Australian

There's a fantastic little piece by Stilgherrian today about the future of journalism. He writes:

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whinging. Whinging about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.

The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new “participatory media” and “citizen journalism” would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But “these people”, as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.

Bollocks.

Now instead of me just doing some lazy journalism and linking his whole piece, let me tell a little story about how I came to read this article.

Early in 2007 when I was still running my company and starting to consume more and more information, particularly about technology, business and politics, I decided that most of it was crap. I haven't watched TV in years because it's crap and full of ads and I hate having to be in front of it at a certain time when something good is on. I don't read the mainstream newspapers because they're full of crap, though I skim through the online editions occasionally. I am finding the online editions less and less useful though because the content is clearly skewed towards celebrity news and recycled rubbish and groupthink.

I was already subscribed to a good selection of blogs and news sites which interested me, though most of them were overseas. I really wanted to know what was going on here in Australia, so I took the plunge and paid for a subscription to Crikey, a daily independent online news service which focusses on - surprise - politics, business and technology from an Australian perspective. At $115 for a year it is totally indispensable.

Crikey employs a small core of full time journalists and a larger group of freelance contributors. It has a few ads in it which are relevant to the content and I'm told it has about 15,000 subscribers. It makes a small profit appropriate to its size.

Crikey was originally started several years ago as a gossip rag for politics nuts and insiders. It grew to be more sophisticated over time and since it was bought out by independent publisher Eric Beecher in 2005 it has been moving consistently from a daily email newsletter to a full embrace of new media technology and ideals. It is nice to see that some people are quietly just getting on with adapting and providing a quality service in today's environment. [click to continue...]

The short answer is - not really. Websites that allow user comments or participation are largely owned by private companies which reserve the right to regulate and censor content but are not obligated to. Some companies like Twitter take a completely hands-off stance, others like eBay have wide-ranging and very detailed policies about what can and can't be said or done.

Wired has done an interesting piece on the issue of free speech online, here are a few choice excerpts:

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later. [click to continue...]

Kevin Rudd led his party to victory last year on a platform of change, to industrial relations laws, education, broadband, indigenous affairs and climate change. Since taking office, we have had the symbolic signing of Kyoto and apology to Stolen Generations, all very nice and all but almost meaningless in practical terms.

The approach to all of these areas of policy has been troubling. Sure, they've only had six months in office and they've launched lots of broad reviews which are yet to report back, but for a Government which was elected with such enthusiasm there seems to be a profound lack of leadership or willingness to make tough but important decisions, or at least look at them with some sense of urgency.

Climate change is particularly troubling, if only for the fact that we have the technology, the resources and incredibly, the public will to deal with it right now. But we're not. We're arguing about cutting a few cents off petrol prices, giving $500 million to the coal companies to research 'clean coal' while cutting the solar panel rebate which cost $50 million, and waiting for a climate change review by Professor Garnaut. The review comes out tomorrow, and, now that it has become clear that Garnaut is going to recommend urgent and wide-ranging action on a number of fronts, the erstwhile poster-boy of Labor is now being distanced and almost disowned by Rudd, Garrett and Wong.

John Birmingham has an excellent essay about it all in July's issue of The Monthly. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Despite the most fervent wishes of Bob Brown, coal isn't going anywhere. According to the Australian Coal Association, coal-fired power stations produce 84% of Australia's electricity and 38% of its greenhouse emissions, significantly higher than the global average of one-quarter. In part this is because the nation does not rely on nuclear power. Contrary to popular belief, Australia does not control the world market for coal, but it is the biggest exporter, with nearly a third of the global trade in black coal, and 60% of trade in metallurgical coal, which is used for smelting. Regardless of the Kyoto Protocol or whatever scheme succeeds it, world demand for coal is very conservatively forecast to rise 73% by 2030.

