The Orstrahyun: Double The Readership Of Murdoch's Telegraph

Based on figures from this Murdoch media puff piece on its 'success', The Orstrahyun recently had a bigger readership than one of the most popular Murdoch Sunday newspapers, The Sunday Telegraph:

 “Our Sunday metro papers (all Sunday papers combined) are read by 4.7 million people each Sunday,” Mr Tonagh said.

‘‘To put that in perspective, last month’s finale of My Kitchen Rules attracted 2.3 million metro viewers. The Block got 2.2 million.

‘‘Last season’s AFL grand final averaged 2.7 million.”

Oztam figures reveal this was well in excess of the average audience for television evening news bulletins on Sunday night in Sydney — with Nine News pulling the top audience of 386,030.

The Sunday Telegraph’s ­average weekly audience was 1.316 million in the 12 months to March.

1.3 million readers for The Sunday Telegraph? Big deal, The Orstrahyun clocked up a readership of more than 2 million people, and that was in less than one week:

And that was back in mid-April. By late April, The Orstrahyun readership for that AC/DC story had reached 2.5 million, it's now closing in on 3 million. And these figures aren't from a few hundred thousand readers returning multiple times to comment, or read comments, or reactions to their comments. These were nearly all unique hits, or views.

This means The Orstrahyun completely flogged Murdoch media's 'most popular Australian blogger' Andrew Bolt for readership:

And I won't even go into the stupidity of the Murdoch media big-noting itself by claiming it has more readers worldwide (and every Murdoch news site is available worlwide, and its stories are archived by Google, so they come up in Google subject and name searches) in one month than a state-based TV show has on a given night.

 Look at this NewsCorp graphic about the hilarious Telegraph's readership:

It all seems incredibly desperate. Which makes you wonder why they'd be so deceptive about their readership if it was as big as they claim.

What the Murdoch media fluffing stories (and there's been more than two dozen across its Australian websites in the past week, some even paywalled as 'premium content') don't tell you about their claimed readership is this - the total weekly audience they claim for websites like the Daily Telegraph, for example, is based on how many Telegraph online pages are viewed in a given period.

It's not how many people actually go to the website to read it specifically everyday, but how many clicks/views all the Telegraph online web pages get in a given period. This total includes all the links shared on Facebook and Twitter and other social media, all the clicks they get because some old celebrity story still on the website turns up in Google searches, and Google Image searches, and all the clicks they get from other Murdoch media websites linking to old stories housed at the Sunday Telegraph homepage because a celebrity previously covered, or 'More Here' links.

If from all that, Murdoch's NewsCorp can claim a readership of 1.3 million for one publication based on alleged weekly averages, why can't The Orstrahyun claim it has a readership of 2.5 million?

Can, and will.



The Orstrahyun - Readership: 2.5 million.


OK, The Orstrahyun clearly doesn't always get that level of readership action, but that's hardly the point when it comes to fudging readership numbers for big-noting purposes. And the Murdoch media are Yodas when it comes to doing that.

From out of the blue, an online story can attract attention and go completely viral, and that's what happened to this AC/DC story. It got picked up by international media, music sites, new sites, was linked to, and circulated heavily on Facebook, all over the world. It went completely ballistic.

Of course The Orstrahyun doesn't get a million or two online readers a day, but neither do any of Murdoch's news sites. They have huge spikes in traffic, like The Orstrahyun did, and then they use the total numbers (spikes and more mundane daily readership) to average out weekly traffic numbers that look far more impressive than they actually are. Online readership numbers for nearly all news sites, not just the Murdoch ones, are completely elastic.

In case you were wondering, an actual average day at The Orstrahyun draws a few thousand readers (without comment action) and a chunk of those hits is people finding archive stories through Google searches, just like the online Murdoch media gets a fat chunk of traffic from old stories. That's why Rupert Murdoch never lived up to his threat to stop Google from archiving and adding Murdoch media stories to search results. It would have been a huge, unhideable loss of daily web traffic.

Thanks to regular readers for sticking with The Orstrahyun over the past seven years. And hello to all the via Google tourists. We miss you already.



From The Orstrahyun's Archive...

