Ten years on from the misogyny speech, Katharine Murphy reflects on how it was framed at the time – and what has been gained since
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I was nervous about looking back at the words I wrote on 9 October, 2012. I didn’t think my reporting would be terrible, I just doubted I’d be proud of it. Back then, my primary job was liveblogging federal politics. The Age, the broadsheet newspaper I worked for then, was transforming itself into a digital-first news agency. The transition was brutal. There was mass job shedding as the internet blew a hole in our business models. Journalists wondered what journalism actually was in this new age, and there were turf wars going on inside Fairfax as the newspaper and digital arms were integrated.
Live reporting was a refuge from those existential uncertainties. In that mode, I covered parliament in 10-or-15-minute intervals, sometimes posting for 12 hours at a time. We were making this style of reporting up as we went. Readers had a voracious appetite for news as it happened, and we were trying to migrate the old newspaper values to live reportage in the new world. None of this scene setting is an excuse, it’s just context. I’m scoping out my professional milieu as I sat, plugged into the matrix, and listened to Julia Gillard hurling the words that became the misogyny speech – a set of words powerful enough to travel around the world.
