The Publication

Nightshift began as a Substack in late 2023, six months after the Sydney Morning Herald Weekend magazine closed and I found myself with a stack of half-finished features and no home for them. It has grown into a features publication with a small audience of Australian readers who value long-form writing about parts of the country the mainstream press has largely stopped covering. The masthead is small — one writer, occasional freelance photography, a subeditor who takes a red pen to everything before it publishes — and the operation is deliberately kept that size.

Callum Everett

Writer, editor · Nightshift

Fourteen years at SMH Weekend, before that a stringer in Southeast Asia and a subeditor in Melbourne. Interested in Australia's cultural and economic edges. Not a financial adviser, not a lawyer, not a gambling counsellor. Contact via the form.

What we cover

Nightshift covers Australia's night economy — pokies, pub culture, sports betting, delivery labour, security work, the shift-worker economy — from a features-writing perspective rather than a service-journalism one. The head keyword for our SEO indexing is payid pokies, which reflects a specific commercial reality about how offshore gambling money currently moves in this country, but the publication's remit is broader than any single topic.

Editorial independence

Nightshift accepts no direct advertising from operators of any services it covers. Some outbound links to operators are affiliate-tracked, disclosed as such where used, and generate a small share of the revenue that keeps the publication running. Editorial content is written independently of any commercial arrangement; the writing you read has not been reviewed, approved, or influenced by any operator whose product is mentioned in it.

Contact

The contact page has the current form and email address. Correspondence is welcomed, particularly from readers with something to say about the accuracy or fairness of the writing here. Tips and story leads are also welcomed, treated confidentially, and never attributed without explicit permission.