Stop The Hysteria, Demands Hysterical Daily Telegraph

Daily Telegraph Exploits War Heroes To Demonise The Disabled

Daily Telegraph: Anyone Opposed To Abbott Is A Revolting Feral 

Peak Rudd - Daily Telegraph Couldn't Fit Anymore 'Get Rudd' Stories On Front Page 

Daily Telegraph 'Staff Writers' Demand Destruction Of Greens, Yet Again

Treasurer Hockey Sues Fairfax Media - 'Freedom Of The Press' Storm Doesn't Erupt

Flashback: Hockey was so close to winning Liberal Party leadership, this story was published online, a bit early

By Darryl Mason

Treasurer Joe Hockey wants people to know that just because he attends dinners at the North Sydney Forum, where 'regular people' can pay $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 or even $50,000 to get varying levels of access to the man who controls the nation's purse strings....

 ....that doesn't mean that decisions made by him are in any way affected by the demands of those who've paid big money to get his attention, or that he is 'For Sale.'

Of course not.

That would be an outrageous level of corruption. And would demand Hockey immediately resign.

So of course he's upset by this Sydney Morning Herald front page:

 
And he's upset by this image box that went with the stories in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that go into detail on how the North Sydney Forum and those 'fees' work:

 So upset, he's launched defamation proceedings against the Herald publisher Fairfax:

Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey is suing Fairfax Media for defamation over a series of articles about a fund-raising forum that offered access to the Treasurer in exchange for donations of thousands of dollars.

Mr Hockey claims that, as a result of the articles, published on May 5, he has been "greatly injured, shunned and avoided and his reputation has been and will be brought into disrepute, odium, ridicule and contempt".

He says Fairfax Media's "over sensational, extravagant and unfair presentation" of the articles indicated an "intent to injure" him.

He is claiming damages, including aggravated damages, interest and costs, although the amount of damages is not specified.

So aggrieved by Fairfax's claims is Hockey, he even tweeted that Kevin Rudd was known for doing the same. Or not the same, because Hockey says he doesn't do that. And to tweet something like that about his old mate Rudd, if he was actually doing the same, would be intensely, insanely, hypocritical:

 
Get the feeling Hockey is going to really, really, really regret tweeting that when, or more precisely, if, the defamation case gets to court, and is pursued to the end.

Anyway, that's for later. Right now, Treasurer Joe Hockey is facing a monumental public backlash, from all strands of Australian society, over the brutal Budget 2014, which leaves pensioners, students, the disabled, the unemployed, all worse off than the wealthy. Oh but, says Joe, we've introduced a 'debt levy' that will mean the wealthy will have to pay up as well. Yeah, not exactly....

One immediate problem for Hockey is he doesn't even know detail of his Budget 2014 you'd expect to be front and centre in his mind. He keeps making mistakes, "bloopers" or is simply 'lying through his fucking teeth' if you want to use the general opinion of many on Twitter:

Embarrassing bloopers by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey have revealed they don’t understand who will be forced to pay their controversial new $7 GP fee.

And their mistakes have undermined the government’s attempt to sell a tough budget to angry voters.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Melbourne radio listeners yesterday an average person would only have to pay the $7 GP fee ten times and then they would be bulk billed.

In fact the government has put no limit on the number of times an ordinary worker will pay the $7 charge, however, there is a ten visit safety net just for pensioners and children.

The Australian Medical Association accused Treasurer Joe Hockey of also getting it wrong when he says the chronically ill won’t be hit by the $7 GP fee.

The Treasurer told Korey Gunnis who suffers from eight chronic illnesses on Monday: “You wouldn’t be hit by the so-called Medicare co-payment. You wouldn’t be affected.”

Mr Hockey, on the ABC’s Q&A program, went on to say: “No, you wouldn’t, because you’d be on a care plan with your doctor. Obviously you’ve got a number of chronic diseases. In that situation you are not affected by the co-payment,”

And he was wrong.

Hockey, and his fellow politicians are meanwhile copping it in the throat because after all the talk of 'The Age Of Entitlement' being over and everyone having to "do the heavy lifting" it keeps looking like the only heavy thing Joe Hockey is lifting is silver cutlery:

But oh, says Joe, pay rises for politicians have been frozen (after across the board pay rises in recent years of up to 40%)...for a while. Nobody really buys it, or cares.

What is odd, though, is just how quiet the Liberal-allied, or conservative-focused, media and columnists and radio hosts have been about Hockey suing Fairfax.


Isn't this an attack on the Freedom Of The Press?

Doesn't that make them outraged and angry and disgusted?

Apparently not. It's tumbleweeds out there on this lawsuit.

