Companies on edge as short sellers come out of the shadows
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Palestinian lobby joins the junket game
For years, the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council have sponsored Australian journalists on lavish trips to Israel to take in one of the Middle East’s most prosperous societies. But this year there was a study tour of rather a different sort — journalists, including our own Bernard Keane, were invited to see the same territory through Palestinian eyes.
Though many who attend the Israeli junket attest strongly to their value, critics (including yours truly) argue that by attending, journalists play into and benefit from the (more powerful) Israeli side’s battle to influence public opinion. By taking journalists on regular junkets, the Israeli lobby can ensure its side of the argument is, at least, sympathetically presented to journalistic opinion-makers in Australia.
But this year, Australia’s Palestinian community has funded their own study tour, which concluded Monday. Journalists from Fairfax (Mark Kenny), News Corp (Dennis Atkins), The West Australian (Andrew Tillett), AAP (Rashida Yosufzai), New Matilda (Chris Graham) and Crikey (Bernard Keane) spent time in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Haifa, Nazareth, Nablus and Tel Aviv. A planned visit to the Gaza strip had to be abandoned when the visas didn’t come through on time (a not unusual occurrence). Two of the journalists attending had previously attended trips organised by the Israeli lobby.
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The complex economics of photographing Sam Armytage’s grundies
Pictures of the Sunrise host won’t make anyone rich – but they are a reliable, steady earner for Sydney’s paparazzi.
When the Daily Mail published a photo of Sunrise host Sam Armytage with a visible panty line (“giant granny panties”, said the Mail, though entertainment reporter Peter Ford said Armytage had told him it was swimwear), a world of outrage was unleashed upon the British website.
“Nasty trash,” said the University of Melbourne’s Meg Simons. A “despicable display of misogyny dressed up as celebrity news,” wrote Clementine Ford. Armytage herself declined offers to respond as the matter was “with the lawyers”.
Crikey has spoken to numerous paparazzi whose photography has helped keep Armytage in such hot demand. Opinions differ about the coverage. But all agreed that for the Daily Mail, it couldn’t have gone better.
“That set of pictures would be less than $500. If 10,000 people shared it and 50,000 read it, the Mail‘s way ahead of the game,” said one pap.
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The tyranny of optimism at Junkee’s ‘un-conference’
Sixty seconds to pitch your idea. That’s what happens the first night of an “un-conference”, where the participants collaboratively decide on the sessions. And so a stream of people got up, some polished and others less so, to outline what they wanted to talk about. The traditional owners of the land that Canberra sits on, the Ngunnawal peoples, were acknowledged at the start of the session. But some people do it again at the start of their pitch. After a while, an indigenous woman gets up. She makes the observation that there’s a pattern emerging: people of colour are offering their respects, and many white people are not.
Thereafter, most make time in their 60 seconds to awkwardly offer their respects, though some do not. I can’t help keeping a mental list. Some who had spoken before the rebuke get up again to do another pitch, this time paying their respects.
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In a slap to Mitchell, News Corp reminds editors: we don’t break confidences
If you speak to someone confidentially at a News Corp title, will your discussions stay off the record forever? For those who used to chat to former editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell, the answer is clearly not necessarily.
He’s freely admitted to having “broken confidences” with several prime ministers in a tell-all memoir. While Mitchell has argued the public interest of his revelations, if News Corp journalists can’t be trusted with off-the-record conversations, they’ll have a harder time breaking stories. So perhaps it’s not surprising that in an email, executive chairman Michael Miller has reminded the company’s editorial leaders that “promises of confidentiality to a source must, of course, be honoured”.
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Economists join the war on cash
Could killing cash save the global economy? If cash didn’t exist, there’d be nothing to stop economic policymakers bumping interest rates into negative territory, charging people for holding money in the bank. In today’s low-growth, low-demand world, perhaps that’s just the trick.
That’s the argument made by two influential economists in recent months. The first of these is Kenneth S. Rogoff, whose book The Curse of Cash has been doing the rounds of the financial press (his name may be familiar even to those who avoid discussions of monetary policy — he was one of two high-ranking economists behind the widely cited “Growth in a Time of Debt” study, whose computational errors were uncovered by three decidedly less influential economists in 2013). The second is Marvin Goodfriend, who this weekend made an aggressive argument for the use of negative interest rates at the Federal Reserve’s annual retreat at Jackson Hole. A corollary of his argument is the necessity of abolishing paper money. It’s an attraction that forms a central plank of Rogoff’s book as well.
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Can’t show this: exactly how the Olympics protects the value of its broadcast
Channel Seven is the only broadcaster to show much Olympics coverage at all. And woe betide anyone who tries to sneak a selfie after the event.
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For the last time, Eddie did say ‘bone’: Llewellyn
Despite Eddie McGuire’s drug-addled revisionism today, the other man in the room remains unequivocal: McGuire said he would “bone” Jessica Rowe.
“He did not say ‘burn’,” Mark Llewellyn told Crikey this morning, rejecting a new account from McGuire in an interview with GQ magazine. It was Llewellyn who first exposed the blokey boardroom language around then-Channel Nine host Jessica Rowe in an explosive affidavit in 2006.
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The little-known agencies selling ‘exclusive’ content to prestigious mastheads
When celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal prepared to open a temporary restaurant in Melbourne, he made a big splash in the Melbourne press. In February 2014, the Herald Sun’s Weekend magazine carried an interview with the chef written by British journalists Dominic Midgley and Shaun Curran. They are not Hun journos. But it wasn’t wire copy, either. So who did the interview?
When a media outlet publishes copy from a wire agency, it usually carries the agency’s acronym (AAP, for example) to say so. Same goes with syndicated copy. With the Blumenthal interview, though, there was nothing obvious to indicate anything external about the piece. It was an exclusive chat, the copy said. But Midgley and Curran’s interview didn’t just appear in the Herald Sun. According to Interview Hub, the British agency that sold the Herald Sun the piece, it also supplied specially tailored pieces for FHM, BBC Good Food and several other food magazines around the world. It estimates 100 million people saw versions of the piece it supplied — and that’s just counting print.
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What did 23-year-old Malcolm make of 20-year-old Tony?
In early 1978, a young Malcolm Turnbull, just a year into a short-lived journalism career, met the 20-year-old version of the man he would eventually knife. And his impression was particularly prescient.
Turnbull’s feature on the Australian Union of Students for The Bulletin begins with an anecdote about how vegetarian delegates objected to the use of a fly-swatting machine and ends with an impassioned lament about the impact of student politics on how influential Australians see politicians more broadly. It’s notable for cameo appearances by figures like Michael Danby, Peter Costello, Nick Xenophou (now Xenophon) and Michael Yabsley.