The redundancies of recent years have given former newspaper journalists time to work on the books they had daydreamt about at their desks. Undercover knows of many books in progress and is already seeing the fruits of their leisure, some with a nostalgic tone. Jenny Tabakoff, a long-time Sydney Morning Herald journo, and Eleanor Learmonth have co-authored No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality, out this week from Text Publishing. No, it is not another media book (Killing Fairfax by Pamela Williams and Fairfax: The Rise and Fall by Colleen Ryan are the latest), but a study of how survivors behave in extremity. OK, so it could be about newspapers. Tabakoff has also collaborated with former Herald colleague Greg Lenthen, under the pen name Jen Gregory, to write Late Final Extra, a digital crime novel (published by Smashwords) about murder, corruption and life in an old-fashioned newspaper office.

William John Stapleton, who worked for the Herald and The Australian, has started A Sense of Place Publishing and one of his first titles is Hunting the Famous, his own wistful memoir of life as a reporter from the 1960s to 2009. He has also published Attack at the Dolphin by one-time journalist Bridget Wilson, a novel about a married woman’s affair with a cadet reporter. Already doing well is Keith Austin, a former Herald feature writer and chief subeditor, whose children’s novel, Grymm, has been lauded in his native Britain by a Guardian reviewer who wrote that Austin ‘‘deserves to take his place up there with Stephen King and Neil Gaiman’’.