Dearest Readers, Michael Taylor and the AIM Network Team – and fellow contributors.
To learn that two of my articles made AIMN’s top five articles for 2023 has filled me with great joy and excitement and I’m positively squeaking with delight.
Of course it has. I am honoured to lay my pen alongside AIMN luminary Rossleigh, who also scored two places in the lineup and then there is the delightfully named Grumpy Geezer who keeps us all on our clodhoppers!
In truth, both of my articles were years and months in the making. Long hours, long nights and even longer days. To think that anyone, let alone thousands of you read them, is an enormous privilege.
They were ‘long reads’ sometime referred to as ‘long form’ or essays. There are facile editors who rely on ‘popular wisdom’ that articles should be no longer than 1200 words because apparently, you the reader, is incapable of sustaining interest in a longer article. Utter bollocks as it transpires. When I first became a journalist, I was imbued with the edict that whatever I wrote should be understandable for a 12-year-old. I thought this was gross insult to 12-year-olds. I was told that words should comprise of no more than two syllables. I ignored such gratuitous and elitist pomposity and arrogance.
Readers mean the world to us. Not just because of the click bait factor but more for the wondrous and complex nature of communication. I learn so much from readers. And from comments too.
I wish to salute the founding editor of AIM Network, Michael Taylor – and his elves – because of his courage and his belief in journalism and journalists. He is extraordinarily supportive and unafraid of long form or short form journalism for that matter. He is a joy to work with and his life experience is such that he has a great empathy and sense of a shared humanity, a good heart as well as a formidable intellect. I’ve watched him nurture talent. He’s a generous editor, and reminds me of my beloved Editor in Chief, the great Les Carlyon, who never once curbed my feral pen, but protected it. And Me.
I could not have achieved the Top Five if Michael had been a lesser editor, a lesser publisher, a lesser journalist.
Nor could I have achieved such an accolade, were it not for you the reader. Thank you. I shall not squander your trust.
1. Tess Lawrence: Number 1 for-2023: George Pell ‘Devil Incarnate’ is dead
2. Rossleigh: Number 2 for 2023: The Amazing Linda Reynolds
3. Tess Lawrence: Number 3 for 2023: Who is Christian Porter’s sugar daddy? (part 1)
4. Grumpy Geezer: Number 4 for 2023: A farce only a monster could love
5. Rossleigh: Number 5 for 2023: The Strange Case Of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price
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Tess Lawrence is Contributing editor-at-large for Independent Australia and her most recent article is The night Porter and allegation of rape.
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