December, 2009

The media debate of the last six months has been on the issue of whether people will, or should, pay for news content online. This afternoon this post by the news executive producer of Ninemsn, Hal Crawford, suggests that organisation at least will not be joining Rupert Murdoch and News Limited on the front line [...]

Regular readers of this blog will remember this post a few weeks ago about the potential death of Croakey and the Crikey Health and Medical Panel because of cutbacks in the Crikey contributor budget. Croakey and CHAMP have made a worthwhile contribution to reporting under-recognised areas in health reporting. They are the brain children of [...]

I have a story in the Crikey email today about a dust-up between freelance journalists, Fairfax and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance over the standard Fairfax Media contract offered to contributors. Read the email for the main story, but in the meantime there are some more things to say. Read the agreement that is [...]

I’ve been trying to think of precedents, and I can’t. Today the Sydney Morning Herald is campaigning to get its readers to sign a petition for an early election, and a constitutional change to overturn four year fixed terms for the state government. All of which is very interesting, though not original. The Daily Telegraph did [...]

I won’t be able to get to this event, sadly, but I imagine many Melbourne based journos will be drawn to the Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank at 8pm tomorrow night to hear Chris Masters speak on why we need Investigative Journalism and why it is endangered.

You know those monks who used to produce illuminated manuscripts? Imagine how they would have felt as the printing press began to get a grip. The historian Mitchell Stephens has written about how in the early days, there were attempts to “do” illuminated manuscripts using the printing press. How quaint, we think these days. Obviously they [...]

Those who read yesterday’s post about the Copenhagen climate change editorial might be interested to know that in today’s letters page, Age editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge replies to a reader’s query about why the paper did not participate with the following words: The Age did not pull out of an agreement to publish the editorial written [...]

Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes has a thoughtful and timely piece on the new ABC site The Drum. Interesting that The Drum has run it, because it critiques the core premiss of that site – that ABC journalists can write “analysis” without breaching that part of Auntie’s Editorial Policies that prohibits the expression of opinions. Now, [...]

Remember the moment in the Life of Brian film where the naughty boy who is not the Messiah urges his followers to accept that they are all individuals. “We’re all individuals’” they chant in unison. Then a voice at the back of the crowd speaks up: “I’m not”. Well, today the Fairfax broadsheets are in [...]

Readers of the Crikey email will have already seen this story of mine about SBS threatening legal action against Crikey for using the term “the world game” as a heading for aggregated stories about soccer. SBS reckons the term is a registered trademark of theirs. Now Sam Roggeveen, editor of the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter online [...]