March, 2010

Google was wrong to quit China, because the internet is a force for good there, argues Professor Yasheng Huang of the  MIT Sloan School of Management (and the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State) in this piece for the Washington Post. It’s an interesting article, and a reminder that China is anything [...]

Since Rupert Murdoch has finally put firm dates on his plans to charge for content online, we might as well review another brave experiment. People who keep up with new media have been keeping a careful eye on  the 146 year old Seattle Post Intelligencer ,which folded in March last year. Or rather it was [...]

Inside Story has a fascinating and worrying article by Rodney Tiffen which suggests that the media got it badly wrong in reporting the imbroglio over the Rudd Government’s home insulation stimulus package. It’s a long piece that unpicks the scheme from a number of points of view, weighing its benefits against its shortcomings. But for [...]

The New York Times has a brief, and not particularly revealing, interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brinon the Google China story.   “There’s a lot of lack of clarity. Our hope is that the newly begun Hong Kong service will continue to be available in mainland China…The story’s not over yet.”

As I write this, the annual Broadcasting Industry Summit is underway in Sydney, with a number of interesting speakers lined up over the next two days. Earlier this morning, it was the turn of Australian Communications and Media Authority Chair Chris Chapman. A lot of his speech fell in to the important but dry category [...]

This is huge. Surely the biggest media story in the year, if not the decade. And it is not only a media story. It is also about culture, censorship, dictatorship and, well,  the future of the world. Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, putting it on a collision course with the [...]

A return to form for Media Watch tonight. People at SBS will be squirming. And some insight into those cryptic comments by Cameron Stewart of the Australian at Friday night’s Quills.

Anyone who has wandered around a News Limited building in recent times will have seen the posters about the organisation’s attempt to become carbon neutral. In 2007, Rupert Murdoch made the brave or rash promise that the multi-national media giant would be carbon neutral by the end of this year. So how’s it going? According [...]

For those who are interested, Malcolm Fraser and I have a piece in The Australian today responding to an earlier article by Sir John Kerr’s former secretary, David Smith. It’s all about a phone call between Kerr and Fraser on the morning of 11 November 1975.

Am I the only one who feels a sense of dissonance at journalists’ award nights? On the one hand it is good to celebrate the best of our craft. On the other hand there is something wrong, deeply wrong, with sitting down surrounded by white linen and glad-handing PR people, eating one of those fiddly tricked [...]