Mr Denmore

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…

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…

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…

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…

Any trusting soul who still does not harbour any doubts about the honesty of the media need only examine today’s coverage of the latest IMF report on Australia. It’s a textbook study in how the facts, readily available online, can be spun to tell any story that suits a pre-determined Read more…

One standard attack line from the mainstream media against bloggers is that they could not deal with the pressures of daily reporting as a professional journalist. According to this argument, there is a chasm between the effort required to casually opine about a pet subject on a hobby blog and Read more…

The Twitterverse has gone off like a pokie machine at jackpot time after popular blogger Grogs Gamut was outed by The Australian’s James Massola. The latter, who had known GG’s identity for the past year, appeared to be under orders from an editor looking to pick a fight with the Read more…

Media organisations, like most businesses these days, like to talk and fuss about their “brand”. The idea of the brand is a nebulous concept at the best of times, and journalists are notoriously (and rightly) cynical about such self-serving management psychobabble. But with the need to differentiate a commoditised  product Read more…

The first response in the twittersphere/blogosphere to the Kerry O’Brien retirement announcement has been to ask who will replace him. The more pertinent question is what will replace a tired format? Nothwithstanding Kerry’s verbal chess games with leading politicians, the 7.30 Report structure and content is dated and predictable – Read more…