Sunday papers – Sunday funnies

A brief round up of the Sunday funnies

Name that crim…

Whaleoil -aka the blogger Cameron Slater – must be feeling a little chuffed this morning, his ‘name and shame’ campaign got a morale boost from two columnists.

Kerre Woodham in the HoS and Rosemary McLeod in the SST are both on board with the Whale’s crusade to have a Manawatu man exposed as a serial downloader of child porn. The man has name suppression – to protect his wife, not him – but there’s been a teacup full of storm about lifting name suppression so that other men in the region aren’t under a cloud of suspicion.

My feeling is that anyone who needs to know who this guy is probably already does,  so lifting name suppression is really only going to satisfy some public curiosity, not actually improve the standard of living in Manawatu.

Global news meltdown and Kiwi exceptionalism

I’ve just come in from the New Zealand Writers and Readers’ Festival. I was on a panel this afternoon with Rhonda Sherman of the New Yorker and Pamele Stirling, editor of The Listener. The chair was Nicola Legat and the crowd was great. I reckon about 300 people; which was more than I’d expected. So, if you were there, “thanks for coming”.

And, if you were there and you want to take up my offer for “citizen journalism” training or would like to help kick-off the “Let’s buy the Herald” coffers with a donation, get in touch.

The session was billed as the “publishing revolution”:

Want to know more about how the publishing industry works? Get the inside word on the pitfalls, peaks and politics of journalism and publishing from leaders in their field. The New Yorker’s Rhonda Sherman, New Zealand Listener editor Pamela Stirling, and AUT Associate Professor of Journalism Martin Hirst sift through the silt of the last decade, and look ahead to the impact of the global economic melt-down and digital age on publishing in the next. Chair: Random House Publisher Nicola Legat. [Progamme note]

Really, given there was a panel of four journalists, it was about the future of the news industry, particularly newspapers and magazines, and therefore, also the future of journalism.

Big media threatens Kiwi blogger

One of my  journalism students has written a good little story on our Te Waha Nui online site about APN threatening to sue blogger James Coe for an alleged trademark infringement.

What will happen to APN?

An interesting report in the UK Guardian media pages yesterday (26 Jan) regarding Tony O’Reilly’s troubled Independent News and Media.

INM is a 39% stakeholder in APN, publishers of the New Zealand Herald. This stake was on the market, but INM has announced that it has given up on finding a buyer at the moment because of the shaky gobal financial system.

Globally the INM group is undertaking a series of cost-cutting measures which have already affected APN’s New Zealand titles, including The Listener, the Herald and a range of suburban titles, such as The Aucklander.

According to a statement issued by INM yesterday (26 Jan) the company is committed to shedding “loss-making” assets, but there is no indication of which parts of the company these might be. In Auckland APN staff must be wondering about their fate too. It seems that, for the moment, they’ve had a repreive.

The group’s UK assets, including the Independent, are also in a state of flux as a merry-go-round of moves in the UK newspaper industry continues. A Russian oligarch and former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev, was able to buy the London Evening Standard newspaper last week for just one pound, which shows just how much of a crisis there is in news media assets.

Perhaps Mr Lebedev’s British staff will have to follow the example of reporters on his Russian paper, Novoya Gazeta,who have taken to carrying guns since a young journalist, Anastasia Baburova, was murdered in Moscow last week (21 Jan).

Anastasia Baburova, a journalist for the investigative newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, and leading human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov were shot by a lone gunman after a press conference in Moscow given by Markelov, report the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF) and other IFEX members.

Markelov represented the family of Kheda Kungayeva, whose murder led to the first prosecution for the killing of a civilian during the Chechen conflict, is believed to have been the main target. He had just publicly denounced at the conference the release of Kungayeva’s murderer from prison.

Baburova, who reported on the conflict in Chechnya as well as on the activities of neo-Nazi groups in Russia, had attended the press conference and was talking to Markelov outside a Moscow metro station when the gunman opened fire. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Baburova was shot in the head as she tried to prevent the killer from escaping and died a few hours later. [IFEX.org]

This YouTube clip is of a union protest at the Qan…

This YouTube clip is of a union protest at the Qantas New Zealand Media Awards held in Wellington on Friday 18 May.
Several journos from the APN group wanted to raise the issue of APN’s outsourcing of sub-editing. They got the banner up, but were shutdown and shoved off the stage pretty quickly.

media ethics, journalism

This YouTube clip is of a union protest at the Qantas New Zealand Media Awards held in Wellington on Friday 18 May.
Several journos from the APN group wanted to raise the issue of APN’s outsourcing of sub-editing. They got the banner up, but were shutdown and shoved off the stage pretty quickly.

media ethics, journalism