Couldn't this be seen as Hockey using lawyers to have stories he doesn't like, or disagrees with, disappeared from the internet?

Of course.


Funny, our 'Freedom Commission' and the usual chanters for press freedom have been curiously quiet on their favourite subject of 'Let Media Freedom Reign!' since Hockey launched his lawsuit.

Very quiet indeed.

And on the subject of Joe Hockey, dug up this piece of 2009 gold from Andrew "I'm Usually Wrong On Nearly Everything" Bolt, where he predicted Hockey would win the Liberal Party leadership because, in his words, Tony Abbott was "unelectable."




From the archive:

December 3, 2008: Joe Vs Julia - Hockey Smells Blood In The Water

Does Joe Hockey Mean Wilson Tuckey Is About To Drop His Pants And Start Singing Cold Chisel Songs?

Feb 13, 2010: The Joe Hockey Experience

Stop Laughing At Joe, This is Serious

The Australian editor Chris Mitchell: 'I Love The Sydney Morning Herald'

The Daily Telegraph's editor Paul Whittaker, Rupert Murdoch and The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell (right)

Well this was unexpected. The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell, that is the newspaper that regularly feasts upon the alleged fetid "Leftism" of Fairfax media actually believes The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are fantastic newspapers.

Via Mumbrella:

Chris Mitchell: "...the Saturday Age and SMH...remain very strong products with breaking news, a colour magazine, good arts and sport coverage, very strong business sections and lots of heavyweight opinion from people who really move national debate."

Eh? What could have motivated Mitchell to sing the praises of The Australian's key rival in this age of rapidly declining newspaper circulations?

The arrival of a third Saturday newspaper, called The Saturday Paper.

So incensed are Mitchell and Fairfax's Gary Linnell they have supplied some absolutely choice quotes to Mumbrella, desperately trying to hose down any interest The Saturday Paper might be generating.

This quote from Linnell is pure gold, and pretty much sums up far too much commentary content in Murdoch and Fairfax newspapers, beautifully so:

 "I desperately hope it doesn’t end up being a boring collection of opinion writers sifting through each others’ navel lint..."

Mumbrella has the full story here.


Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Media What To Print And Who To Back

2007: The Australian Editor Chris Mitchell Claims Pro-Peace Aussies Hate Hearing Less Iraqis Are Being Slaughtered

Chris Mitchell's War On Australian Bloggers

The Australian's Obsession With Twitter Is Just Plain Stupid

News Corp Australia CEO Kim Williams Quits After Daily Telegraph 'Nazi PM' Front Page - Federal Election Day 5

Less than two years after taking over Rupert Murdoch''s Australian News Corp operations, CEO Kim Williams is stepping down. Remarkably, not of Murdoch's 130 plus Australian newspapers scored this scoop.

We'll return to this dramatic news, and look back at Williams gormless attempts to demonise Australian bloggers and independent media, but here's Kim Williams e-mail to staff (somehow, Murdoch papers even got scooped on this):

Dear Colleagues

I attach the media statement about my departure from News Corp which will be effective from this weekend.

An action like this is always taken with a heavy heart and a mixed bag of feelings and reflections on a wide range of experiences with News Corp across almost 20 years. It is certainly not a decision made lightly, or without an awareness of the impact decisions like this inevitably have on many close colleagues, clients and diverse bodies within the media community.

I started with News Corp back in 1995 and have worked with the company ever since in three roles – as CEO at FOX Studios Australia, CEO of FOXTEL and as CEO at News Corp Australia. Each role has offered a diversity of challenges and wonderful opportunities. I have enjoyed the responsibility and have been honoured to work with many extraordinarily talented people.

Whilst the leadership roles and the issues encountered have at times been frankly really confronting, it has been a source of perpetual renewal and reinforcement to have worked with so many terrific colleagues both here and internationally.  It is the people that one remembers the most.   I will be forever grateful to those who have been so helpful and constructively supportive in the many matters we have mutually confronted. There have been many good wins matched with some memorable awful problems and opponents!  It has all been the stuff of a rich and varied professional life that I would never have had without the benefit of the trust reposed in me by many great colleagues at News Corp.

I wish Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, their new management team in the new News Corp and all my international colleagues nothing but the best continued success with the product and commercial rewards that their efforts so richly deserve. I am genuinely in awe at the range and depth of talent in the company here and in the international arena and have great confidence in the future and all that it holds for the new enterprise.

