Wednesday Headlines: 

• Students to stage school walkout over Pauline Hanson
• One dead and more than 200 rescued after Bali ferry fire
• News bargaining incentive hits parliament today
• Victorian authorities prepare for mass vaccine event of little penguins
• Tooth decay cases soar across Australia as people put off expensive dentist work

Deep Dive: When Bension Siebert's role was made redundant here at The Briefing, 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. 
 

• Bension’s essay on Cheek Media: How sex work saved my investigative journalism career 

• Bension’s Instagram: bensionfindsout 

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