With Courier-Mail editor Chris Dore about to leave Queensland to edit Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, there is just one question staff want answered: will Dorey take his puppy to work with him at Holt Street?
Spies in the Courier-Mail newsroom tell us that for the past month Dorey has been bringing a cute French bulldog puppy into work with him every day. The puppy sits in a little box in his office, attends news conference and is taken outside regularly by Dore’s personal assistant to do his, ahem, business.
The puppy’s incongruous appearance in the newsroom reminds us of what happened when it came time for Dore’s predecessor, David Fagan, to leave the building. The popular editor, who had once hired a jazz band to play outside the building to mark the paper’s transition to a digital-first newsroom, was pranked by staff on his last day. Instead of the usual speeches around the newsdesk, right on Friday afternoon deadline a brass band appeared in the busy newsroom and played so loudly no one could work.
Chris Mitchell’s parting shot
No one has been as brave as the Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston in making fun of the antics of the top brass at News Corp Australia. Regularly in his Rear Window column he has poked fun at Rupert Murdoch and his editors, publishing items that make even the Weekly Beast blush.
This week Aston excelled with a piece mocking the Australian’s extensive coverage of the retirement of editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell. Aston: “Self-absorption, hubris and complete contempt for readers: nobody does a glorious valedictory of Chris Mitchell quite like Chris Mitchell. It would be disingenuous to say nobody predicted the obsequiousness of the Australian’s coverage of its outgoing chief on Monday, because everybody did; the coverage is of a newspaper figurehead whose abandonment of professional modesty even Trey Parker and Matt Stone couldn’t ever have dreamed up. Mitchell is not Fred Hollows, or a Victoria Cross recipient, he’s the highly paid editor of a loss-making newspaper.
It’s stuff like this that has infuriated Mitchell and other News Corp editors, including incoming editor-in-chief Paul “Boris” Whittaker over the years. Nothing unusual about that. But we were taken aback when we discovered the national broadsheet’s pursuit of Aston. The Oz had found out where Aston lived, sent a snapper to stake out his apartment on a recent weekend and papped him when he left the building. The photograph was run in the Australian’s Media section last week with a critical piece on the so-called “troubled” journalist with the caption: “Joe Aston in Potts Point, Sydney, on the weekend.”
From Bolt to Howard: the ABC of inclusion
There has been a less than positive reaction to the news that rightwing culture warrior Andrew Bolt will feature in a documentary on the ABC about Indigenous recognition in 2017.
Film-maker Simon Nasht wishes to stress that the program, I Can Change Your Mind About Recognition, is a serious examination of the issues and will explore and challenge the views of both Bolt and his sparring partner, Labor MP Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal person to serve in the New South Wales parliament, and currently the deputy leader of the opposition.
Nasht’s production company Smith&Nasht (a partnership with entrepreneur Dick Smith) has another project on the boil which will also screen on Aunty. The two-part documentary series Howard on Menzies has been slated for next year and was unveiled at a ABC program launch. Presented by former PM John Howard, it will examine the 18-year reign of Sir Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. It has to be said I can think of more charismatic TV presenters than JWH.
Gerard Henderson makes Christmas offer too good to refuse
Out of ideas for Christmas? The Sydney Institute’s executive director Gerard Henderson is offering signed copies of his latest book about anti-Communist activist Bob Santamaria. For $60 you can purchase a signed copy of Gerard Henderson’s Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man (“postage free within Australia”).
Fairfax redundancies send union into overdrive
Last week Fairfax Media announced a joint venture for an online new car business between drive.com.au and automotive digital business 112.
“Fairfax will licence the Drive brand and drive.com.au URL to 112, which currently owns and operates themotorreport.com.au, a unique independent online car-buyer resource,” the media company said in a press release.
But what wasn’t announced was that seven editorial positions would be made redundant, and the journalists affected could apply for the jobs with the joint venture.
Staff were not happy and stop-work meetings were held. Chief editorial honcho Sean Aylmer addressed the Sydney and Melbourne newsrooms assuring them that editorial independence would remain core to the Drive brand.
But the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance filed a dispute with the Fair Work Commission, which has listed it for a conference on Friday 18 December.
“MEAA will assert Fairfax breached its obligations under the enterprise agreement by failing to: consult employees and MEAA about the decision to undertake major change; provide adequate information about the proposed change; call for voluntary redundancies; consider redeployment opportunities for Drive employees.”
Newspapers are dying, long live newspapers!
Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has not hidden the fact he is restructuring the Fairfax mastheads into a digital business in which the brands the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age will still exist but the newspapers may not.
Speaking at an invitation-only Centre for Corporate Public Affairs dinner, Hywood talked down the printed product as a mere “snapshot” of the news at 9pm on any day, which takes hours to produce and print, and then is then put on trucks and distributed for consumption the next day.
“You can open it up and it’s a particular consumer experience, and that is a demand that has to be met,” Hywood said. While the “vast majority” of people get their news digitally, there remains a small contingent who “will pay a lot of money for print” which is extremely expensive to print and distribute.
When asked in the Q&A session how long it would be before we had to pay $26 for a Saturday newspaper, Hywood quipped: “That’s a good thing.”
Two ABC presenters fly the coop
Two of the original presenters from ABC News 24 announced on Wednesday they were leaving the network. Amanda Shalala has been poached by Fox Sports but we are yet to hear what the silver fox Scott Bevan is up to.
“Scott and Amanda were with News 24 when the channel launched in 2010,” news boss Craig McMurtrie told staff. “On that first evening Scott was hosting The World and Amanda was presenting sport, and in the years since they have made a huge contribution to the success of News 24.”
Walkleys ceremony covered with award-winning clumsiness
The Walkleys is “journalism’s night of nights”, but from the quality of the TV production shown on Sky News Australia’s A-PAC channel and streamed live on the Walkleys website you’d never guess.
In previous years it has gone off without a hitch, when it was produced by SBS and ABC, so what went wrong this year? It was low-rent, clumsy coverage complete with shocking audio and tape run delays and hosts audibly chatting away as they waited for packages to conclude.
When Waleed Aly was playing guitar in the room, at home we were treated to long slabs of nominated documentary footage with no explanation. Sky News blamed the Walkleys, saying the broadcast was a live feed provided by the Walkleys and they had no control over the lighting or the audio.
The on-screen credits said the executive producer was Walkleys general manager Louisa Graham but Graham refused to comment when approached, saying it was an old story and she was off to a meeting.