China and India will account for a good deal of that increase. At the moment, for instance, only 3% of our coal exports go to China, which is - according to a New York Times report of 11 June - opening a coal-fired power station every ten days. That is not a typo. "Every week to ten days," the report said, "another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego." The People's Republic does have its own vast reserves of coal, but at least half is the dirtier brown variety, unlike our minty-fresh export-quality black stuff. The Australian coal industry is also more mature, efficient and technologically advanced than its competitors in China. As more and more of the hundreds of coal-fired power stations China has planned come online, their appetite for high-quality Australian coal will become more voracious. This is why Kevin Rudd has remarked on the natural congruity of the two nations' interests, the world's largest exporter and the world's largest consumer of coal.

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Remember the Gold Coast City Council election back in March? Although not particularly popular, Ron Clarke was re-elected for two reasons - firstly because there was a wide field of candidates, people were confused and stuck to what they knew, and secondly because Clarke promised a freeze on rate rises.

Other candidates including former City Finance boss Rob Molhoek dismissed the rates freeze saying it was irresponsible and could result in financial ruin for the city. At a budget meeting yesterday Clarke voted against his own rates freeze and apologised for breaking his election promise.

"Just like at the Olympics when I didn't win a gold medal, again I have come up short,"

It was an embarrassing backdown for Cr Clarke as he finally admitted that the city would be left in 'financial peril' if the freeze went ahead. Said Cr Clarke,

"I am sorry to the ratepayers. I wasn't able to deliver the freeze and I'm sorry for that,"

Click to read the report in the Gold Coast Bulletin.
Click to read the story of the Gold Coast City Council election.

PM Kevin Rudd recently sat through an hour of all sorts of questions from a studio audience on the ABC's new Q&A program hosted by Tony Jones.

The show is quite interesting, well it is if you're into this sort of thing. You can download the podcast from the ABC website or through iTunes.

But for those with a passing curiosity, here's what he had to say on the contentious issues of gay marriage and refugee detention centres...

Do you ever wonder when any of our leaders are going to take a leadership position on real issues that will affect entire societies for decades to come? Our politicians have spent the last week bickering about whether it would be better to have a 2c cut in the price of petrol per litre or a 5c cut in the price of petrol per litre, when even a 10c or 20c cut would be absorbed almost immediately by soaring oil costs which are never going to go down due to basic laws of supply and demand, and when the billions of dollars per year it would cost the public purse to do so could be far better employed investing in the new energy alternatives and social reforms we will need to adapt to changing times. And if we're placing such a big emphasis on this whole climate change thing, isn't it a good thing that petrol prices are rising and forcing the change we need?

Anyway, here's a thoughtful article from Crikey today saying the same thing I just said but better researched and with proper paragraphs and stuff

So, the world is facing the biggest oil price crisis since the 1970s, and possibly the beginning of the end of oil altogether. One of the critical parameters of our entire economy, a key factor in our lifestyle and a major contributor to global warming, is fundamentally changing.

What’s the response of most of our political class? A debate about cutting the price of petrol by five cents a litre versus cutting it by two cents. And that’s before we started having the debate about the debate.

As Christine Milne correctly observed last week in Crikey, this isn’t a problem that’s going to be solved by the same thinking that created it. There are alternative approaches.

One of the key myths being peddled about petrol usage is that it’s price-inelastic. If it’s so inelastic, the NSW Government wouldn’t be looking to buy 150 new buses to meet growing demand for public transport use, which has grown by 74 services since January in Sydney. Tram, train and bus usage wouldn’t be up significantly in Melbourne. The rising price is forcing people who have access to public transport to switch to it.

The emerging problem, and the inelasticity, is in communities that have no alternative to motor vehicles, particularly in urban fringe suburbs where commuting distances are massive, and which are likely to have lower incomes and are therefore have less discretionary expenditure to re-direct to petrol. Two or five cents a litre reduction in petrol prices is likely to provide about two days’ relief for such people at the moment. [click to continue...]