Speaker 1: I love a newspaper in addition to my deep obsessiveness
Speaker 1: about books. I am a compulsive consumer of news in
Speaker 1: all its forms. But there are a few more purely
Speaker 1: pleasurable ways to enjoy the news that on the holidays,
Speaker 1: coffee brewing papers strewn across the table, with people passing
Speaker 1: supplements and sections across to one another. There are online equivalents,
Speaker 1: but there's something about that old fashioned way of catching
Speaker 1: up with the world that remains very special. But the
Speaker 1: business of news, we are told, is in crisis. I
Speaker 1: think it's declared dead even more often than the book is.
Speaker 1: There are challenges of advertising, challenges of revenue, and a
Speaker 1: decline in consumption and a decline in trust. It's a problem.
Speaker 1: If news dies, then our society suffers. Eric Beecher is
Speaker 1: a newsman. It's what is devoted the better part of
Speaker 1: his life and career too. As a journalist, his work
Speaker 1: for some of the most well respected newspapers in the world,
Speaker 1: and as his career has progressed, Eric has climbed the
Speaker 1: media ladder. He's currently a media proprietor, head of Private Media,
Speaker 1: which runs the website Criche. Amongst the many achievements of
Speaker 1: Eric Beach's career in the media, there are few key
Speaker 1: moments that stand out. In nineteen eighty four, he became
Speaker 1: the youngest ever editor of the City Morning Herald. He
Speaker 1: was just thirty three at the time. With Digribbel, he
Speaker 1: built text media into a major player, and in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven he received a Walkley Award for Journalistic Leadership.
Speaker 1: Later he also became chair of the Wheeler Center in
Speaker 1: Melbourne when I was its director. And the thing that
Speaker 1: I've always so admired about Eric getting to work alongside
Speaker 1: him is the ways in which he's such a fierce
Speaker 1: advocate for independent, fearless media. It's a passion that played
Speaker 1: out more recently in twenty twenty two when Lachlan Murdock
Speaker 1: leveled a high profile defamation lawsuit in his direction. While
Speaker 1: the case ended up being withdrawn, it was just the
Speaker 1: motivation Eric needed to finish the book he's been quietly
Speaker 1: working on for years. That book was called The Men
Speaker 1: Who Killed the News, and in it, Eric reveals the
Speaker 1: distorted role of media moguls over the past two centuries,
Speaker 1: from Conrad Black and William Randolph Hurst to Rupert Murdock
Speaker 1: and Elon Musk. The book explores how these men have
Speaker 1: abused their power to increase their wealth while undermining journalism
Speaker 1: and truth at a huge cost to our politics and
Speaker 1: our society. It might sound like a book that has
Speaker 1: the potential to be dry, but Eric Beecher knows how
Speaker 1: to spin a story. At its opening, it has the
Speaker 1: feel of one of those Russian classics, a cast of
Speaker 1: characters in the front, introducing us to the colorful moguls
Speaker 1: good and bad who are going to populate its pages.
Speaker 1: And then it pivots. It becomes a crime story as
Speaker 1: we bear witness to the ways in which the world
Speaker 1: of news is slowly deliberately being killed. It's a political
Speaker 1: thriller that asks the kind of society we want to
Speaker 1: bark long to. And it's a love story because one
Speaker 1: thing is crystal clear. Eric Beecher loves news and loves
Speaker 1: the disappearing world of serious journalism. I'm Michael Williams, and
Speaker 1: this is Read This the show about the books we
Speaker 1: love and the stories behind them. There are many things
Speaker 1: in The Men Who Killed the News that I love.
Speaker 1: It's a fabulous bit of reading. It's a kind of
Speaker 1: sobering history and also an assessment of the kind of
Speaker 1: current state of news media and how we got here.
Speaker 1: But I wanted maybe to dig into your personal history
Speaker 1: and relationship with journalism. When did you first get the bug?
Speaker 1: When did you first identify that journalism was a thing
Speaker 1: that you might devote your life to.
Speaker 2: Well, I got the bug at a very early age.
Speaker 2: And I have no idea where the bug came from
Speaker 2: because no one in my family was a journalist. And
Speaker 2: I grew up in Sydney and we got the Sydney
Speaker 2: Morning Herald every morning and I saw it on the
Speaker 2: breakfast table. Whether that gave me the bug, I'm not sure,
Speaker 2: but you know, I edited my boy Scouts magazine, I
Speaker 2: edited all the school magazines. I started a national cricket
Speaker 2: magazine at the age of seventeen. I just loved it.
