Goodbye Mumbrella; Hello Unmade

A couple of weeks back, I said goodbye to my colleagues, as I left Mumbrella's staff after nearly 13 years.

Beforehand, I hated the idea of having a virtual leaving do. I'd been hoping to make my exit at the Mumbrella Awards. But the Sydney lockdown wrecked that plan, and indeed the launch party for my book, Media Unmade .

So instead, we had a virtual leaving do. I was back in my office in Tasmania, while my colleagues were on the mainland.

I wasn't looking forward to it. Since the start of the pandemic, we'd had a few previous virtual leaving dos which fell flat. Once the formalities are done, it gets awkward, as nobody quite knows how to make it flow.

I need not have worried. Having agreed beforehand that we'd wind things up as soon as things slowed down, it was, for me, really moving. My colleagues said some truly generous things.

The team revived the old journalism tradition of a leaving page. They dusted off the template for Encore, the magazine we (expensively) used to publish as a sister title to Mumbrella.

It's already in a frame.

But the gift I will really treasure is the Mumbrella trophy I'm clutching in the photograph at the top of this article.

It's a one-off. It was specially made for me in the Mumbrella colours. And flatteringly, they'd engraved it with "Entrepreneur of the Decade".

The origin of Mumbrella's trophies says something about Mumbrella's ethos.

Each one is expensive to manufacture. They're heavy. We could have come up with something cheaper. But we wanted to make sure that winning one of our awards really meant something, and we wanted winners to proudly display them. Over the years, we invested thousands of dollars more on manufacturing Mumbrella Awards trophies than a beancounter would have been able to justify.

It was a tangible signal that we took the responsibility of organising and judging a fair industry awards process seriously.

And it was about long term brand building. Some of the best advertising, media and marketing organisations in the country now proudly display Mumbrella trophies in their office receptions. (Or they did before the lockdowns, anyway.)

So it means a lot to me to now have one of my own.

I was also delighted at that virtual leaving do that we could share the news with the team that my connection with Mumbrella will continue.

I'll retain the honorary title of editor-at-large and will still be making regular contributions.

But my day job will be starting a new thing. I'm starting the analytical email newsletter Unmade. I believe that the Substack email platform has the potential to do for subscription publishing what Wordpress did for blogging, and I'd like to get in on the action.

Shortly, I will be publishing the first edition of Unmade. You can sign up here for free , and later a paid subscription tier will follow. I'll be explaining more of my thinking in that first email a few hours from posting this. I do hope you'll sign up.

Unmade is a partnership with Mumbrella and its parent company Diversified Communications. For now it's a loose arrangement, but if it goes well, we'll formalise everything early next year.

I can't wait to get back to work.