For generations, aspiring journalists were told there was a path to somewhat secure full-time employment.
Not an easy path by any means and not one readily available to those unable to spend significant time doing unpaid internships and then working in atrociously paid entry-level positions.
Nonetheless, there was a well-trodden path. Get a degree, do internships while and immediately after studying, freelance, develop a portfolio, maybe do some corporate work, maybe move to a regional area, land an entry-level full-time job, then start inching your way up the greasy pole.
That traditional career ladder hasn’t entirely disappeared. But its early rungs are disappearing. Junior jobs are fiercely contested. Freelance budgets have thinned. Youth-media mastheads that once gave young writers a start have shrunk or been shuttered.
For David Allen, Patrick Lenton and Jackson Langford, the crisis is not abstract. Each has lived through a different version of it.
Allen did everything he was told to do and still went through six months of hell before landing a role.
Lenton was a well-established journalist who discovered his impressive portfolio and CV did not guarantee either freelance or employee work.
Langford was recently made redundant after the business he worked for was sold. He and his co-workers found out about the sale by reading about it in the paper.
Patrick Lenton’s long dry spell
Lenton, 41, recently explored the gap between fictional portrayals of journalism and the grimmer reality for The Guardian.
“Like many elder millennial journalists, I was sold a particular, rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail, Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, even the titular Sally from When Harry Met Sally all poisoned my weak developing brain with a fantasy of wearing cute blazers and smoking cigarettes in my apartment and writing silly little stories that somehow saved the day.”
What was the reality like?
“The millennial journalism fantasy has been transmuted from a dream into a depressing capitalistic reality, dominated by mass layoffs and redundancies, constant media buyouts and endless ruinous tech pivots… I saw the best minds of my generation writing lists about which of the Muppets were most fuckable.”
Lenton currently has a full-time role as Digital Manager and Journalist at the Star Observer, but he’s got raw memories of a recent 18-month stretch where work was hard to come by.
Lenton drifted into cultural journalism in his mid-twenties when editors began approaching him to contribute to their publications. Senior roles at Junkee Media, The Conversation and the ABC followed.
After leaving a Lifestyle Reporter role at the ABC at the start of 2024, Lenton experienced an unprecedented dry spell for 18 months.
“After that, I found it very, very hard to land another position in journalism. It’s taken me quite a while to get back into that, not from lack of trying,” he told Influencing.
During this period, Lenton noticed freelance budgets drying up. “Over and over again, I’d get a regular set-up with a company, and then they would go under or get bought out.” Lenton also noticed potential employers, with plenty of candidates to choose from, were becoming ever pickier.
“I had so many interviews,” Lenton recalls. “On three occasions, I got to the final-round interview with large publications but then missed out.”
As we’ll get to shortly, Lenton is far from despairing about either his own future or that of the media. But he points to a supply-demand imbalance that only seems to be growing worse.
“It’s a shrinking industry – there are far more journalists than there are jobs for them.”
David Allen’s six months of hell
Like Lenton, David Allen is now happily employed. But before he landed a job as an InnovationAus reporter in November last year, he had to slog through a demoralising six months of dealing with unresponsive potential employers.
In mid-2025, Allen published a LinkedIn post entitled Looking for journalism work in Australia is frustrating. In it, Allen explains how his impressive background – an RMIT University Bachelor of Communications with a high GPA, several “plum internships”, and four years’ experience in a fast-paced newsroom – failed to impress.
“So far as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), News Corp, Nine and Seven West Media are concerned, I am trash unworthy of even an interview. (The Guardian never hires [externally], so who knows what their tea is),” he wrote at the time.
Allen was offered a full-time role but had to turn it down because he couldn’t survive on $34,000 a year.
“I did get through to second and third interview rounds on some smaller publications, mostly regional,” Allen told Influencing.
“But there was the understanding that you’re going to accept significantly lower pay. That you’re going to live in a share house, you’re going to have rental stress, you’re going to struggle to afford cars and food and so forth. Also, relocating to regional Australia is potentially going to land you in five thousand dollars in debt.”