Speaker 2: I just fell in love with it.
Speaker 1: So I love this story about it, not just because
Speaker 1: it reveals you're a colossal merd at every level, but
Speaker 1: there is something about the attitude of identifying a gap
Speaker 1: in the market and you know you're an avid cricket fan,
Speaker 1: you knew what you wanted to read, identifying it wasn't there,
Speaker 1: and deciding that you may as well take the responsibility
Speaker 1: to fill that gap.
Speaker 2: It sounds like it's some kind of special instinct or intuition.
Speaker 2: Actually what it was was naivety. That's what it was.
Speaker 1: You don't think it's the exact same naivity that has
Speaker 1: carried you through the rest of your career.
Speaker 2: Since the naivety probably developed a little bit into something
Speaker 2: a little more advanced. But I look back and think,
Speaker 2: you know, why would I have done that. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've had so many failures in my publishing career, magazines
Speaker 2: that didn't work, and ideas that didn't work, and websites
Speaker 2: that didn't work. And I've had a couple of successes
Speaker 2: as well. And I was a newspaper editor in my
Speaker 2: early thirties at a very young age, and I don't
Speaker 2: quite know how that happened, but it was great. And
Speaker 2: I mean one of the most important things, or the
Speaker 2: most important thing that happened to me in my life
Speaker 2: as a journalist was I was a reporter on the
Speaker 2: Melbourne Age in my twenties and that's where I started
Speaker 2: in daily journalism. The Age then was owned by the
Speaker 2: Fairfax Company, but it had been owned by the Sime
Speaker 2: family and there was until a sign family member was
Speaker 2: the managing director Ranald MacDonald, and I got to know Ranald,
Speaker 2: and he knew because I told him many times that
Speaker 2: my interest actually was in editing, not so I could
Speaker 2: be the boss, but because I loved the craft of editing.
Speaker 2: And in those days, most newspaper editors were people who
Speaker 2: had been promoted because they were very good reporters. And
Speaker 2: to me, they are different skills. They obviously overlap, but
Speaker 2: they are different skills. And the Age sent me away
Speaker 2: for eighteen months and put me through three very good newspapers,
Speaker 2: the Sunday Times and the Observer in London, and the
Speaker 2: Washington Post. And so I learned about editing and newspapers
Speaker 2: at that level, and newspaper editing at that level, and
Speaker 2: journalism at that level in those places. And I came
Speaker 2: back and then I started to practice it here all right, Eric, I.
Speaker 1: Want to level a quote in your direction. Here we go.
Speaker 1: The illustry is littered with self staled purer to believe
Speaker 1: the business of media, the requirement to make a profit
Speaker 1: somehow corrupts the craft. The self anointed media elite among
Speaker 1: us believe somewhat self servingly that not only the act
Speaker 1: or process of maintenance profit is positively sinister, but also
Speaker 1: that the very desire to do so is Does that
Speaker 1: describe you, Eric Beecher? Are you a self satisfied, self
Speaker 1: anointed media elite.
Speaker 2: I guess some people might think I am one person,
Speaker 2: in particular the person you're quoting. I remember that quote.
Speaker 2: I have been a working journalist, an editor, a publisher,
Speaker 2: and a media owner. So I'm not someone who regards
Speaker 2: profitability and commercial imperatives as being unimportant. In fact, it's
Speaker 2: so critical because if you're not viable, you don't exist.
Speaker 2: So that goes without saying so criticism like that I
Speaker 2: think is facile at the same time, and what I've
Speaker 2: tried to do with his book is to try and
Speaker 2: look at the balance between the profit motive, the commercial motive,
Speaker 2: and the role of proper public interest journalism in a
Speaker 2: democracy and whether they can coexist. And sometimes they can,
Speaker 2: and often throughout history they haven't, and that's been I
Speaker 2: think a real tragedy for democracy.