Finally, I thank all my Australian colleagues for their support, understanding and commitment to the company, its products and customers over a long time. There are far too many people to single any one out – you all know who you are and what we have shared together!

With my warmest and best wishes to you all in continuing to meet the challenges of change to achieve a great future individually and corporately.

Kim Williams

More Here

Who Just Lost Another Few Billion Trying To Convince You That Celebrities Are Important And That People Who Don't Look Like You Can't Be Trusted?

Witnessing The Death Throes Of An Old Media Dinosaur

By Darryl Mason

A short round-up of the global losses of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, culled from this story :

* News Corporation net loss in 12 months - $US3.4 billion.

* Full year operating profit drops by 32%

* Growth in cable TV fails to compensate for massive losses in films, books, magazines, newspapers.

* In April/May/June quarter 2009, News Corp. smashed by $203 million in losses. In comparison, same quarter 2008 saw $1.1 billion profit.

* Advertising revenue for Murdoch's British papers - The Sun, The Times, News Of The World - plunged by 14%.

* Murdoch's 20th Century Fox film division, profits slumped from $1.24 last year to $848 million this year.

* Profits from Murdoch's Fox TV division - US, UK, Asia - were slashed by more than 80%.

No wonder ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch was reading, grimly, by phone, from a prepared statement when he tried to explain to shareholders that while the news about News Corp. was shockingly bad, next year was looking better because he intended to make people....umm....pay to read the news online.

Pay to read the news online? Who didn't laugh when they heard that the first time? This is a visionary strategy to save a massive global corporation from destruction?

Who is this crazy old man and what has he done with the Dirty Digger?

Stephen Mayne, the founder of the profitable online news site, Crikey, was interviewed on ABC Midday News on Thursday, as news broke of the ex-Australian's media empire being blitzed by billions in losses.

---------------------------------------------

"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers"

---------------------------------------------

Mayne doesn't necessarily think that the ex-Australian will be left completely fucked and bombed by the 'You Will Pay!' experiment, but it's not looking good. Mayne believes the Murdoch product soon to be for sale is not good enough, and Murdoch will always be ten steps from disaster as long as he continues printing actual newspapers.

"I think for Rupert Murdoch to declare that the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, every one of his newspapers in the world, and he is the world's biggest newspaper owner, for them all to charge is a very risky proposition," Mayne said. "And I predict they won't get much revenue, and they'll simply lose a whole heap of (reader) traffic."

Mayne said Murdoch's biggest problem was not simply convincing people to read Pay To Read online, but to give them enough reasons to want to pay.

"A lot of what Rupert does isn't particularly high quality, and if there's other high quality material from Fairfax, or other rivals in Britain and the US, that is still free, then everyone will just go to their websites. So you can only charge if (all the other news media) is charging and if your content is particularly fantastic," Mayne said.

"So the big challenge for Rupert, is to round up all the big newspaper publishers around the world and to get them to all collude and agree to change the business model. And that will be very hard given they all compete so aggressively."

The ex-Australian will continue to suffer while he clings to the 20th century.

"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers," Mayne said.

"The industry is collapsing, his advertising revenue is down 20% across the board. Google has cut everybody's lunch. And i think the only real way he can get out of it is to get companies like Google to start paying him money in return for aggregating their content. Get everyone together, start charging, and then do a big deal with Google to try and scoop up some of their billions in annual advertising revenue derived from aggregating newspaper content."

Doing away with actual newspapers, Mayne predicts, will be an inevitable part of returning Big Media to shareholder-applauding profit. That is, if profits enough to survive are even possible again for a corporation as large and expensive and bloated with seven figure executives as Murdoch's News Corp.

"I think newspapers...it's a dying industry," Mayne said.

----------------------------------

"Publishers have been screwing advertisers for 100 years. Technology has now turned the tables"

---------------------------------

Economist Alan Kholer says Rupert Murdoch is crashing and burning because advertising income online compared to print has proved to be so gaping :

....who was to know that the price of online advertising would settle at about a tenth of the price of print advertising?

This is, after all, a classic business event: a technological change that causes a price reduction. And the result is always the same - lower costs.

While absurdly high print advertising prices (in print) have subsidised large editorial budgets, and low or zero cover prices, it won’t do it online.

It is the fact that the price of advertising has collapsed. Murdoch’s real problem is that the balance of power between publishers and advertisers has entirely flipped.

