’t necessarily make claims to being comprehensive or exhaustive, but there are areas that feel underexplored; podcasting, for instance, is conspicuous by its absence, particularly in the chapter on post-redundancy reinvention. Such omissions hint at the potential constraints of exploring broader cultural shifts through the lens of individual experience. For example, Dodd and Ricketson note that while they aimed ‘for a 50/50 gender balance […] achieving greater cultural and ethnic diversity among the interviewees has been more difficult because of the lack of diversity historically in Australian newsrooms’. This suggests some of the limits of this type of storytelling in examining these issues. That few journalists who fit the project’s parameters were willing or able to talk about race and racism in Australian media organisations does not mean, of course, that the wider topic is not worthy of attention.

At a more granular level, the parameters of the research may also account for the apparent overrepresentation of newspaper reporters (particularly those covering ‘hard’ news such as current affairs and politics) for metropolitan dailies in the interview pool, which the editors suggest arose partly from their focus on workers who had taken redundancies. Despite this, they do canvass a not insignificant range of journalistic specialties, including cartoonists, horse-racing writers, magazine editors, news photographers, and radio reporters.

It is worth acknowledging how much ground Upheaval manages to cover. Dodd and Ricketson write that they hoped to preserve some of their interview subjects’ ‘practical wisdom about the industry, much of which has resonance for the future of journalism’. The book will be a useful resource for aspiring journalists, as well as an engaging historical account of considerable interest to readers within and beyond the world of the Australian media. Mostly, though, it will resonate with current and former journalists. Such readers will no doubt recognise a good deal of their own experience in Upheaval: the frustrations and satisfactions of working in a newsroom; the attendant camaraderie and rivalries; the tendency for journalism to consume much of your life and identity; and the genuine grief that can accompany leaving the profession behind.