Review: ‘Inside Story’

On holiday, I’ve been reading ‘Inside Story’ – ABC foreign correspondent Peter Lloyd’s honest and compelling tale of his humiliating arrest and imprisonment in Singapore in 2008 for drug possession (a trafficking charge was later dropped).

Lloyd was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of his arrest, a personal legacy of his work over the previous six years covering a succession of disasters – including the Bali bombing, the Boxing Day tsunami and the carnage around Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and her subsequent assassination. (more…)

News Speak

A bizarre year in journalism ends with our dominant media company’s flagship newspaper, an outlet that long ago gave up any pretence of objectivity, declaring war on the press gallery, the blogosphere, the twitterverse and just about anyone that wasn’t a Murdoch lackey sitting in front of a terminal in Holt Street.

The Australian is becoming a case-study in wagon-circling institutional paranoia, knee-jerk hyper-sensitivity, stupefying arrogance and an unending Orwellian capacity for declaring that black is white. Christopher Joye puts its increasingly unhinged behaviour down to insecurity, noting that the paper spends “more time defending its own actions in pushing specific agendas and ideological narratives than any other serious media forum on earth”. (more…)

So You Want to be a Journalist?

Oh, how familiar: Communications Graduate: “I want to be a journalist for the New York Times, interviewing the president, living in a Greenwich Village apartment and eating out at cool restaurants.”Wizened Old Journalist: “How about a job writing about pork belly futures for a trade magazine in Kansas?” And the Read more…

Branded Journalism

Australians don’t know who reports the news they consume and don’t care. At least that’s the conclusion of new research from Essential Media Communications, which found that outside the household names of Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan and Andrew Bolt,readers and viewers struggle to nominate a single journalist. To anyone raised Read more…

Waiting for Poddo

The union representing Australian journalists has released a report on the state of the profession. ‘Life in the Clickstream II: The Future of Journalism’ is the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance’s second such survey, updating an inaugural effort two years ago. For anyone familiar with the plight of the media Read more…

Slow Business

If politics is show business for ugly people, television journalism is politics for stupid people. At least that’s the conclusion one might reach after watching current affairs shows on the commercial channels. The performers huff and puff and the producers manufacture outrage, so that there is inevitably an inverse relationship Read more…