Advertisers and their agencies now rule the roost. They refuse to pay more than a tenth or so per unit of what they pay in print, and they demand much better service, such as only paying for actual new customers, not simply for “branding” that can’t be measured.

And why shouldn’t they act this way? The publishers have been screwing them for a hundred years, charging outrageous prices to access their treasured audiences. Technology has now turned the tables.

We are merely witnessing the death throes of an oligopoly’s hubris.

An editorial in Crikey ouchingly brands the newspapers Murdoch clings to as "legacy media" :

"...this is all a gigantic gamble by desperate newspaper owners to plug the deep cracks in their business models that have turned newspapers from 20th century money machines into 21st century legacy media.

Saying that quality journalism is not cheap to produce is self-evident. But the fundamental problem for most quality newspapers is not that people aren’t paying for that journalism, it’s that advertisers — especially classified advertisers — have found a better and cheaper medium than newspapers. And it’s the advertisers, not the readers, who pay for the quality journalism that made newspapers so profitable and powerful.

Unless readers are prepared to replace the lost classified advertising revenues — which in the case of a newspaper like The Sydney Morning Herald would require every buyer to pay something like $250 a year extra for the content — the problem of funding quality journalism won’t be solved.

I've been a newspaper junkie since my early teens. I brought 2 or 3 newpapers a day, every day, for decades, until about 3 years ago. Now I only regularly buy weekend newspapers.

I spent about $10 on newspapers last weekend, and except for a Louis Nowra piece in The Australian, most of the weekend paper pile remains unread. I read most of the news elsewhere online, the day before. I can barely bother to read columnists like Greg Sheridan, Philip Adams, Miranda Devine and Sun Herald, Sunday Telegraph and The Australians editorials, online, let alone devoting offline time to getting through them.

------------------------------

It seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?

-------------------------------

None of the weekend papers feel essential anymore. It doesn't feel like I'm going to miss out if I don't buy them and read them comprehensively. When I was in my early 20s, I often chose buying newspapers over buying Saturday morning breakfast. The idea of doing that now seems insane.

There are probably thousands of bloggers, and dozens of indie media sites, run by juiced New Media 20-somethings, who snort and cackle and giggle with delight at what is happening to the old corporate media these days, and some seem to take a particular delight in believing that actual newspapers won't be found some day soon in racks at the 7-11, or piling up the gutters on windy days.

It's seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?


You had to wait for the newspaper once. You had to wait for it to go on sale, or for the newsagent to open. There was many a 2am Saturday or Sunday morning when I haunted all night newsagents in Kings Cross or Central Station (coming home from work, or from seeing gigs) hassling to get bundles cut open so I could get what I wanted and rush home to read them before sleep overwhelmed.

Now I can just read all that vital news on an iPhone as I stumble home instead.

And if there are days when I can't be bothered to visit online news sites, let alone pick up an actual paper, I'm confident that the array of writers, journos, media junkies, I follow on Twitter will alert me to plenty of quality news from all over the world, including much that I would never bothered to read had they not recommended it.

And Twitter is the nail through the palms of all the big, vastly expensive news media online today. Murdoch execs in particular still seem to have no idea what this instant news sharing system is going to become. None of them dare to say the word 'Twitter' out loud right now, even as they loudly repeatedly denounce the legitimate competition for eyeballs and attention from one person blogs, as they attempt to degrade and discredit the credibility of a thrilling storm of independent New News Media.

"You need us to tell you what's going on."

Really? Do we?

It doesn't feel like that anymore.

All media execs are terrified of Twitter. Trying to fit a chunk of news or info into just 140 character posts is is training millions how to write clearly, succinctly. Twitter is training people in how to reduce an explanation of what is happening to them, or people they know, or people they've just read about, into a handful of words. Experienced twooters can compress a 1200 word front page story in The Australian to its most essential facts spread across a couple of posts.

If you want to know the latest news on anything, tossing subject key words into the Twitter search engine more often than not delivers you the very latest on the news you're interested in, sometimes literally a minute or less after it happens.

The idea that the average person needs a journalist, or a columnist, to explain to them what is happening in their local community, their city or state, their country, to interpret and filter information, feels very 20th century.

As 20th century as that file pile of weekend newspapers a few feet from me, that now feel like more of a chore than a pleasure to leaf through.

I live without daily newspapers now, and I'm sure I've almost been rehabbed enough by a world of online news to dump the weekend newspaper habit as well.

