Your host

‘Mr Denmore’ is financial journalist Jim Parker, a 26-year media veteran. Jim began in journalism in New Zealand at the end of the 70s, working in commercial and public radio. He migrated to radio in Australia in the mid-80s before a two-year stint in London as a radio correspondent and TV news producer. Back in Australia, Jim worked for five years in wire service AAP,  before becoming an Asia editor for a US financial wire. In the mid-90s, he helped pioneer desktop financial television with Reuters. In six years from 2000, Jim worked on new media ventures for Fairfax. Since 2006, Jim has worked as a corporate communications adviser, writing and presenting on investment, media and communication for financial intermediaries.  Jim is a graduate in journalism from the Auckland University of Technology and in social and economic history from Deakin University, Victoria.

So who’s this?

That’s Michael Joseph Savage. He was an Australian-born New Zealand statesman who served as the 23rd Prime Minister of New Zealand, heading the First Labour Government from 6 December 1935 until his death in 1940. A staunch unionist, Savage is generally known as the architect of the Kiwi welfare state. Essentially New Zealand’s version of Australia’s wartime leader John Curtin, Savage was so revered by the Depression and WWII  generation, his picture hung on the lounge room walls of many NZ homes right through until the 60s. People today still flock to his memorial, in a park overlooking Auckland Harbour.  ‘Mr Denmore’ uses Savage as his avatar because of the latter’s connections to both Australia and New Zealand and the enormous mana he holds as a social democrat in the classic sense.

2 Comments

Simon Warriner · March 16, 2016 at 6:46 PM

Just been reading your blog, and finding myself in furious agreement.

My one quibble is that you seen to ignore the possibility that the media owners are using some of the motivating factors, like click-through counts to mask their own agenda.

My motivation for this perspective comes from reading the last book by Douglas reed, “The Controversy of Zion”. He devotes an entire chapter to the demise of a well known and respected British newspaper editor. It is well worth a read for anyone seeking to understand how the media world might be manipulated.

Google it, free pdf downloads available.

For information, not publication.

Matthew Ricketson · August 12, 2021 at 10:03 AM

Hi Jim,

How’s it going? I think you’re the same Jim Parker who recently reviewed Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism on Good Reads. If you’re not, my apologies. If you are, I’d like to offer your some feedback. I could put them up on Good Reads but I thought I’d start here as I think we may have met some years ago at a meet-up that Melissa Sweet organised in Canberra.

Anyway, to your review. I was taught many years ago that it’s preferable to review the book in front of you rather than the book you wished the authors had written. Short of a biographer of Winston Churchill turning in a biography of Neville Chamberlain, you can’t really say the authors have failed in their stated task. If you really want another book about how the big media companies failed to adapt to the digital age, well, you can always write it yourself. But you don’t need to as there have already been several books on the very topic that you wanted Andrew Dodd and I to write about: Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The rise and fall (2013); Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (2013), and Ben Hills’ Stop the Presses (2014). In any case, the topic you wanted us to write about is not ignored in Upheaval; it just isn’t the focus of the book. What is the book’s focus is the human stories of journalists and journalism from the 1980s to now.

You also complain about the book’s concentration on print journalism. We explain why on page nine. The vast bulk of the redundancies took place in the two biggest print media companies in Australia, Fairfax and News. We did interview journalists who took redundancy from commercial tv networks and smaller regional publications but the simple fact is that these outlets never employed anything like the same number of journalists as Fairfax and News.

As to your quibble about sub-editors being journalists, we completely agree. A number of them were among our interviewees. What we did quote, on page 64, was the view of some reporters that sub-editors are failed reporters.

Jim, you’re a smart person whose analysis of the news media is thoughtful and sharp. I wish you had read Upheaval a bit more carefully, or at the least with an open mind. To the best of my knowledge, there have been few if any books like it in Australia. That is, books that portray journalists and journalism in their glory and their warts. It is a portrait that has a lot to offer today’s journalists as they try to do more with less, and do it amid roiling hyper-partisanship and a surfeit of spinners.

I’m happy to discuss further if you like.

Cheers, Matthew Ricketson.

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