Speaker 1: That quote is Lachland Murdock, in that moment giving anarration
Speaker 1: at the State Library of Victoria, was actively taking issue
Speaker 1: with previous comments you've made, picking a fight with you personally,
Speaker 1: and I want to get to Lachlan and his family
Speaker 1: in a tick. But before we get there, it seems
Speaker 1: to me that when we talk about media again and again,
Speaker 1: the thing that we talk about is whether the business
Speaker 1: model is possible or whether it's irreparably broken. Was there
Speaker 1: ever a time when the business model made sense and
Speaker 1: didn't compromise what it did?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I mean, I was lucky enough to start my
Speaker 2: career and live a lot of my particularly newspaper career,
Speaker 2: in what I would regard as the golden age of media,
Speaker 2: both business models and therefore journalism. And they were the
Speaker 2: days when newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald or the
Speaker 2: Melbourne Age would produce two hundred pages of classified ads
Speaker 2: every Saturday and would make millions and millions of dollars
Speaker 2: of profit every Saturday from those ads. And they had owners,
Speaker 2: the Fairfax family for over a century, who saw their
Speaker 2: role as yes, owners and business people, but also as
Speaker 2: participants in the civic life and the democratic life of
Speaker 2: their country, and so they were able to get that
Speaker 2: balance right. Other media moguls, through history and even up
Speaker 2: to now and especially now, in some ways don't get
Speaker 2: that balance right in my view at all. All they
Speaker 2: focus on is the profit motive.
Speaker 1: So did that Golden age, those kind of rivers of
Speaker 1: classified advertising gold mean that it distorted our idea of
Speaker 1: what people valued when it came to the news. Did
Speaker 1: it mean that we never fully understood the relationship between
Speaker 1: a civil society and its press. Look.
Speaker 2: I think for journalists it was a foundation stone to
Speaker 2: enable them to do their work properly and do it independently.
Speaker 2: For the consumers of news, it was a different era,
Speaker 2: not just because of that business model. In fact, the
Speaker 2: change in business model was when advertising, classified advertising and
Speaker 2: other forms of display advertising migrated from those print newspapers
Speaker 2: to digital and then to social media. And so what
Speaker 2: that has meant is not only has the revenue that
Speaker 2: supported quality journalism almost disappeared now, but it means that
Speaker 2: the landscape for consuming news and being interested in news,
Speaker 2: and the competition for people's time that essentially didn't exist
Speaker 2: before the Internet now makes it an entirely different landscape
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that in that lecture Lachlan Murdock
Speaker 1: was having a goure is that two years prior you'd
Speaker 1: given the andro Alli lecture, and in that you'd drawn
Speaker 1: a kind of distinction between serious journalism and other journalism,
Speaker 1: and the ways in which those lofty ideals for the
Speaker 1: kind of newspaper that said is like Melbourne or Sydney
Speaker 1: should be able to sustain were compromised. And we're being
Speaker 1: consistently compromised. If it's not the business model that compromises,
Speaker 1: then what is.
Speaker 2: It's a whole lot of things that have changed in
Speaker 2: the world, I think, not least social media. I mean
Speaker 2: social media has transformed not just the media landscape and
Speaker 2: not just the media consumption landscape, but it's transfer the
Speaker 2: way that people think about issues, and it's turned people
Speaker 2: who would otherwise have depended on a small amount of
Speaker 2: reliable media, it's turned them into partisans. I mean everyone
Speaker 2: now has an op ed column, as it were, and
Speaker 2: so that changes entirely the way that journalism is consumed
Speaker 2: and thought about.
Speaker 1: It never ceases to amaze me. The ways in which
Speaker 1: if you survey consumers of media and journalism, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've done many times in your career, they'll say, oh,
Speaker 1: these things are important to me. Now, these are what
Speaker 1: I'll read. But now in the age of the Internet,
Speaker 1: when we can track what stories they read and which
Speaker 1: ones they read to the end, the disconnect between the
Speaker 1: things that a general populace says they want from their
Speaker 1: journalism and the stuff that they engage with or consume.
Speaker 1: There's a pretty big chasm between those two things, isn't.
Speaker 2: The absolutely And I think that what you've really done
Speaker 2: is make another point here, which is so important for
Speaker 2: people not just in the media, but consumers of the
Speaker 2: media and people who care about the state of civic
Speaker 2: society should be aware of, is that media now has
Speaker 2: rapidly changed in the last few years and is heading
Speaker 2: in this direction so fast. Media now has become niche.
Speaker 2: It's only niche. Even the New York Times, with ten
Speaker 2: million subscribers, is actually in its marketplace, which is the
Speaker 2: world is a niche. The old newspapers that used to
Speaker 2: sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies a day
Speaker 2: now sell tens of thousands of copies to day to
Speaker 2: very old people largely, and I'm old, so I can
Speaker 2: say that. But they are niches. Everything is a niche.