If the Old Media now so desperately trying to save itself from financial ruin and irrelevancy can't convince a full-blown news junkie like me to buy their gear in print or online, what hope do they have to convince the majority who have only a casual news habit?

I feel absolutely no devotion or allegiance to any Old Media. What do they serve up that I can't get elsewhere online, if not immediately, then a bit later from elsewhere?

I'd rather pay Fairfax columnist Annabel Crabbe $30 a year to write her columns for her own blog and then alert me to those stories via Twitter than to pay Fairfax $100 or more a year for a whole slew of content I don't want, don't need, won't read. If Crabbe charged, say, $60 a year and mailed me a book she'd either written or one she highly recommended, I'd sign up tomorrow.

To me, the biggest problem the Old Media in Australia, all over the world, face right now is overcoming the dawning reality that they are no longer essential.

The monopoly on information and news enjoyed for so long by a handful of media corporations has been smashed by the Big Free, by thousands of blogs and independent news sites and comment boards on MySpace and on aggregators (and summarisers) like Digg and Reddit and free access forums on anything you can imagine, contemplate or question.

Information and news is Free, and that cannot be changed back now. No matter what former gods of public manipulation and opinion shaping like Rupert Murdoch try and do, the sharing of news and information can never go back to what it once was.

Those days are over.

Curiously, while the media giants are being stripped by market forces of their wealth and influence, there are plenty of blogs and independent news media who are doing very well for themselves right now, and free information exchangeries like Twitter only help to expand their online audiences.

When the true desperation sets in for media giants like Murdoch, and it wont be long now, the real down and nasty war against all that enthusiastically free competition from bloggers and indie news sites will begin. And it will be an ugly.

And pathetic.


.

.

Aporkalypse, Please

By Darryl Mason

The first confirmed case of an Australian with swine flu, actually in Australia - but she had it in the US and claims she was no longer sick or showing symptoms when she boarded a plane to come home - is announced to massive media freakout on a slow news day.

So how did the Saturday 5pm news on Channel 10 in Sydney deal with one confirmed case of Australian Has Swine Flu! as the first story of the bulletin, without being too dramatic? Cut to newsreader questioning Some Expert :

Newsreader : Is it time to panic?

Some Expert : No.

It's like the declarations from government health departments and the World Health Organisation warning us, "Don't Panic!" as though there will come a time of "Fuck Yes, Panic Now!" announcements.

Newsreader : Health Minister, there are now 2000 confirmed cases of ManBirdPig Flu in Australia, with dozens of deaths. Is it time now for the Australian public to panic?

Health Minister : "Yes. Yes I do think the time has come for everyone to panic."

Newsreader : Are you panicking right now?"

Health Minister : "Yes. I am panicking. This is me in a state of panic."

Newsreader : "Sorry, minister, I couldn't hear you clearly over what sounds like breaking waves and a game of beach volleyball in the background there."

Health Minister (off) : "....close the fucking door, Wayne!"

Newsreader : "Minister?"

Health Minister : "Sorry, it was...the TV...in my hotel room...in Canberra."

Newsreader : "Just how should the Australian people panic, minister? Should they go all out bat fucking shit crazy, and start killing their neighbours and salting their corpses for future meals when quality food will be scarce? Or should we remain in homes for a third month and watch TV and shiver just a little at this news and make little defeated wincing, sighing and choking-sob noises instead?"

Health Minister : "I'd advise against the gathering and preserving of other working families for later consumption, at this time. It is in the interest of all Australians to remain calm even as we move through this state of obvious and prolonged panic."

Newsreader : "So you're saying the Australian people should stay calm but feel free to panic?"

Health Minister : "Yes, as long as your frantic panic is confined to your home, and you don't break anything and you don't start grabbing your family members by the shoulders and shaking them as you scream 'God hates us! He really does!' over and over again until you fall exhausted and dehydrated to the floor."

Newsreader : "So we can panic, but we need to remain calm in our panic?"

Health Minister : "Yes, that's exactly correct."

Newsreader : "Thank you."

Health Minister : "Thank you."

Newsreader : "In other news, the NRL is reeling after more group sex allegations surfaced, but this time no females were involved..."

Health Minister (off) : "...that's what I told that clue-bat worthy idiot. I just can't believe how fucking doomed they all are back there."

Newsreader : "..........I'm sorry, it appears the health minister's microphone is still on and we are trying to get the..."

