Let this be a lesson to you, kids. If you’re going to use company resources to help you climb the career ladder elsewhere, you’d be well served to make sure your contract doesn’t have any nasty non-compete clauses in it that frown upon you doing so.
“I just didn’t think it would be a big deal, people do it all the time. Thousands of hours of editing time gets billed to the company while presenters work on their showreels.”
“You may think that it’s ridiculous … for such a small thing. It’s not ridiculous to the bosses in Qatar. They also believe that playing soccer in the desert is not ridiculous.”
“I’ll miss working with AJ+ in San Francisco, they really are doing things there that are 20 years ahead of Australian media. They have brown people in their videos.”
“The team [at] AJ+ are really talented and are making innovative work. They’re skating where the puck will be, bringing context to the news cycle, and engaging millennial audiences on really important issues like race, privacy, and freedom of speech…. and they only censored my work once.”
“If I’ve learnt anything during my time at Al Jazeera it’s that journalism is not a crime, unless you’re a BBC journalist exposing the deaths of migrant workers during the construction of football stadiums in Doha…or you use the studio and make up for 40 minutes”
The comparison Dan makes there – that being between potentially breaching contract by using employer resources to make an audition tape for a light entertainment show on Comedy Central, and a group of journalists who were detained by Qatari government officials as an alleged matter of “national security” after they tried to investigate the housing conditions of migrant workers who have been dying en masse whilst constructing sport stadiums for the desert nation’s highly contentious FIFA World Cup in 2022 – is what you call “something of a long bow.”
“I really enjoyed my time at AJ+ got to make a heap of great work, travel the US and play to a broad international audience, despite looking Jewish.”
