If you have even a passing interest in the state of the Australian media, you may have come across the estimate that between four and five thousand journalism jobs were lost nationally in the past decade. This estimate suggests the scale of an industry-wide crisis in which successive rounds of redundancies became a feature of life in many newsrooms as media organisations turned to cost-cutting in their struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. The figure, which originated from the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, also points, albeit more obliquely, to the human impact of such cultural changes and the thousands of distinctive individual experiences that such numbers can elide.