Health Minister (off) : "....well you tell Kev he should have thought about packing his own frigging hair dryer before we evacuated. And another thing, Wayne, if I'm going to be staying here for six months, I want a bungalow right on the beach, goddammit. I'm not spending half a year in Vanuatu living in some damp shack a half kay back from the frigging beach."

Newsreader : "In breaking news, the federal government and opposition have announced the relocation of Parliament to a well-defended, heavily stockpiled island in Vanuatu, for the immediate future."

I think there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people in Australia who have picked up the swine flu virus in the past five weeks or so, and because they are used to dealing with flu symptoms most years without feeling the need or urgency to see a doctor, they don't know they picked it up, suffered briefly and with no mammothic discomfort, and are now feeling much better.

It's a flu, one that will probably prove more fatal to those it infects than seasonal Influenza A viruses usually do, but it does not deliver vastly different symptoms than those 'usual' flu. You'll only know you've got or had ManBirdPig Flu once you've been tested by a doctor.

If the New Flu made your nose change into a snout, or made you puke out the inside of your own leg, then yes, it would be obvious you'd picked up H1N1 and dozens of people a week would be announced to have become infected.

Even if H1N1 turns into a pandemic and kills 2% of everyone it infects, these deaths are not going to happen all in one week or month or probably not even in the same year.

Twenty or thirty thousand Australians dying from HumanBirdPig Flu over 18 months will be big news, and the changes to the most basic functioning of society from widespread absenteeism will be monumental and unavoidable, but the deaths, if they come, will come in waves, across those many months.

With constant nightly news attention focused around the spread of a virus that is killing hundreds a week, even the news of an ongoing pandemic will get old for most, or will want to be mostly avoided by those who have already lost friends and family to the virus.

A pandemic killing tens of thousands of Australians in a year will be one of the biggest stories of the century, but it will be one of the hardest for the media to cover, respectfully, and without hysteria, and also maintain interest in.

The science is difficult, the lies and deceptions from governments about what is actually going on will be monumental and the visuals of people lining up outside hospitals, or bodies being carried from homes, the mass funerals, the quarantined being interviewed from behind their living room windows, and barren city streets and squares, will quickly become boring to most viewers.

A pandemic is not a fast moving story, at least not fast enough for the speed of today's news, it will crawl along, a tragedy that unfolds slowly filled mostly with intimate dramas behind the front doors of quarantined homes. And there will be months when nothing happens at all, when road accidents and heart disease deaths beat out pandemic influenza for 'Most Deaths This Month.'

I'm sure the evening news will give us maps of Australia with death tallies for each state and territory, too, if a pandemic becomes reality, and you'll know just how serious the pandemic actually is by whether the reporter 'on the scene' will be wearing a face mask or a full biosuit, breathing like Darth Vader.


Aporkalypse Now?

Aporkalypse When?

I Want To Know, But You Don't Have To Tell Me That

By Darryl Mason

There is sometimes a bit of wisdom to be found amongst the usual anti-Muslim frothing, bizarre Rudd-related conspiracy theories and Howard/Costello worship at The Professional Idiot's.

This from NC :

...the public doesn’t have a right to know and you would be surprised how many don’t want to know. The “public” has no rights over the private lives of individuals, they are just that “PRIVATE”.

The death of a person may be news, the grief of their friends and family is not. Who decided it was news worthy to shove a microphone in the face of a grieving mother and ask ‘How does it feel’, pity the response of “how do you think moron” is edited out.

For too long we in Australia have been fed a steady diet of gossip and been told it is news. The opinions of journalists are reported as news rather than opinion, worse still journalists interviewing journalists about events rather than getting the news from the source. Sloppy, lazy and trashy reporting, too many so called journalists don’t do their homework before interviews and display their ignorance the moment they open their mouths asking inane questions

I don’t care which Hollywood star is sleeping with whom, its not news, neither is asking so jetlagged starlet or sports person, “how do you like Australia” the minute they get off the plane.

It’s not news, it’s not informative - its gossip, but far too often its lead item on the TV news or on the front page.

All of this is exactly why so many Australians are turning away from the dead tree media, soaking up news instead from blogs and alternative news sites.

Rupert Murdoch's Australian media are reeling from the gratuitously tasteless fake photo scandal surrounding Pauline "That's Not My Belly Button" Hanson.

And so they should.