Jackson Langford’s uncertain future
After graduating with a Bachelor of Communication from the University of Newcastle in 2015, Jackson Langford set about pursuing a career as a music journalist, contributing to blogs on an unpaid basis and contacting musicians via their Facebook page and begging them for interviews.
When he landed a job at MTV Australia a year after graduating, he was amazed at his good fortune. After MTV Australia shut down in late 2021, Langford ended up at Val Morgan Digital, where he worked as branded content editor across titles such as BuzzFeed, LADbible and Thrillist, for three and a half years.
“And then we all found out one weekend, via the AFR, we had been sold to Vinyl Group,” Langford told Influencing. “When I saw the news, I went into panic mode and felt something in the air telling me it was my time. And I was right.”
Langford estimates around “30 to 40 per cent” of his team was made redundant shortly after the acquisition.
“When I started at Val Morgan in 2023, versus where we are now in 2026, the media landscape is so different. The job market is very scary.”
For the love of the game
The challenges of trying to make a living as a journalist don’t seem to have dimmed Lenton, Allen or Langford’s passion for journalism.
Lenton fears pursuing a career as a journalist means accepting a life of genteel poverty, but that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. “I don’t have a mortgage; I’ve never really made enough money to buy a house,” Lenton says. “And my only dependant is a stinky greyhound. I can live off small amounts of money and, if you want to keep working in journalism in Australia, you have to be OK with the fact there’s small amounts of money and very few opportunities. But I still believe in the importance of journalism, especially independent journalism. And I’m not very good at anything else – I just like writing.”
Allen is also delighted he’s (finally) getting paid to do what he loves.
“It’s hard to put that one into words because it has been so excellent,” he said. “There is, not a day in a week where I don’t cover a story that I don’t look at and think, ‘This is why I’m here. This is why I wanted to do this in the first place.’”
Even Langford suspects being made redundant in a tough labour market might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
“I’ve often asked myself why I didn’t just become a dentist,” Langford said. Langford has considered leaving the industry several times but now tries not to “get too disillusioned by the state of everything until it’s absolutely necessary”.
“There have been multiple times where I was ready to walk away and get a corporate job,” Langford said. “But if I’d done that, I would have missed out on an opportunity I didn’t know was coming. And I’ve had so many great opportunities, I’ve been able to travel the world.”
What the future holds
Surprisingly, Lenton, Allen and Langford are all cautiously optimistic about the future of the Australian media – or at least parts of it.
As well as his day job, Lenton has a side project – the nonsense newsletter, a queer-led culture and comedy Substack. He plans to remain involved in journalism, even though he’s “not sure what that will look like, to be honest”.
Langford has also recently launched a Substack – cc: jackson langford, which covers “Music, film, TV, gaming, culture, whatever I want.”
Like Lenton, Langford isn’t expecting to be able to support himself on the proceeds of his newsletter. But he hopes the project will be creatively revivifying and keep him upbeat as he endures the demoralising grind of chasing freelance assignments and jobs.
“It just felt like the perfect time,” he said. “I can exercise my creativity and tell whatever story I want to tell without anyone telling me I can’t do that. My primary focus with the Substack was to get back to why I fell in love with what I do without having to worry about the state of the industry. The journalism industry is really scary right now, but journalism is still amazing.”
Allen is not certain he’ll be able to remain working in the media until he reaches retirement age, but neither is he worried about being automated out of a job any time soon.
“There’s just not the social licence – people don’t want AI telling them stories,” he said. “Even with a drone live on the scene of a disaster, able to give a 360° view, people are still going to want a commentator in there explaining. They’re going to want to hear from experts being interviewed, telling them what has happened.”
Allen’s not sure how Australia’s larger and less agile media organisations are going to fare in the years to come, but he’s optimistic about smaller and mid-sized players.
“Journalism still has a bright future. It’s going to change dramatically though. Smaller companies are, in every respect, powering the newsrooms of Australia at this point. The top one per cent of journalists are finding their own stories. Everything else is either being sourced from a newswire or from mid-tier publications that are on the ground doing localised, specific [reporting]. It’s those mid-tier companies that really need the fruits of the News Bargaining Incentive.”