‘The Successor’: The title of Paddy Manning’s unauthorised biography of Lachlan Murdoch, oldest son of media giant Rupert, is a conscious play on the immensely popular fiction TV series Succession, which itself is clearly based on the Murdoch dynasty. So if you’re familiar with the series, one of the first Read more…
“How democracies can be sustained as the likely contests over climate change and energy consumption destabilise them will become the central political question of the coming decade.” Professor Helen Thompson, ’Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’ Like others, I became aware of Professor Helen Thompson’s astounding breadth of knowledge Read more…
In the wake of St Barnaby’s latest resurrection/resuscitation, the ABC news flashed up with a story about an aborted attempt by his National Party of opportunists, carpetbaggers and grafters to rewrite the Murray-Darling Basin plan, a 2012 bipartisan agreement about how to use the water that flows down Australia’s longest Read more…
Any Australian who has paid even cursory attention to this country’s poisonous politics over climate change these past two decades will be familiar with this long and sorry story, but to see it all laid out in sequence, in every depressing detail, is breath-taking. In ‘The Carbon Club’ (Allen& Unwin), Read more…
In age in which we are flooded with largely depressing books on the death of traditional media and establishment journalism, it’s exciting to read the perspective of someone who has grown up in new media and who celebrates the rise of the audience.
Tim Dunlop, a writer, academic and one of Australia’s pioneer political bloggers, has written a refreshing insiders’ account of the rise of the new media insurgency. Thankfully absent is the now ritual characterisation of bloggers as pyjama-clad single-issue boffins or journalistic wannabes. (more…)
This is either the most well timed book on politics of recent times or the worst. In her meticulously detailed volume of the caustic three years of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, Kerry-Anne Walsh ends the narrative tantalisingly short of the final scene – the long-canvassed ‘Ruddstoration’.
It seems churlish to fail the book on events overtaking it, but this is always the danger with seeking to tell history on the run. Indeed, one wonders, after reading it, whether Walsh’s punchy news diary-style treatment might have worked better as a live blog than as a paperback. (more…)
Journalism isn’t like any other business. And that’s because journalism isn’t a business at all. The great newspaper empires now being dismantled in Australia and elsewhere were actually advertising businesses supporting cultural institutions.
Industrial era journalism was a craft subsidised by the advertising. When advertising separated from the newspapers, the journalism lost its subsidy. Now, companies like Fairfax Media are seeking to put a market value on journalism itself. Good luck with that. (more…)
At a Reuters editorial management course in Singapore around 1997, the attendees were being reminded about the principle of objectivity in journalism. To play his or her stated role in a global news organisation, the journalist had to be a perennial outsider with no affiliation.
At that point, the trainer theatrically looked over his shoulder as if to see that no-one else was listening and leaned in toward the class, sotto voce: “Actually, that’s not really true. We aren’t objective at all. Implicit in everything we write is an acceptance of the Washington Consensus.” (more…)
Hundreds of young people in Australia enter communication degrees each year in anticipation of securing jobs in journalism that no longer exist. How must that make a journalism educator like Margaret Simons feel?
Well, not as depressed as you might think. In fact, as the title of her new book attests (‘Journalism at the Crossroads: Crisis and Opportunity for the Press‘), Simons – the director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne – paints a tentatively hopeful picture of the future of the craft which has been her living for most of her life. (more…)
If it hadn’t been Grog’s Gamut, it would have been someone else. The unmasking of the popular political blogger by The Australian newspaper in 2010 served in retrospect as the moment when blogging in Australia gained something of a critical mass.
Until then, the nation’s mainstream media had treated blogs as background noise, at best, unrelated to the real business of journalism and political commentary. But when News Ltd’s James Massola revealed “Grog’s” true identity as a Canberra public servant Greg Jericho, it was clear something had changed.
