Journalist Christina Patterson has spoken out about losing her job earlier this year after a decade at The Independent.
Her redundancy came in the same year that she was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for a series of articles about the NHS.
In a blog about the death of journalism, Patterson said that job losses are an inevitability but that her departure still came as a “shock”.
She wrote: “We journalists always knew we’d lose our jobs. We knew it in the way smokers know that sucking a little stick of tobacco gives you cancer. We knew it, but when it happens, it’s still a shock.
"For me, the week before it all blew up – and I think we can probably say that shouting at the editor so that he threatens to call security does count as 'blowing up' – I had been asked to address a seminar at the House of Commons and present a film for The One Show to coincide with the release of The Francis Report.
“One moment, I was being asked, by politicians, and TV presenters, and radio presenters, for my opinion on whatever I’d written about that morning. The next moment, I didn’t have a job."
She added: “The next moment – the next day, to be a little more precise – I was telling Harriet Harman, on the phone, while pacing round my study, that I’d been looking forward to doing the interview we’d fixed, for a series on 'women and power', but that it didn’t seem all that appropriate any more, since I didn’t have any power – and that my career as a journalist on a national newspaper seemed to have come to a sudden end.”
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