Thursday Headlines:
Deep Dive: When Bension Siebert's role was made redundant, the award-winning journalist found himself staring down a shrinking media industry that no longer seemed willing to invest in the investigations he'd spent his career chasing.
A week later, he was walking out of a stranger's apartment with $600 in his pocket, having just taken his first paid in-person sex work booking.
In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou and Sacha Barbour Gatt welcome their former colleague and co-host back to the mic to unpack an unlikely career move - and the essay about it that's turned his life upside down in a matter of days.
Bension explains how five hours of sex work can out-earn a week of journalism, why he sees it less as a last resort than a kind of liberation, and how a media landscape squeezed by redundancies and legal risk pushed him toward telling the stories he says newsrooms won't.
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