The Saturday Paper celebrates 10 years with Angry at Breakfast
On March 2, The Saturday Paper celebrates 10 years since publishing its first edition. It is marking the occasion with a
book of editorials by editor-in-chief Erik Jensen, titled Angry at Breakfast.
The book is a pacy, pungent account of a lost decade. Like The Saturday Paper, it is forthright, playful and ultimately revealing. This is politics in all its ugly, stumbling, ludicrous detail.
Over the past decade, The Saturday Paper has become Australia’s leading independent newspaper. Its journalism has won multiple Walkley Awards and its readership has grown to more than 350,000.
The paper started with a meeting between publisher Morry Schwartz and Erik Jensen, who was then 23.
“I had wanted to have a newspaper ever since I started going to McGills as a teenager,” Schwartz says. “When I met Erik, I knew it was something that was possible. When other titles were really struggling, it was exactly the right time for us to get started.”
When The Saturday Paper launched, most critics said it wouldn’t last more than six months. Instead, it has been a commercial success since its first year, and has proved there is an audience for quality, independent journalism.
“Ten years later, the paper still feels miraculous,” Jensen says. “The journalism we produce is among the best in the country. From Rick Morton’s dogged coverage of robodebt to Karen Middleton’s scrupulous, incisive coverage of federal politics, The Saturday Paper is doing exactly what we always hoped it would do – adding a new voice and telling stories ignored elsewhere.”
Until the age of five, I believed things only exploded and only rarely. The day I learnt this not to be true, I was trying to hold a papaya that I thought would be breakfast. As I lifted the fruit, its flesh ran out onto the table. Its juice had burnt into the timber and the air stung with its ripeness. That morning, I learnt the word “imploded”.
I thought about this betrayal as I read over a decade of editorials from The Saturday Paper. I realise now that it is exceedingly uncommon for something to blow up. Much more likely, it will rot from inside. Australia is proof of that.
– Erik Jensen, from the introduction to Angry at Breakfast
Press contact
Geoff Cope-Watts
Marketing & Partnerships Manager, Schwartz Media
[email protected]