The new slim domestic

Journalism education?

Updating #media140 day two under way
An update from the Media140 conference in Sydney where I’ve been for the past two days. Interesting ideas and discussion and for me very pleasing to see that some journalists and media organisations  actually get “it”, without going overboard to claim that journalism is dead – but doesn’t know it’s a corpse – in the way that many social media evangelists twitter on about. This is just a holding post with some highlights and a link to Jay Rosen’s speaking notes. Jay Rosen is a professor at NYU and one of the world’s leading social media evangelists (IMHO). He’s just about to start on a feed via Sk

Some interesting thoughts on social media for legacy giants
I’m at #media140 in Sydney, the keynote this morning was ABC managing director Mark Scott. He outlined some interesting innovations for legacy media wanting to get on the Twitterverse bandwagon.   He started with the 4Ts: Telegraph, Telephone, Typewriter, Twitter. An interesting geneaology of communications technologies. Scott noted that the 4Ts have always been about short, sharp reports of breaking news; particularly the generation of good headlines. He talked about how the ABC is moving quickly to embrace social media with the appointment of a coordinator of social media to formalise the ABC’s presence across all social networking sites

Michael Laws – self-praising dribblejaws
Thanks to Jess for alerting me to this. Whanganui Mayor and inveterate loudmouth bully Michael Laws is at it again. This time he’s outrageously demanding the the “underclass” be sterilised. This was the kind of ethnic cleansing policy followed by the Nazis in the 1930s and look where that got us. It’s also a popular battle cry amongst modern fascists of the BNP and White Power varieties. But who is Laws speaking for? He as asked to define underclass by a Dominion Post reporter and this was his reply:

Sunday and I’m stuffed
Two brief comments this morning about the Sunday news agenda. Firstly, why is stuff.co.nz featuring two stories designed to get a rise out of Sunday morning male readers? One is an inadvertent advert for Penthouse magazine and the other an advertisment for the Gold Coast SuperGP motor racing dressed up as a soft(core) news story. The news value in these items is miniscule to non-existent. Only one has a local angle (the woman is a Kiwi, but appeared in the “Aussie Babes” pages of the magazine), but the “wow” factor is high — both feature prominent images of scantily-clad young women. Don’t believe me that

Journalism and blogging: leave it to the machines?
In science and science fiction there’s a moment when it all goes to custard for the human race. It’s the singularity – often defined as the time when machines begin to out think humans. We’re not there yet and I’m comfortable with predictions that it might happen 200 years after my demise. But you can never really trust futurist predictions. We’ve already got smart(ish) bots hurtling around the interWebs chewing up data and spitting it out again in a clickable and commercial form, so I’m not too sanguine about what’s gong on in the DARP