It has been something of a tough week for the Holt Street troops. The Daily Telegraph relaunched its website only to see it plagued by teething problems and heavily criticised by readers.
The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph have been “reimagined, re-engineered and redesigned”, the digital editor, Peter Brown, announced on Wednesday. “DailyTelegraph.com.au’s new desktop, tablet and mobile responsive website features a bold and modern new look but most importantly our commitment to agenda-setting, exclusive and breaking news journalism remains at the heart of what we do,” he said. “The look of the site has changed but our passion and dedication to advocate for you and a better NSW has not.”
But most readers who left comments weren’t having a bar of it. Brown was admirably patient, calmly answering every single criticism.
Michael: “This new website is absolutely awful, how do I go back to the old pages. This is hard to look at.”
Brown: “I appreciate the feedback. The old site no longer exists as we have moved to our new responsive website for desktop, tablet and mobile. It would be great if you can describe what you do not like – and do like – so we can include your specific feedback in our ongoing work to make the site better.”
Terry: “It’s crap!”
Brown: “Thanks for the feedback Terry. Are you able to specifically describe ‘crap’?”
Wilkinson’s Sunday shift
Lisa Wilkinson likes to have a finger in a lot of pies. As the co-host of the Today show on Nine, she hosts live television from Monday through Friday for almost 20 hours. She is also the editor-at-large for the Huffington Post Australia and she recently become the “national face of NutraLife”, a women’s health supplement. And this week the Today show has been flogging a new role for Wilkinson: she will edit the news pages of the Sunday Telegraph on 3 September along with the Today show team who are also “guest editing” News Corp papers on the weekend. Co-host Karl Stefanovic will lend a hand with Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Mail in Queensland and Sylvia Jeffries will look after the Body & Soul section.
With Huffington Post Australia being a joint-venture with Fairfax Media, a few eyebrows have been raised as to why Wilkinson is promoting News Corp’s stable of papers. Channel Nine tells us the deal is a mutual PR exercise with News Corp and is not a commercial partnership. “It is the Today Show that is involved in the initiative – not Lisa alone,” a spokeswoman for Huffington Post told Weekly Beast. “Lisa’s involvement is in her capacity as a Today Show host. It has no bearing on her continuing role as HuffPost Australia’s editor-at-large.”
Ahmed’s back to Aunty
Dr Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist and media commentator, has pretty much worn out his welcome at credible media outlets after being labelled a serial plagiarist and publicly exposed three times in the past five years. So it was quite a surprise to see the ABC promoting the western Sydney medic as an expert commentator this week, even plugging his book Fragile Nation, Vulnerability, Resilience and Victimhood across radio and online. Five years ago his columns in the Sydney Morning Herald were exposed by Media Watch as being heavily lifted from other sources without attribution and he lost his gig.
Then the Australian picked him up and he did it again, only to be sacked by then editor Clive Mathieson. Ahmed was already the subject of a heated debate about domestic violence because his Oz piece argued that male disempowerment was partly to blame for domestic violence, and he cut ties with White Ribbon because of it. You’d think he would stick to doctoring after that, but no, he started writing for conservative journal the Spectator, and was revealed in July to have borrowed heavily from an article by bioethicist Carl Elliott published in 2000 about transgenderism and gender fluidity.
ABC Online published a lengthy opinion piece in which he argued drug testing of welfare recipients wasn’t all bad.
Then he was invited on to Radio National’s Drive program with Patricia Karvelas to expand on his theme that addiction wasn’t just a medical problem.
Talking addiction and welfare testing on abc @RadioNational with @PatsKarvelas soon pic.twitter.com/IItv62lDLl
— Tanveer Ahmed (@drtahmed) August 30, 2017
“The ABC chose to publish and broadcast Dr Tanveer Ahmed’s views as a psychiatrist who is involved in the federal government’s drug-test trial of welfare recipients in Sydney’s Bankstown,” an ABC spokesman said. “The ABC is aware of previous plagiarism accusations surrounding Dr Ahmed, but did not consider them relevant in this instance, given he was being asked for his expert clinical opinion on the program in question.”
Jones moans
2GB broadcaster Alan Jones is very annoyed that his colleagues at Fairfax Media don’t give him the respect he deserves because they are all employed by Fairfax Media after all. When Jones didn’t like the way Fairfax reported his program’s ratings results he lashed out on radio, saying the journalists “do nothing but bag this station” while calling themselves the “home of journalistic integrity”. Just because 2GB is not part of the “lunatic left”, Jones said, they never reported his ratings fairly. Addressing the Fairfax board directly, Jones asked if they supported an editorial policy of bagging “one of the few outfits that are successful”.
The Fairfax empire owns 2GB - but do nothing but bag us. No wonder, apart from us, they struggle to gain readership, ratings & advertising.
— Alan Jones (@AlanJones) August 29, 2017
Later on Thursday Jones sparked another negative story in the Fairfax press, this time for a tasteless tweet against a favourite target, Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore. Despite a widespread interpretation that his tweet was an invitation to string Clover Moore up high over Sydney, Jones said he did nothing wrong.
$11.3m - can you believe it? You can guess what many people would rather hang 58 metres over George Street...and it’s not a Cloud Arch.
— Alan Jones (@AlanJones) August 30, 2017
Switzer signs off
After a stint of less than a year, conservative commentator Tom Switzer, an adjunct fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs, has quit as host of Sunday Extra on Radio National. Switzer replaced longtime host Jonathan Green on RN’s live Sunday morning broadcast of Ockham’s Razor and Background Briefing this year and not everyone was happy about it.
The former opinion editor of the Australian will still host his other RN show Between the Lines. “Tom decided to depart Sunday Extra as host due to his increasing workload outside the ABC,” a spokesman said. “The ABC is delighted that Tom will continue to be part of the RN lineup, hosting his Wednesday evening program Between the Lines, which he has done since 2015.”
Fox shunting
We told you last week that Sky News reached just 3% of the metropolitan population each week, but there is a news channel that attracts an even smaller audience for Foxtel: the US Fox News. Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch took Fox News off the air in the UK after 15 years because it was no longer commercially viable – it only attracted 2,000 viewers a day. “We have concluded that it is not in our commercial interest to continue providing Fox News in the UK,” 21st Century Fox said. “Fox News is focused on the US market and designed for a US audience and, accordingly, it averages only a few thousand viewers across the day in the UK.”
We asked Foxtel if there were any plans to do the same in Australia but it declined to comment. Industry sources say Fox News viewing figures are so low in Australia they are not even separately measured.
