New Matilda to fold: What comes next?
Crikey is reporting that New Matilda, which launched in August 2004, is to cease publishing on June 25. Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning: The online media [...]
Government: Don't feed the trolls
The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. [...]
To the beat of a different drum
With a fair bit of ado, the ABC launched its new opinion website, The Drum, on Monday. It’s edited by Jonathan Green, formerly of Crikey, to whom congratulations are due, as they are to Sophie Black who’s had a very [...]
Australians for Australian books
In a second piece of good news to come from the Federal government today, the Productivity Commission’s mooted changes to the import regime for books have not been accepted. The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported [...]
Ben Naparstek, The Monthly and the Julia Gillard "biography wars"
A truly bizarre editorial decision from Ben Naparstek, who occupies the chair at The Monthly, has resulted in the publication of a review of Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Julia Gillard by Christine Wallace, who is writing a rival biography of [...]
Guy Rundle on parallel import restrictions for books
In Fairfax’s relaunched National Times, Guy Rundle has a perceptive but inconsistent piece on the unsustainability of parallel importation restrictions (often abbreviated to PIR) for Australian books: Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their [...]
Will anyone pay for online news?
There’s an interesting take in Australian Policy Online from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleague, Terry Flew, on the whole question of business models for online news, which has had quite the airing of late. My own view is that [...]
Books in the digital age
I’m speaking on the 11th of August at an event organised by the Queensland Writers Centre: Books in the Digital Age:The Future of Writing With the rapid changes in Australia’s writing and publishing industry, where will books fit in the [...]
The Mad Monk
I’ve got a feeling that the mix of a seemingly random collection of crazy authoritarian policy ideas (covenant marriage, raising the pension age to 70, bringing back WorkChoices, the federal government taking over everything) and arrogant self-congratulation that appear to [...]
At the cutting edge of media experience
Well, I think it’s safe to say that a full scale war has broken out between News Ltd and Australian independent media operators. Posts today at Crikey, Larvatus Prodeo and The Oz’s Mark Day. Day amused me with this in [...]
The Author of A Blog v Times Newspapers Limited
At Skepticlawyer, Legal Eagle has written a fascinating post on the bizarrely named case cited above, which was heard recently in the British High Court. As she writes: “The Author of A Blog” cited as the claimant was the pseudonymous [...]
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