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- For your eyes only: election preview!
I’m excited (and a little nervous) to finally share my plans for Zee Feed’s 2025 federal election coverage. This has been a project in the works for months, and represents to a shift in editorial strategy that I’ve been wanting to make for a year – finally going for it!
Zee Feed should be a place for bigger ideas, and trying to be reactive to the news cycle with that ethos has become impossible. So, no more week-to-week publishing. In the fifth year of this beautiful little publication, Zee Feed is shifting to issues-based publishing. Every two months, a collection of articles available to read at once. Like a magazine, but online. It begins with this…
The Zee Feed 2025 Election Special Issue. Complete with its own digital cover. As a newsletter subscriber you are the first to see the cover and hear this news. Even my mum didn’t know (she wanted to get the surprise along with everyone else. Hi Mum! Surprise!)
The Election Issue won’t be live until Monday, April 7 – also the last day to enrol or update your enrolment details with the AEC.
Like everything I’ve done with Zee Feed so far, it’s kind of an experiment — but one I feel good about.
What’s in the 2025 Election Special Issue?
You can expect thoughtful, helpful commentary and analysis of the biggest issues in this election campaign – which, of course, is the Zee Feed way! They’ll be published in two drops, one available Monday and another midway through to allow us to capture any important themes that come from the campaign itself.
Some of the pieces you can read from Monday:
Why the climate crisis has been pushed into the background, after being the issue of the 2022 election;
A critique of this being the so-called “cost-of-living” election;
Which opinion polls are worth paying attention to, and which ones are meaningless.
In drop two, we’ll have articles on the bot campaigns trying to sway you; the impossibility of trying to vote when Palestine is your #1 priority; and what might be possible with a minority government. Plus more!
The issue will also include a spreadsheet of resources you might find helpful, with links to tools, policy breakdowns, and good work that other people are producing.
I’m still putting the final tweaks on my first ever “Letter from the Editor”. Here’s an excerpt: “This is an explicitly ideological publication. It’s right there in the first line of the About page, our journalism, commentary and analysis is proudly intersectional and feminist. We do not pretend to be objective or unbiased (which are terms often used by other media outlets to hide centrist beliefs). Given that the vast majority of Australian media is underpinned by and promotes conservative beliefs, I’m more than comfortable providing one of the few alternatives.
Having said that, I don’t think Zee Feed’s job is to change your mind or your vote. This audience shares our feminist beliefs! Whose mind would I be changing? Instead, I see our articles as points of conversation, giving you the language to spread these ideas and be offline influencers. You’re much better placed to change the minds of the people in your life than I am.
That last point is especially important, and I might piss some of my peers off by saying this but…
Offline conversations are much more effective at changing people’s hearts and minds than online content. If the goal is reversing Australia’s slide to the right, sharing posts and videos is not going to do much.
The best case study for this comes from the 2022 election, and the historic “best ever” result by the Greens, which included winning three new Queensland seats: Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane. They achieved this in part by mobilising a huge door knocking campaign facilitating face-to-face conversations about Greens political policies and values.
Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather told the Betoota Talks podcast: “Whenever we get a new [door knocking volunteer], the first time they’ve come back and they’ve changed someone’s mind it’s like they’ve found a new religion. They’re like ‘Wow, this works’. Over the weekend this guy called Alex a volunteer of ours, he said ‘Max, I changed this One Nation voter’s mind … I think I got him to vote for the Greens now!’”
There is no post you could possibly share that will be more effective at changing hearts and minds than being an active member of your community, having real conversations with people of different political beliefs.”
Okay, I need to get back to finalising this issue for publication.
Thank you so much for the support. It means a lot.