A Qantas winner, but still overcooking the eggs

I wrote last week about the 2008 Qantas Media Awards, suggesting that the surpreme winner - APN’s Herald on Sunday - might take the biscuit for circulation and zippy tabloid headlines, but that it also took the editor’s egg-beater to some stories in the chase for circulation. Well, I’m happy to say, my point’s been proved this week. A front page story about the “lavish” lifestyle of recently released 19-year-old Bailey Kurariki.

Regime Quake - good news, or excuse for incursion?

I have just read Naomi Klein’s column in The Nation, it’s online here. She makes an argument that the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China could lead to greater political unrest in those nations. I guess that’s always a possibility in the aftermath of such shocks, but how can people really fight back when they’re starving and their backs are literally to the wall?

Burma and the shock doctrine

When the devastating cyclone hit Burma couple of weeks ago I pondered a blog post on the Shock Doctrine. I read Naomi Klein’s great book a few months ago and as soon as it was clear how devastated parts of Burma were, I thought: “this is a time for a shock doctrine intervention”. Well f*c( me with a spade, so it’s come to pass.

I first heard talk of a western military intervention this morning (15 May), so it’s time to join the blog chat on this topic. I found this interesting case for intervention on Slate, dated 12 May.

Slap on the writs!

So the NZ police have finally acted against the Fairfax editors and journalists who wrote about the leaked “Urewera” terror case affidavit. The police issued a “warning”, but I can’t really see what the effect of that will be.

Is it supposed to “chill” any enthusiasm the media has for publishing similar details in the future? If so, one would hope that it fails miserably. On the other hand, if the reporters and editors have breached Section 312K of the Crimes Act, why aren’t they being prosecuted?

The best and the brightest? Qantas journalism winners announced

I guess we’d have to assume that APN boss Rick Neville had a good weekend. His newspapers took a truckload of prizes home from the 2008 Qantas Media Awards on Friday night (9 May). Dominion Post reporter Phil Kitchin is no doubt smiling too. It was generally agreed among his peers at the awards ceremony that Phil totally deserved Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Louise Nicholls Schollum-Shipton police rape story that he covered for many years before finally seeing his hard work and persistence rewarded in 2007. Phil’s prize is a trip to Wolfson College, Cambridge (UK) for some research and, I’m sure, some fun too.

Responses to my posts on shorthand

I thought it might be worthwhile getting this thread back onto the frontpage here. For some reason, which I don’t know, but which delights me, a whole bunch of staff from the New Zealand Herald have decided to comment on my “Who’s still teaching shorthand” post of a few weeks back.

I’ve also collated some responses that have come in to my email from colleagues in Australia. Not sure why they haven’t just dropped them here, but perhaps they’re still not comfortable with blogging (LOL)

Reporters sans frontieres - boycotting the Olympics

I am interested to see that the usually non-partisan Reporters sans frontieres (Reporters without borders) is campaigning quite hard for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

One can’t really argue with the campaign’s slogan “China: the world’s largest prison for journalists and cyber-dissidents”, though Baghdad and Kabul are probably more dangerous, perhaps even Moscow and the former Soviet Union.

I must say though, that I agree with the RSF.

Our Media matters - or does it?

In August last year the New Zealand journalists’ union, the Electrical, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) organised a conference in Wellington to discuss the state of the news media in Aotearoa. It was a lively couple of days, full of passionate speeches, political arguments and…it turns out, hot air.

At the time the EPMU (it’s a long historical story about how the journos got buried in this massive industrial union and something to do with the horror days of the new right in New Zealand in the dim, dark 1980s) was pressured into agreeing to establish a committee to seek submissions into a review of the state of the news media and journalism. Submissions are meant to close soon, but last I heard, none had been received. It begs the question: “Does anyone really care?”

The new journalism syllabus?

I was pleased a couple of days ago to see a good debate on Mindy McAdam’s excellent Teaching Online Journalism blog. When you read through the entry and the response comments it’s easy to see that journalism educators are struggling with what should be in a 21st century journalism curriculum.

On the positive side, there’s some interesting and useful suggestions being made and some neat stuff being trialled in various journalism schools. The generosity of those who are willing to share what are, essentially, trade secrets is laudable.

I’m not going to repeat all the suggestions and advice here, but I thought an annotated aggregation of the links might be useful.

Do I need a SecondLife?

I’ve been thinking about some of the research I need to do to write the book I’m doing at the moment. For instance, can I monetize my students’ clickstream?

I had an interesting conversation with someone about that today and the possibilities are intriguing, though the logistics are difficult. Can I really make them work for nothing? No, not this EthicalMartini.

But, if we could share the spoils, or spoil the shareholders, then I’d be interested. I’ll come back to this later, but what I wanted to talk about this evening (it’s 7.14pm in Auckland and after a shi%%y day I’ve got a martini and a beautiful wife close by) is SecondLife.