JON FAINE: Colin from Richmond’s going to ask you a question that’ll do nothing for your blood pressure. Good morning, Colin.

CALLER COLIN: Yes hi. I’m a subscriber to Crikey and I was just wondering if Andrew – actually one of the things I like about Crikey is that I get a daily email and so it feels like I’m actually getting something delivered into my inbox for…

JON FAINE: So you subscribe to the daily service?

CALLER COLIN: Yeah yeah I do. And I really read that and I don’t really read the website that much at all. So I’m just wondering if you’d like to comment on the impact of these new publishers. And then I’ve got another question just about classified ads and how important that is for paper business because there seems to be a lot of websites out there which do classified ads better than a lot of the newspapers.

JON FAINE: And that’s hit Fairfax particularly hard for what’s called the rivers of gold…

ANDREW JASPAN: Correct.

JON FAINE: …that traditionally were the main income stream. So, Andrew what do you think now that you’re freed of the constraints of working for a rival media organisation, you were never happy with Crikey when you were editor of the newspaper.

ANDREW JASPAN: No I don’t intend to go there, Jon. What I would say however is that we here in Melbourne had a lot of thoughts about how we wanted to develop the online service, and I’m not going to rehearse them all here, but I think if we’d allowed local initiative to take hold and we could have developed The Ageonline as we wanted to do it here in Melbourne, we would have been offering very much the kind of things that Crikey and others can do out there. But the fact of the matter is that The Age online was largely run out of Sydney by a different division with its own, you know, its own costs and profit motives and its own business structure.

So – but that’s, you know, that’s up for discussion right now.

Your second point on classifieds…

JON FAINE: Is that all you want to say about for instance…

ANDREW JASPAN: No I…

JON FAINE: …about Crikey? You don’t want to say anything about Crikey?

ANDREW JASPAN: No no not particularly. I mean, you know…

JON FAINE: You were pretty angry with them a few times in your tenure as an editor of the paper.

ANDREW JASPAN: I was, I was but you know I think the previous editor was as well, and so it goes on. I don’t mind being held to account, I really don’t mind. You know, the editor wields or can wield a great deal of power and I don’t mind people holding us to account.

JON FAINE: Alright.

ANDREW JASPAN: What I dislike is just snide cynicism, as it were, but that’s another issue.

Snide cyncicsim? How nice!

What happened yesterday was an inevitable act of pragmatic politics. The hypocrisy and abject failure lies in the gap between Rudd’s aggressive climate rhetoric and his meek, pusillanimous policy, a gap that could have been filled by active leadership from our Prime Minister and his party. If they truly believe that climate change is the elephant in all our rooms, then they had an obligation to provide the sort of national discussion and understanding that might have made the dramatic action required to save our planet and our children’s skins politically palatable. They didn’t. Kevin 07 failed to deliver climate change we can believe in. The unravelling environment became nothing more than just another what’s-in-it for me issue of personal pain or gain. The destructive individualism refined through a decade of the previous administration plays on, fuelled by a populist press and pandered to by a nervous government too eager to please, too anxious to take a risk.

Crikey – and me personally – has copped a lot of blogosphere heat for running a poll to name the Obama puppy that included the candidate A Mongrel Called Trig. It was a reader suggestion, and it somehow made our shortlist, and then hopped onto the polling page. From there it was just a hop skip and a jump to the outraged comment strings of Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and others.

There’s not a lot of love in those rooms.

We deserve our lumps here. There was no redeeming – or even comic – feature to what is just a dumb slur on an innocent child. The galling part of course, is giving ammunition to the billious rabble of the blogging far right. But what can you say when you’re so obviously in the wrong. Other than “I was wrong.” Which I was.

As I say, cop your lumps, learn your lesson and move on.