Last and Curious

In journalism, there’s nothing like beating the opposition on a breaking story. Having juicy information before anyone else is an adrenalin-pumping, endorphin-generating sensation that is hard to come down from. In the financial wire services in the 80s and 90s, we fought more competitively than anyone, with timings of news Read more…

The Play’s the Thing

The eerie return of John Howard, more like Banquo than Lazarus, to Australian public life is doing strange things to the heads of the journalistic community. There was Jonathan Green on the ABC’s Drum today, fawning over Howard’s “steely chutzpah” and contrasting his supposed “conviction” politics with the weather vane-driven, Read more…

Dark Satanic News Mills

Anyone who has worked in the production side of a wire news service (AP, Dow Jones, Reuters, AAP, Bloomberg, AFP) will tell you the atmosphere in those always chaotic newsrooms can feel something like an 18th century mill where the machines never stop. Reporters, chief reporters, sub-editors, news and picture Read more…

State of Play?

On holiday at the moment, I’ve been catching up with movies I’ve missed, including ‘State of Play’ a political/media thriller built around a collaboration between an old school MSM investigative reporter and a blogger working for the same newspaper in Washington. Behind the main story about dirty dealings in the Read more…