Forty years ago I got my first job in journalism, working over a summer holiday for The River News – a weekly newspaper serving the town of Waikerie in the South Australian Riverland. Circulation was about 2,000 – which meant that just about every household in the town and surrounding areas bought a copy each week.
The River News wasn’t particularly a bastion of quality journalism. One of my jobs was to write the advertorial. Such was my naivety that I approached what was meant to be an advertising feature on the local Ford dealership as an investigative project – and had my first experience of copy being comprehensively rewritten as a result.
