November 27, 2009 – 2:29 pm
I just had a call from the office of Minister for Communications Senator Stephen Conroy regarding this piece I wrote for today’s Crikey email. To quote the relevant pars of the Crikey piece: The Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, can be a difficult man to read, and it would seem that some people are getting it [...]
November 27, 2009 – 10:30 am
A good post here from Tim Burrowes at Mumbrella about the differences between this year’s two online masthead new arrivals – News Limited’s The Punch and Fairfax’s National Times. I would add to Mumbrella’s observations about the new media savvyness of the publication’s editors an anecdote I heard a few months ago about The Punch boss David [...]
November 26, 2009 – 8:49 pm
This is sad. The local versions of A Current Affair have been axed in Adelaide and Perth. This may not mean much east of the dividing range, but in Adelaide at least (I am less familiar with Perth) ACA has provided, along with the usual diet of petty shonks, diets and celebs, the occasional piece [...]
November 25, 2009 – 9:48 pm
Nothing drives site traffic like gossip, as the figures for my blog yesterday – when I posted the deliciously painful correspondence between Eric Ellis and The Monthly - attest. Meanwhile I’ve been waiting for a quiet day on the media patch to give a more serious matter a going over. Thanks to Malcolm Turnbull hogging the [...]
November 24, 2009 – 2:00 pm
As reported in the Crikey email today, there is a stoush going on between The Monthly magazine and Asian-based freelancer Eric Ellis. It’s all about an article commissioned by editor Ben Naparstek on the refugee camps in Sri Lanka. Ellis delivered, but Naparstek decided the piece wasn’t up to the magazine’s high standards. It has [...]
November 24, 2009 – 6:52 am
A slightly belated acknowledgement here, but last Friday in the Crikey email, I predicted that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy would signal his intentions regarding Australian content regulation on new media platforms. Well, my information was from good sources, but Conroy did not speak as expected. Conroy’s speech followed what I called the Battle of the [...]
November 23, 2009 – 8:31 pm
Those following events at Crikey in the wake of the announced departure of editor Jonathan Green might have noticed that an advertisement for the position of editor appeared in today’s Media section of the Australian. Meanwhile, Green’s deputy, Sophie Black, is giving a speech on the future of public interest journalism this Wednesday evening. Details [...]
November 19, 2009 – 10:10 pm
Today was a day for speechifying by television big wigs. Even as Foxtel’s Kim Williams was calling for deregulation of the television industry, as reported in my previous post, the ABC’s Director of Television, Kim Dalton, was suggesting that regulation be extended to cover new platforms, including mobile telephones and television content delivered by the [...]
November 19, 2009 – 5:13 pm
The CEO of Foxtel, Kim Williams, has made a major speech today calling for a rapid and fundamental alteration to the way in which the television industry is regulated. Speaking at the Network Insights Conference in Sydney, Williams took the fight up to commercial free to air television and to the ABC, suggesting that regulations [...]
November 19, 2009 – 12:14 am
This morning the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne will release its first major research report. It is an extraordinary document, giving a close-grained view of how journalists reported on Australia’s worst peacetime disaster – the Black Saturday bushfires earlier this year. In a story in the Crikey email later today, I [...]