Speaker 2: And so if you look at what the mass market
Speaker 2: is interested in, it exists, but it largely exists on
Speaker 2: social media, and it's certainly not news journalism.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I so fondly remember about
Speaker 1: working closely with you and our time together and getting
Speaker 1: the Wheeler Center established. Was that attitude of willingness to
Speaker 1: kind of take a risk and do something because there
Speaker 1: was a gap that needed to be filled, you know,
Speaker 1: that desire to actually make a social and cultural difference
Speaker 1: in the thing that was made. That the profitability the
Speaker 1: viability of it mattered at all times, but that the
Speaker 1: driving impulse was how do we make this space better
Speaker 1: thanks to the work that we're doing. And I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting for someone who spent their career in journalism
Speaker 1: and in newspapers overwhelmingly that you still carry that energy
Speaker 1: that's that's what you do, because it seems at odds
Speaker 1: with so much of what we see from our media.
Speaker 2: Yes, I guess I don't know how, when or why
Speaker 2: it was inculcated in me, but I did have that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it wasn't quite recklessness, because I've always approached
Speaker 2: whatever the risky projects that I was involved with, including
Speaker 2: the Wheelers Center, with the view that you push the
Speaker 2: boundaries really hard creatively and commercially, but you do it
Speaker 2: understanding what would happen in the worst case scenario, So
Speaker 2: you try and put some kind of safety limit underneath
Speaker 2: it to make sure that it can't actually fall over
Speaker 2: the cliff. And if you can get those two things right,
Speaker 2: it seems to me that that's the best mix, rather
Speaker 2: than being all bravado and just doing it and suddenly
Speaker 2: you see the cliff, or being so cautious that you
Speaker 2: never get anywhere near the cliff.
Speaker 1: I think that relationship between the two is really important.
Speaker 1: But when you were describing your career before, you're a
Speaker 1: great pains to refer to yourself as a media owner
Speaker 1: rather than as a mogul. And I want to know,
Speaker 1: is that just a question of scale or is that
Speaker 1: a question of attitude both?
Speaker 2: I think. I mean it's certainly a question of scale.
Speaker 2: I think media moguls, to the extent that they are
Speaker 2: defined and formally, need to have significant scale. I mean,
Speaker 2: in today's dollar terms, they need to be running organizations
Speaker 2: and empires that are billions and billions of dollars. So
Speaker 2: in the book, I actually delineate between media moguls and
Speaker 2: media magnates. And then, as some of my friends describe me,
Speaker 2: I'm a medium mongrel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems like a good slating scale. After the break,
Speaker 1: Eric reveals his favorite media moguls and why this book
Speaker 1: won't be his last. We'll be right back. Part of
Speaker 1: the central thesis of The Men Who Killed News is
Speaker 1: about the centrality, as the name would suggest, of these moguls,
Speaker 1: of the individuals who, through their application of their power,
Speaker 1: completely shaped and defined the way we understood news. Were
Speaker 1: the men who killed the news also the men who
Speaker 1: made the news.
Speaker 2: They were, I mean, the basic thesis of this book
Speaker 2: that has struck me for I spent two years working
Speaker 2: as an editor for Rupert Murdoch in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: and then I left because my social and ethical conscience
Speaker 2: didn't allow me to stay, and I left. And ever
Speaker 2: since then, I've both observed and to some extent, participated
Speaker 2: in what I describe as a loophole in democracy. And
Speaker 2: that loophole is that democratic countries provide significant support for
Speaker 2: a free press, in the sense that in America it's
Speaker 2: the First Amendment constitution. Most European countries have free press
Speaker 2: support in their constitutions. In Australia and England it's a
Speaker 2: bit different, but it still exists. And so what that
Speaker 2: means is the press has a privilege position in society
Speaker 2: as it should have to hold power to account and
Speaker 2: to really make democracy the sort of vibrant force that
Speaker 2: it should be. But on the other side of the ledger,
Speaker 2: there are absolutely no regulations, laws, ethical guidelines. There's nothing
Speaker 2: to control or to regulate the way that the owners
Speaker 2: of the free press operate, and so it's entirely up
Speaker 2: to the conscience of individuals to decide how they get
Speaker 2: that balance right. And the media moguls who decided that
Speaker 2: they were in it for money and power, not for
Speaker 2: the role of the free press, were able to achieve
Speaker 2: money and power. But the price that was paid in
Speaker 2: those democracies I think has been enormous and continues to be.
