“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…
“Oz polls show nothing can save this miserable govt. Election can not come soon enough.People decided and tuned out months ago.”
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) May 19, 2013
‘The nation is drowning in debt. The federal government has lost control of public finances. The NBN is a disaster. Business is struggling because union thugs are destroying productivity growth. We are being overwhelmed with illegal boat arrivals. Refugees are living on welfare and bleeding us dry.’ (more…)
‘Twenty Ways to Bulk Up Your Cash’. That was the breathless headline in The Australian Financial Review on September, 27, 2005
“It’s shop till you drop for ordinary people with money to park,” the article gushed. “And the range of investment options is so vast, it’s very nearly an embarrassment of riches.” (more…)
A health warning to mainstream media consumers: When a news story starts with the words “is expected to”, activate the BS detector. When that story involves forecasts about economic statistics, shift detector to warp speed. (more…)
I read the news today. Oh boy. Apparently, Australia is now a socialist dictatorship run by red rag shop stewards stealing the legitimate rewards of those with enterprise and throwing it away on the undeserving poor.
“Once again, nothing in it for me,” said ‘Single Dad’ in the comments section of a Sydney Morning Herald analysis from Adele Ferguson describing Wayne Swan’s fifth budget as ‘Class Warfare’. Over at ‘The Heart of the Nation’, meanwhile, the splash was ‘Smash the Rich, Save the Base’, with Swan and Gillard seen leading an angry mob against a hammer and sickle backdrop. (more…)
Don’t talk about alleged “middle class welfare” to Prudence Hetherington-Alswyth. This is a woman who already felt she had sacrificed enough. And now with Wayne Swan’s heartless budget, her struggling family feels it has reached rock bottom. This is their story.
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It is less than 20 years ago that the US financial news organisation I then worked for started asking journalists to put an email address at the bottom of every story. I remember snorting at the presumption that our readers were as nerdish as our tech-head editor in Washington.
Move on two decades and we find journalists doing the bulk of their work over the internet – through research, finding contacts, sourcing background, remote editing and doing interviews. Technology has transformed the craft from one-to-many publishing to many-to-many. But for all the ease that digital newsgathering has provided, there is still something to be said for getting out from behind the screen and into the analog world. (more…)
