Blogging
Oh, THAT guy
This is Jim Parker, a former financial journalist and now corporate communications flak. He’s also known as Mr Denmore. I’ve kept this blog going for 18 months as ‘Mr D’ and I plan to keep doing so. But I thought it was about time I revealed my daytime persona. Read more…
Broadcasting
Convergence or Submergence?
The history of media regulation in Australia is one of the communications bureaucracy playing a no-win game of catch-up with technology. Just as a regulatory regime is nailed down, another revolutionary distribution mechanism appears out of nowhere and rips up the floorboards again.
The final report of the government’s Convergence Review is an attempt to future-proof the rules for a digital age in which standalone notions of print vs broadcasting have been rendered obsolete by technology that allows media to deliver text, audio, and video over wired and wireless connections.
Craft Standards
Sex Text Pest Bests Rest Test
As with dramatists, journalists thrive on sex and conflict. We love to weave narratives around contested, err, positions. And the more passionate the partisans, the more drama we can wring out of the contest. You could say that without sleaze and conflict, there is no story. Which is why the Peter Slipper saga is heaven for hackdom.
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ABC
Going Analog
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…)
Craft Standards
‘Freedom’ Versus Truth
Judged by the hysterical reaction of the media and its think tank boosters to the modest ideas of the Finkelstein inquiry, journalism’s ultimate arbiter is the market. If the press’ output is no good, the public will not buy it. Or so the story goes.
It’s a neat trick that equates freedom of the press with the notion of an unfettered capitalist free market. Anything that stands between the desire of media companies to make a profit by selling audiences to advertisers must automatically be an attack on freedom. (more…)
Government Policy and Regulation
Freedom from the Press
- “There is common ground among all those who think seriously about the role of the news media and about journalistic ethics that a free press plays an essential role in a democratic society, and no regulation should endanger that role”: Opening words of the 468-page report of the independent inquiry into the media by former Federal Court Judge Ray Finkelstein.
- Labor Plan to Control the Media: Headline on Australian Financial Review’s front page splash on the Finkelstein report the following day.
Blogging
Blogalism
A US court’s $2.5 million ruling against a blogger for defaming a businessman has sparked a flurry of new attempts to define journalism in relation to blogging. My view on what constitutes journalism is similar to what someone once said about por**graphy – I know it when I see it.
While this won’t help the judges, you can be certain that earnest attempts to define a journalist in legal terms will lead to nothing but confusion. The Americans, with their black letter law pedantry, just love debates of this kind because it keeps much of the legal profession in business.
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Blogging
Waiting for the Feature
It’s 11pm at a Coffs Harbour sports club. The lone gambler is $400 down and still waiting for the feature. This particular poker machine, The King of the Nile (pictured), is his favourite. When the coveted 15-free-games feature appears – all too infrequently – any winnings are trebled. Even better, Read more…
Education
Not in it for the Money
Why go into journalism? The industry that employs you is in decline, the on-the-job training is virtually non-existent, the business model is broken, the hours are long, the work involves endless and mindless churning of pregurgitated material, and the pay is lousy. Most of the population rate you just above used car salesmen and now the major media companies are farming off jobs to sweatshops.
Yet people are spending more time with news than ever as the technology that enables the creation, distribution and reception of news grows every more sophisticated. It’s just that no-one can work out how to make money out of it. (more…)