#056 Journalism, story-telling & running hard as you can
With award-winning journalist, Jo Chandler
Jo Chandler is an award-winning Australian journalist, author, editor, and educator. She’s become perhaps Australia’s best and most recognised climate journalist, also authoring the awarded book on the topic, Feeling the Heat. Her most recent Walkley Award, Australia’s highest honour in journalism, was for her ongoing freelance work. Jo’s grappled with media and climate disruption on the front line, and shares powerful thoughts on the stories that need to be told, and how we can continue to tell them.
Jo Chandler with one of her Walkley Awards, the highest honours for journalism in Australia. Sourced from her website (see below).
“Hope isn’t a lottery ticket and it’s not wishy washy, and it’s not believing that there’ll be a magic solution. It’s the thing that makes you run and fight as hard as you possibly can. And I think that’s the kind of hope that we have to put in our stories.”
Gutsy, moving and instructive, this is an insider’s view of a rapidly shifting media context, the great adventure story of climate science, and long-form journalism as a means of reconnecting us with real news, and the people who make it. Is this art of story-telling still an effective way to contextualise, personalise and build trust – in science, the living world, and even each other? And if so, how do we best keep doing it?
Anthony met Jo for this conversation at the State Theatre Centre in Perth late last year, during the Quantum Words Festival.
Title slide pic: Jo Chandler, sourced from her website (see below).
With thanks to the Quantum Words Festival, WritingWA and the WA State Theatre Centre.
Music:
The System, by the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra
Concluding music by Jeremiah Johnson
Due to licencing restrictions, our guest’s nominated music can only be played on radio or similarly licenced broadcasts of this episode.