From passion project to a national prison newspaper, speaking to and for those doing time

What led to the creation of About Time?

I co-founded it with Rosie Heselev. The first edition launched in July 2024, but we started putting things together behind the scenes as far back as 2021. I was working at Allens, a big law firm, and had done quite a lot of freelance journalism on the side. I had also done a lot of work through my law degree in criminal justice, including working in America for a while on the Innocence Project, helping people we believed were wrongly convicted of murder. I also worked for NAAJA [the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency] in Darwin for a while. 

I heard about a prison newspaper in the UK and explored more about the world of prison journalism, as well as criminal justice journalism in the US, and so I thought, wow, this seems really cool. We don't have this in Australia. Could this be a thing? And it kind of started from there.

Did it take much convincing to find people to help you make this thing happen?

Yeah, there were so many different entities to convince. First of all, I was trying to find out, is this a gap? And is this a gap that people want to fill? I managed to get in touch with someone who runs focus groups with people in prison or who were formerly in prison, and we asked them about it, as well as asking some Facebook groups of former incarcerated people and their families. The consensus was definitely, ‘Oh, this would have been great when I was inside, but I doubt Corrections would let it through.’ 

Corrections are perceived somewhat negatively by people inside in Australia. It obviously differs between each state and territory, but they kind of have carte blanche authority to decide what goes in and out. So we formed a board, we raised money, we created like a mock-up sample first edition, we put a lot of things in practice. But then, the last thing, that we were always unsure about, was whether Corrections would say yes. In the end, we went state by state, starting with Victoria where we had a couple of connections. I think once people agreed to a meeting, they saw us, thought we’re legit and they realised we’ll do all the work and we’ll give people inside something that’s gonna be good for them and should help, they were like, alright, maybe it’s worth a try.

How do you fund it?

It’s a mix of things. We’ve got a few government grants. We’ve got some big grants from private foundations [such as the Judith Neilson Foundation], and we also have advertising revenue from personal injury law firms and criminal law firms who want to promote their services to people in prison who might be potential clients. Funding is probably two-thirds and advertising is just under one-third. There’s a little bit of subscription revenue as well.

Are there any ads you're not allowed to take?

There was one guy who made an ad that was like, ‘We can’t break you out of prison, but we can do everything else.’ And one of the Corrections departments said, ‘Oh, we can’t promote jailbreak and so we can’t publish it’. We said, ‘It’s clearly a joke’, and then they let it in. We do tell the advertisers what they can’t say and make sure they’re legit. We make sure they’re not taking advantage of the people inside.

Mental health considerations must be hugely important in what you do.

Really important. We have a health section and often it’s mental health tips and tools from psychologists or formerly incarcerated people. So yeah, the ads need to be the kind of content that doesn’t make things worse.

What’s your favourite part of the newspaper?

The letters. We get letters every day, probably like between two and four letters a day from people in prison. A lot of those they want to be published in the paper, writing about their life and their experiences, advice and regrets and so on, as well as art and poetry. But also, a lot of letters have feedback for us, talking about the impact that the paper has had on their time inside. It’s almost exclusively positive and I feel like there aren’t that many jobs where you can have such frequent and immediate positive feedback.

How big is your circulation? 

We print about 13,000 copies and then we have about another 13,000 digital copies for New South Wales, because they [prisoners] all have tablets. It’s something like one paper per every four people in every prison on average. That’s all free of charge, and then we have an audience outside prison – you know, online, newsletter, social media, a few thousand followers across the different types of platforms.

What size is the Australian prison population?

I think it’s like about 47,000 now, which has gone up quite a lot recently, because I think maybe 40 per cent of the Australian prison population is on remand because governments have made it so difficult to get bail now. [Editor’s note: Australian Bureau of Statistics figures say 42 per cent of prisoners in Australia are on remand. The prison population consisted of 27,051 sentenced prisoners and 19,850 unsentenced (remand) prisoners as of June 30, 2025.]

That means a huge proportion of people in prison haven’t even been convicted of a crime and they’re waiting and waiting and waiting for their trial. It’s a really sad reality of the Australian prison population. Obviously, if they’re convicted, they’re in for a lot longer, but if they’re not, they can still end up being in prison for one to two years because there’s a huge backlog of criminal trials.

Is the outside prison readership mainly families wanting to keep track of what happens inside?

I guess that’s the most immediate secondary audience: families and friends and formerly incarcerated people. But then, we do a lot of kind of investigative reporting on the prison system and the justice system more broadly. We have really high-quality journalists and we pay everyone from outside prison for their writing, and so there are people in the sector who are interested in that world. It would be great if we could bring [the newspaper] to more of a mainstream audience, just to convince people that it’s important to know about what happens in prison and who these people are beyond the crime reported in the media. I think that would help a lot.

Corrections departments are okay with your investigate reporting?

I guess there is a line, but as long as our reporting is fact-based, based on real people's experiences, and we can verify that, and it’s not just hardcore opinion writing, then I think Corrections probably feel that not publishing it would look quite poor. We do sometimes have online-only content, which we publish weekly, versus the monthly paper, and so anything that doesn’t go into the prisons doesn’t have to be vetted, but we also like reach out to Corrections for comments on any stories about them. They are happy to publish content that might be perceived as negative, so long as it is very much fact- and primary-source-based.

A major issue relating to jails is Indigenous incarceration rates and deaths in custody. Is that somewhere you go to in the paper?

It is. We recently got accepted to publish in the Northern Territory. It was the last jurisdiction to say yes, but now we’re in Darwin and Alice. The paper has a dedicated section called ‘Mob’, where we write about First Nations information, and of course often it’s negative information. We do write about deaths in custody. We try not to overdo it because it’s really depressing, but we definitely write about the issues affecting First Nations people and uniquely affecting them. But then, a couple of months ago, we had a special First Nations issue and we tried to highlight positive First Nations stories, because you don’t often see too much of that. It’s a necessary kind of thing to cover, for sure.

It’s amazing that Corrections departments are okay with that.

Yeah, maybe it’s because they’ve seen the good feedback about it, or they’ve realised it gives people inside something to do, which is really important.

Is About Time a passion project for you personally?

It started as a passion project but now it’s turned into a full-time job in a medium-sized charity with a team of employees, contractors and volunteers, and an office. That’s been very lucky because I never thought it would be that. I started out doing lots of putting content together, and now I feel more like a fundraiser and the manager of a team and logistics and board reporting and all that kind of stuff, so it’s interesting how your role changes, but it’s definitely a lot of fun.

And what’s your plan for About Time Media? Where to from here?

A lot depends on funding. If we can get more, we can distribute the paper to more facilities, like immigration detention facilities and forensic mental health hospitals, and we can do some different or adapted publications for youth justice. We’d also love to buy or receive donated books to build small libraries in prison wings, and we’d love to run live events with storytelling. We also want to do more audio and video stuff, so yeah, there are a lot of things beyond expanding the paper

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