Speaker 1: Some of the characters in the Spook, it's a strange
Speaker 1: way to kind of talk about it, but are very
Speaker 1: richly drawn, and it seems to me there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of pleasure in on earthing their peccadillos and their monstrousness.
Speaker 1: Do you have favorites? Do you have like if you
Speaker 1: were collecting football cards or their moguls, so you'd want
Speaker 1: to kind of keep in your album.
Speaker 2: Well, before I answer that, I should just mention that
Speaker 2: they're not all bad. There are some good moguls, and
Speaker 2: the Ox Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times,
Speaker 2: are good moguls. I think the Fairfax family in this country,
Speaker 2: who no longer have media holdings, although they have a
Speaker 2: small interest in my company, and I should declare that
Speaker 2: I think we're really good moguls. Lord Thompson, the Canadian
Speaker 2: who then went on to own the London Times, was
Speaker 2: a really good nogul. So there were good moguls as well.
Speaker 2: The others, however, in my view, always put their own
Speaker 2: interests ahead of the public interest. Are their favorites well,
Speaker 2: I mean it depends what the crow criteria are. I mean,
Speaker 2: you couldn't invent a character like Robert Maxwell, both the
Speaker 2: way he lived and the way he died. Lord Beaverbrook
Speaker 2: was a medium Morgel from Central Casting, and the stories
Speaker 2: about him are just so entertaining. The TV series Succession
Speaker 2: tries to tap this and does, to a large extent
Speaker 2: tap it. And when people ask me what do I
Speaker 2: think of Succession? Wasn't it a fantastic story? I say
Speaker 2: to them, well, to me, it was a documentary.
Speaker 1: At the very top, you have a kind of list,
Speaker 1: almost like a Russian novel, of here are the key
Speaker 1: players who you need to know and how they connect.
Speaker 1: And you're very ineffably Eric Beecher dry in the way
Speaker 1: that you sum them up. I particularly took issue with
Speaker 1: where you described Conrad Black, which made me laugh, which
Speaker 1: was Canadian publisher controlled the global quality newspapers, pompous and verbose, author,
Speaker 1: stole from his company, jailed, And it seems to me
Speaker 1: that construction said that verbosity is a product of being
Speaker 1: an author, just as being jailed as a product of
Speaker 1: stealing from your company.
Speaker 2: Well, Conrad Black was never the biggest media mogul in
Speaker 2: history in terms of the size of his empire, although
Speaker 2: at its peak it was quite extensive. But he was
Speaker 2: certainly in the top two or three most colorful media moguls.
Speaker 2: And he's still alive. He's still writing columns in Canada.
Speaker 2: He's still a member of the House of Lords. He's
Speaker 2: discredited in his home country Canada. He's not allowed to
Speaker 2: travel to the US because he had a jail term there.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't make these things up.
Speaker 1: That is a great way to end your life as
Speaker 1: a media proprietors in exile but still writing columns. You
Speaker 1: get to do both things exactly. One of the things
Speaker 1: that you clearly in this book have a lot of
Speaker 1: belief in, an affection for, and I know this about
Speaker 1: you and the way you've conducted yourself in your career
Speaker 1: is the writer, the journalist, the person who's actually crafted
Speaker 1: the story and put it out there. And it seems
Speaker 1: to me that many of the threats across decades that
Speaker 1: you run through here are threats of delivery mechanism, their
Speaker 1: threats a business model, but they're not threats to the
Speaker 1: purity of the telling the story in the first place.
Speaker 1: But what we're facing now with the rise of AI
Speaker 1: is an existential threat to writers.
Speaker 2: Look it looks like it is. I think it's far
Speaker 2: too early to be in any way definitive about how
Speaker 2: this is going to play out, just as it was
Speaker 2: when the Internet arrived on our doorsteps, you know, twenty
Speaker 2: five years ago, or whenever it was. AI in theory
Speaker 2: and in some places in practice has the capacity and
Speaker 2: the ability to replace certain kinds of journalism. But will
Speaker 2: people trust that if it's not proved to be either
Speaker 2: accurate or incisive, or intelligent or serious, serious readers won't
Speaker 2: trust it. The people that will be vulnerable are people
Speaker 2: who aren't serious about their consumption of news and journalism.
Speaker 2: So we just don't know yet. But I think we
Speaker 2: need to prepare for the worst, and that requires governments
Speaker 2: regulating and legislating. We need to impose copyright principles across AI.
