Deborah Hill Cone: Journalism is in a state of upheaval

We did art. My daughter painted cat superheroes. I painted a really butt-ugly picture of Voldemort. Was very satisfying. Guess that's why it's called art therapy. Photo / iStock

Media may be being swallowed in a vacuum.

I thought I had this week's column all lined up. And then I spent the week at home with sick children. Maybe I could do this home-schooling thing.

We did art. My daughter painted cat superheroes. I painted a really butt-ugly picture of Voldemort. Was very satisfying. Guess that's why it's called art therapy.

Then we did a guided meditation. Actually, I lie. I chanted "calm blue ocean" and my daughter made fun of me and watched Cartoon Network. "All I want to do is see you turn into a giant woman, A GIANT WOMAN."

We listened to some Chopin. Then I got the most likes ever on Facebook for posting that I'd just microwaved a cup of instant coffee.

This seemed to be a sign of something. I thought I might be able to parse this into a column of some kind. Are we done with being precious hipster poppets, maybe?

Then I was hoping to somehow wind all this domestic detritus around to the fact I seem to be hurtling towards menopause (it's called perimenopause). I'm 48, I guess this is not hot news. Just as you get your life arranged, just as you crawl out of the black hole of despair, await the eel in a sock. As Plum Wodehouse said: "It's just when a fellow is feeling braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping."

I wanted to write about menopause because I did have something burning to say about how sucky it is that there are so few kick-ass post-menopausal role models. (Helen Mirren: "At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words 'f*** off' much more frequently." )

But I can't, because I'm having another crisis, my usual crisis actually, which is what the hell I am doing here writing about myself? The local journalism industry is in a state of upheaval. This may be a phase of creative destruction that will lead to the birth of a more formidable, brawny and flexible media, but in the interim it's pretty bloody scary.

I just read gossip columnist Rachel Glucina's new enterprise, Scout. It made me feel rather smug and glad I was not living the desperate life of those people. (Then I felt bad that I felt smug, as I must be a bad person, but then good that I felt bad as obviously I was self-aware enough to feel bad. See? Hormone fluctuations.)

The really frustrating thing is that people more than ever need and want real stories, not articles about Mike Hosking vacuuming his car. They need new narratives, new ideas of ways of living, and a few hard, cold facts they can cling on to amid the annihilating tornado of change.

They might even be prepared to pay for it, if only we could get it right. Lots of industries go through this kind of wipeout, but while the world might get along fine without travel agents, it needs storytellers. While the revamping of the media is not the end of Western civilisation as we know it, it is a trifle worrisome.

I say this as someone who writes about myself for a living, but we don't need more people like me. We don't need more introspective bloggers or writers noodling on about personal crises and cupcakes. We need more righteous people sitting in on court cases and council meetings and covering not terribly spectacular incidents and accidents that might turn out to be actually terribly important: all the stuff citizen journalists are not very interested in. (Watergate started with a court report.)

Anyway, I couldn't write about my internal world if I hadn't spent 15 years writing about the real world first, all those ho-hum AGMs and balance sheets.

The Asaro tribe of Papua New Guinea have a saying: "Knowledge is only rumour until it is in the muscle."

We have too much rumour and not enough muscle.

Vulnerability researcher Brene Brown uses this saying to refer to embodied cognition, how we don't truly know stuff till we feel it in our bodies. But I think the media act as our muscles, repository of our knowledge, and we need to keep flexing our muscles or they will atrophy through lack of use.

Remember those floppy human "big babies" in their hover chairs in WALL-E? We don't want to end up like that.

So now I'm off to a pump class. (Exercise boosts your brain-derived neurotrophic factor. There's a fact for ya.) And while I work out I shall assuage my self-indulgent guilt with a self-justifying Tolstoy quote: "Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself."

If we want a powerful media we have to make our own strength felt, just as Helen Mirren said.