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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…
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Trust Never Sleeps
If you could pay directly for the work of a journalist. says Annabel Crabb in a widely applauded University of Melbourne speech on the sorry plight of her trade, you would be buying the individual journalist’s time, research and writing. “You are taking out a time share on all the Read more…
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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…
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The Perennial Outsider
“Rupert Murdoch came into this business as an outsider and he continues to see himself as such, no matter that he owns everything, controls everything, and is the central person of our time. He continues to see himself as an outsider and it gives him enormous happiness, joy, and a Read more…
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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…
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Thumb Suckers
The billy’s boiling again over at new media upstart New Matilda, which has whistled out to its readers that it’s back in business (almost) and looking for financial backers. One can only wish them well, given the dire state of journalism emerging from their mainstream cousins. Crikey remains our only Read more…
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Click Magnets
Any business or finance editor will tell you that of all the news they publish, the most clicked-upon stories involve mentions of property, house prices and interest rates. No surprise, obviously, given how leveraged the average Australian consumer is to real estate (see RBA chart pack here). So there clearly Read more…
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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…