Yes, it’s a full decade since we sent our first email newsletter to those few hundred readers who’d signed up to Inside Story without knowing quite what to expect. The response was strangely encouraging: our server couldn’t cope with the surge in traffic and we went off the air. (We were back pretty quickly.)
It was 2008, the beginning of a decade of extraordinary change: the “subprime crisis” was turning into the global financial crisis, Kevin Rudd was still an uncommonly popular prime minister, Barack Obama was about to be elected president, and the worst of the populist right was years away. The media was facing enormous challenges too — not just from the internet but also from shrinking advertising revenue and the proliferation of partisan news outlets.
In those days we were based at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, which provided vital support. Today, Inside Story is an independently published magazine with a much larger and still-growing readership — and, we hope, a reputation for quality and depth. Swinburne is still one of our backers, as is the University of South Australia, and the newsletter now reaches many thousands of subscribers in Australia and overseas.
All of which is a preamble to the news that an anthology of Inside Story essays, journalism and reviews, Inside Story: The First Ten Years, will be published in November by Grattan Street Press ($29.99 plus $5 postage). We’ll be providing more details very soon, but if you’d like to pre-order a copy in the meantime, just contact us here.
We’d also be delighted if you would consider becoming an Inside Story supporter, by making either a monthly contribution or a once-off donation. Details are here.
We’re very much looking forward to the next ten years of Inside Story; we hope you are too. •
