Tuesday, July 13, 2004



Former editor of the Antipodean Terror Col Allan, now of The New York Post kitchen sink fame, got Kerrey's running mate wrong. You can buy a copy of Page 1 on eBay for five bucks... Ach, priceless sink is going for $$$$
Critic says people are laughing at NY Post, not with it...
Media critic and longtime Post reader Jon Friedman says it pains him to say the Murdoch tabloid is becoming a bad joke. Fixated with the task of printing what it considers to be scoops and exclusives at all costs -- even when it had the flimsiest evidence to make its case -- the Post has been captured by its own game and, worse, it has become a caricature of itself.

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Is Another Caricature of itself Sliding slowly into the S(a)dney Sunset?
Lord knows, we get a little puffed up sometimes. Having someone who can puncture our over-stuffed dreams of fair and balanced journalism might be a really good thing.(Hard core irony intended)
Well Margo Kingston's web diary has an extraordinarily high hit rate and her web discussions are informative lively and civilised and give a real debate that is missing from the rest of the paper. She has cultivated new writers and many readers after taking part in web forums have gone off to start their own blogs.
The Herald editors just wish Margo would go away. When her book Not Happy John was published it was recommended by middle ranking editors that it was good enough to warrant an excerpt. But this was vetoed by editor Robert Whitehead. A profile commissioned for spectrum was ditched, once again by Whitehead. So we have the funny experience of Kingston being ignored by her own paper. Then the Sun-Herald dropped her column without even telling her. The oddest thing was when Ross Fitzgerald launched her book, his speech on the death of civil society was a page one story in The Age and it spilt to a full text of his speech on the oped page. In the Herald, not a word.

What makes it strange is that her book is now in its second reprint and has sold about 25,000 copies
• Out-of-the-closet liberal columnist Walter Cronkite: Outfoxed Amazing Documentary: Former Fox journalists, internal memos to blow the whistle on Fox partisan bias [Newspaper ethics Jon Carroll laments the passing of the old days of casual corruption and illicit favors]
• · See Also Election 2004 Backyard Blog project: Seattle Times wants its readers to blog the elections
• · · See Also Jay Rosen will be on of 35 credentialed bloggers reporting from the Democratic Convention [ courtesy of First Draft]
• · · · See Also Andrew Cline laments the dearth of understanding journalists have of rhetoric, a lack that results in he-said, she-said political coverage [ courtesy of Campaign Desk ]
• · · · · See Also Tim Rutten labels 2004 as the year of living dangerously for the U.S. news media, warning of an acceleration of "journalism's slide back into partisanship
• · · · · · See Also W's to the basics of journalism. No. 8: Why did I waste my time?