Communicator | Online Strategist | Considered Opinions
Metlink has been sold a terrible marketing campaign to discourage fare evasion. According to Metlink’s media release: With fare evaders taking more than 225,000 trips each weekday on Victoria’s public transport network, Metlink is stepping up its fight against fare evasion today with the launch of a new advertising campaign. The campaign includes a television [...]
I came across Bill McKibben’s opinion piece in the Washington Post and an associated video of the piece, narrated by Stephen Thomson that are well worth looking at. McKibben (of 350.org fame) takes on the current reluctance of climate activists and action advocates to link specific extreme weather events (floods in QLD, Pakistan and the [...]
I read recently that the Japanese nuclear crisis at Fukushima continues. Amazingly, if you read newspapers in Australia on a daily basis (as I do) you probably wouldn’t know it. Thankfully, The Guardian has a report on the latest on crisis – and the scary news that authorities may have tried to hide the fact [...]
In the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli whips himself up into an uncharacteristic passion on the subject of the unification of Italy. He urges Lorenzo de’ Medici to fulfil his destiny by being the main to bring it about: This opportunity then, for Italy at last to look on her deliverer, ought not to [...]
Unions not only have a legal obligation to respect copyright, but an ethical obligation. Unions have fought for intellectual property rights for photographers for years. Respecting copyright doesn’t mean kowtowing to Disney. It means not using photos from the Internet without permission of the owner. I mention this as a “pro-tip” because I have often [...]
Tony Abbott has used his “direct action” plan as the counterpoint to Labor’s carbon price plan. Apart from the obvious purpose of “direct action” being Abbott’s desire to directly transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds to private hands, his proposal should fail the “common sense” test. Climate change is like a fire [...]
Nora Ephron, an American director and journalist, describes her early journalism professor setting an assignment for the class. He asked them to write a lead for their student paper. The lead is the first sentence in a news article – it captures the attention of the reader and sums up the focus of the story. [...]
Michael Rowland on ABC News Breakfast asked a special advisor to President Obama on their stimulus spending “what advice would you have for Australia?” The answer: something along the lines of: “I wouldn’t want to tell a country that has such low unemployment how to do things.” Journalist pro-tip: realise that in the international community, [...]
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Does the blogosphere have “delusions of grandeur”?
Don Arthur over at Club Troppo reckons the “blogosphere” has delusions of grandeur. His thesis seems to boil down to: most major investigative stories are broken by professional journalists, not bloggers. Most of the commentary by bloggers (even the good stuff) is derivative, either of someone else’s work or as analysis of figures produced by [...]