Speaker 2: We need to do all of those things because at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, it's only humans who can
Speaker 2: create the kind of content that is going to both
Speaker 2: satisfy and enlighten other humans.
Speaker 1: The book was more than ten years in the making,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious about whether in the writing of it
Speaker 1: there were surprises for you, or whether it confirmed things
Speaker 1: that you'd long known and suspected about the industry that
Speaker 1: you've given your life to.
Speaker 2: There were no real surprises in the direction that I found,
Speaker 2: and most of us who follow these things know about
Speaker 2: that direction. What surprised and to some extent, alarmed me
Speaker 2: was the scale of it, the layers of it, and
Speaker 2: the way that it's become normalized and accepted. And I
Speaker 2: understand why that might be because most normal citizens, including
Speaker 2: politicians and political leaders and business leaders, feel they can't
Speaker 2: do anything about it, so they have to live with
Speaker 2: the beast rather than tame the beast. But when you
Speaker 2: look at the cumulative effect, which is what I've done
Speaker 2: in this book, from really the late eighteen hundreds when
Speaker 2: the first big kind of newspapers started to evolve, until
Speaker 2: you know, the third decade of this century, where we
Speaker 2: have social media and we have Fox News and whatever.
Speaker 2: The cumulative effect has just been horrific, and that surprised
Speaker 2: me the scale of it.
Speaker 1: At the end of writing this book, are you moral
Speaker 1: less optimistic about the prospect of the kind of journalism
Speaker 1: you believe in having a future.
Speaker 2: I'm far less optimistic about it happening at scale, and
Speaker 2: indeed that's not what's happening. But I remain in some
Speaker 2: ways even more optimistic of it happening in important pockets
Speaker 2: because the business model now requires the consumers and readers
Speaker 2: and viewers of quality journalism to pay for it in
Speaker 2: a way that they didn't before. They used to pay
Speaker 2: for their newspaper, but it was subsidized heavily by the advertising.
Speaker 2: It means that the people who end up paying for
Speaker 2: it and consuming it take it very seriously, and they
Speaker 2: can fund to a limited but a big enough degree,
Speaker 2: the resources needed to do it well. So it's a
Speaker 2: bit of both.
Speaker 1: Now you know you've got a book on the front
Speaker 1: of the shelves of the bookshops, in the library, whatever.
Speaker 1: You have a yen to write a follow up book,
Speaker 1: books where you're going to spend the next few years.
Speaker 2: Well, I really really enjoyed it. I mean, I've been
Speaker 2: writing journalism and editing journalism all my life, but writing
Speaker 2: a one hundred thousand word book is a different proposition.
Speaker 1: And it's flying business class. You can stretch your legs out.
Speaker 2: You can. It's flying first class, actually, Michael, and you
Speaker 2: can really stretch your legs out. But it was really satisfying.
Speaker 2: So I've enjoyed that. I am thinking about another project.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what it will be.
Speaker 1: Eric Beacher, thank you for your time.
Speaker 2: Thanks Michael.
Speaker 1: Eric Beach's book The Men Who Killed the News is
Speaker 1: available now. Before we go, I wanted to tell you
Speaker 1: what I've been reading this week. Melbourne author Ella Baxter's
Speaker 1: debut novel New Animals, came out a few years ago
Speaker 1: and show her to be a significant talent. Her follow
Speaker 1: up Wu Wu is out now and it is dark, weird, angry,
Speaker 1: fun It's said in the contemporary art world, and has
Speaker 1: creepy puppets, a stalker, the ghost of a multi media artist,
Speaker 1: and a whole lot more that earns it the name
Speaker 1: Wu Wu. It's terrific. You can find it and all
Speaker 1: the other books we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
Speaker 1: please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: helps a lot. Next week I read this I sit
Speaker 1: down with Turkish author Elif Shaffer to talk about her
Speaker 1: new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, and she
Speaker 1: shares the differences between writing in her mother tongue and
Speaker 1: writing in English.
Speaker 3: If my writing as melancholy, sorrow, longing, sadness, I find
Speaker 3: his sticks much easier to express in Turkish. But when
Speaker 3: it comes to humor, which I love, irony and sakai
Speaker 3: are much easier in English.
Speaker 1: Read this is produced and edited by Clara Ames, mixing
Speaker 1: and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See
Speaker 1: you next week.