What's next for The Yeah Nah Review
...and why you should become a paid subscriber...
Howdy!
Firstly, I just wanna say thanks so much for reading/sharing/subscribing to YNR. Although we ‘created’ this thing back in 2023, I didn’t really start posting on it seriously until September last year. Since then, we’ve (why do I keep saying “we” it is just me, especially now that my dog is dead) attracted over 800 subscribers, 80+ of which are paying.
Hot dang, that’s real nice. Cheers.
For those of you who don’t really know me, or just know me through this little newsletter, uhhhh, g’day. My name is Patrick Marlborough, and I have been a grunt in the content mines for far too long. I’ve been getting paid to write since I was 15, back when that was a thing that was possible, and have built a career cranking out words semi-regularly for national and international publications (Vice, The Guardian, Gawker, Slate, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, NME, Kotaku, Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Rolling Stone, Junkee, Pedestrian, the Betoota Advocate, and more defunct magazines, blogs, and journals than I care to remember) mainly from my home in Fremantle, Perth, Western Australia aka the middle of bumfuck nowhere.
Despite having a pretty ‘successful’ (I have received a lot of hate DMs) career as a “journo”, I never studied to be one, and personally loathe journalism as a practice and a state of being. Most of my creative energy goes towards my novels, my live shows, and my music, but people tend to engage with whatever this is more, I figure because the middle-brow won the culture wars a long time ago, which, I guess, I should be very grateful for.
Anyway and anyhow…
I started the YNR off the back of a relentless frustration with the state of the media/arts industry, what felt like a century as a freelance writer/merc, and a deep hatred of just about all the gatekeepers and bosses in said industry in Australia, as well as their absolutely dastardly rates of pay (or lack there of).
My mild involvement in the MEAA’s (join your union) noble effort to get publications like The Guardian (typically paid me $150 Aud a piece) and Crikey etc to agree to a — in my view — disgustingly low freelance feature rate of $300 (AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS!!! PATHETICCC!!!) kinda helped me decide to finally try and go it solo, despite years of being pretty averse to the idea due to a mysterious knack for getting published, somehow. But a series of private equity goons buying, gutting, and desecrating the corpses of publications I used to write for on the regs, especially the well paying (compared to Aus) US pubs like Vice, Gawker, Kotaku etc, forced my hand. I was sick of getting paid bupkis by bumpkins for what I/they/the readers considered pretty good work, and thought, fuck it, I might as well cut out the middle man (besides the silicon valley goons who siphon profit from my work on this fairly naff platform) and make myself my own editor-in-chief (terrible, if anyone needs and misses switched-on editors, it’s this dipshit).
I used to make around 1k a week freelance writing. Nowadays, I’d be lucky to make that in a month, or, really, two. This business — always a nursery for lickspittles, cravens, and dolts — is now at a point of irreversible prolapse, and working within it, for the benefit of such dolts, has little to no appeal without a decent $$$ incentive (I mean, writing for Vice always made me nauseous, but at least I got a bit of kitty to make the ten thousand death threats from Gen-X ketamine junkie types almost kinda worth it).
Editorial direction in the 2010s went from content slop to contentvertorial to content AI slop so seamlessly only the mass lay-offs of friends, foes, and peers could mark the passage of crud through to the other side of the barrel bottom. I have always been hired to be the “wacky take/obscure knowledge” guy/goon (see: autism), but that basically brands you as an unemployable mutoid in a business whose managerial class aspire to a perfectly frictionless passivity. As I’ve written elsewhere, the freaks were driven to extinction, and without them garnering the interest of folks who actually read (oddly key to a words-based business), the industry soon followed.
So yeah, nah, hence The Yeah Nah Review.
My main hope with this thing is that I can make it self-sustaining. I have the advantage of being a pretty good writer, which is a neat trick in an industry that is ironically very short of them, particularly in Australia, where private education has made the average columnist write/think/talk/persist in a zone somewhere between intergenerational inbreeding and untreated head injury.
Writing is my life. It’s all I’ve known since about the age of 4. I don’t like doing anything else, at least anything that is acceptable to do in public (including my comedy, if you’ve seen it, you understand). I currently work part-time as a disability support worker, a job I genuinely do not like, but it’s at least a funny line to pull out when you want to catch a smug PICA bar tankie off guard when they defensively respond to you asking them about their public sector email job with “I help disabled guys buy Lego minifigs at Cockburn Gateway for minimum wage — I am a living saint.” But I’d love to not be doing this, I’d love to back to being a full time writer, as I was before the bottom fell out of, well, everything, I’d especially love to never set foot in Cockburn Gateway again in my life.
I want to use YNR to publish the things I would not be allowed to publish elsewhere in Australia, my editors having an understandable fear of our hilariously draconian defamation laws (I have already been in trouble for suggesting Peter Dutton has FAS, and I just want to reiterate: I don’t care, and he does). But yeah, leftwing political commentary is all but verboten in Australia, as is culture writing that has something resembling a spine/lacking a PhD, so I humbly wish to bring you both through the prism of my own incurable drongology, if you have the stomach for it.
What this looks like down the track is: a weekly bit of political commentary etc as I have been doing; reviews of books, film, music, Lego Minifigs etc. (I got into this biz as a critic, and I’ll die as one); interviews and profiles of Australian artists/oddballs whose work I appreciate/think deserves a little more light; and, shamelessly, Friday Fiction, a segment I abandoned for no real reason other than my dog’s sudden death has thrown me into an unending depressive state that makes me forget about all my obligations but going to the toilet and showering.
To be genuine for a moment: I really am so grateful to everyone who has subscribed and shared YNR, both paid and unpaid, as it’s nice to know that years of pretty stupid/fairly middling work has got me a nice and smart little following of switched-on fans. I am a genuine freak, so I truly appreciate it when people stop to smile and chat as opposed to throwing peanuts etc. through the bars.
If you want to take your support to the next level, and like the sound of what I’m planning here, then a $5 a month subscription makes a world of difference. I have far flung dreams of 1000 paid subscribers, but honestly, 100 paid monthly subscribers (I think we’re at 82, as of writing) would make a tangible difference to my life, and my ability to do my work. Not just YNR, but my novels (4 finished, 1 [NOCK LOOSE] in bookstores everywhere come July 1st), my live shows (yes, I will try to bring Bad Boy Buckley to Melbourne, we just need the cash!), and my music (sorry).
I completely understand subscription fatigue, and personally hate reading articles of any stripe (true), and that’s why all of YNR remains free to all comers (again, even sharing it makes a difference/is appreciated). But…if you want more of it, and if you want me to get really weird with it, then consider that $5. Let’s face it, you’ll end up buying me a pint at the pub if you run into me there anyway, so you might as well pay for it in advance (I still want that pint but).
Anyway! Here’s hoping my crushing dog grief will lift a bit in the coming weeks and I can get down to writing 2 - 3 pieces a week on here. I love you all and only want to bring honour to you and your house.
good on ya, and long live Buckley!
Patrick
p.s. Straying for the Morsel and I have started a podcast that you can subscribe to here!