Many of the non-blog Murdoch news sites had to stop accepting comments because the vast majority of commenters were heavily slamming The Daily/Sunday Telegraph and Herald Sun for propagating so much creepy shit, and invading Hanson's privacy in a deeply disturbing way.

Will they learn anything from it?

Only if the damages they have to pay out cost more than the profits made from running the non-story across its front pages and all over its online 'news' sites.

You want to know why corporate tabloid media is dying? This is why. The pap and crap doesn't distract the public like it once did, this is why newspapers like The Sunday Telegraph are so desperate they will pay $15,000 to a dying man, with a very vague memory, for photos that kind of look like Pauline Hanson might have at 20, but are probably from an Eastern Europe porn/dating site.

And on old photos that some may wish have disappeared forever, here's an interesting rumour bouncing back from New York : Murdoch owns MySpace, and every drunken party photo some kid puts up there gets copied, named, tagged and filed away. Why? Just in case that partying kid becomes someone famous and decides to delete their MySpace profile and photos, the Murdoch media will always have copies of those photos that may, one day, cause much regret.

If anyone from the Murdoch media is willing to deny the above, in full, I will be more than happy to update with a correction, or clarification.

Newspaper No Longer Most Trusted Source Of News For Australians

90% of Journalism Students Do Not Read Newspapers

By Darryl Mason

Australians have lost their trust in newspapers. Where once we had seven or eight major dailies in our larger cities, we now have one or two, at most, with at least one barely managing to hang on as a newspaper. But people are not just forsaking the daily newspaper ritual because the medium is well overdue for a complete reinvention, we ditched newspapers because we no longer trusted them to tell us the truth.

Newspapers are dying because they broke the essential pact of trust that existed for a century between newspaper and dedicated daily reader : you print the news that you have made sure is true to the best of your abilities, and we will trust you on most of it.

In the rush to war, all the city dailies, and The Australian of course, printed pages filled with lies and distortions and myth for months on end. We knew it was bullshit, how did they not know? And so millions of Australian minds wondered : 'Well, if they can so casually lie to us about a fucking war, what else are they lying to us about, on a daily basis?'

Story One :

The journalists of the future are rapidly moving away from traditional news services, saying they are impractical compared to new media.

A survey of Australian journalism students found 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, preferring to source news from commercial television or online media.

Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, Alan Knight, conducted the survey and says despite an aversion to newspapers, 95 per cent of students are very interested in following the news.

He says the move away from newspapers is of great concern because they are still the major source of serious news in Australia.

Professor Knight says the survey results indicated most journalism students strongly believe newspapers will eventually die out but it may take some time.

"The future of printed newspapers is looking grim as there is an evident shift towards digital journalism."

Story Two :

A study by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has found that the Internet is the most trusted media outlet in Australia.

The study found that 25% of the population list the Internet as their must trusted source of information, followed by newspapers at 20%, TV at approx 17%, and radio at approx 13%.

I certainly don't think newspapers are about to die out. There will be even more of them in the future, but they will be more like magazines, and the news will be more local, focused on the events and happenings of a few suburbs, instead of entire states or countries. There's more to say on that, but my last coffee buzz has worn off and it's too late now for a refresher.

Perhaps the major newspapers can make up on the weekend what they lose during the week from melting sales. The weekend paper is heading towards $5, so just make it $5 now, but make it worth $10. That means real discount coupons for supermarkets and petrol stations. Get rid of the awful, inky newsprint, make it more like a larger magazine, with a weekly free movie on DVD (or a memory stick), and perhaps also the week's worth of video stories produced for the websites that most of us never get around to viewing during the workday. Why not a standard CD every week, a compilation of songs from the albums reviewed inside? Why not a thin paperback as well?

Instead of the Saturday morning ritual being "get milk, get bread, oh yeah, get the papers", it should be, "If I don't get the paper today, my weekend will be ruined."

I'm sure all the major newspaper owners are preparing for what comes next, when the newspapers we have come to know and love, and now disrespect and distrust, no longer pay their way. But you sure don't hear them talking much about exciting, innovative ideas to refresh and re-invent their printed media, and save their own arses.

This Is News, Apparently



News.com.au readers are less than impressed, and know they are being fed garbage news :

"Corey has been on news.com.au everyday for the past 2weeks. your site has lost a lot of my respect.

"Please stop reporting on this nobody!!!! Nobody cares about him. Everybody is sick of him. If you did not report stories about him nobody would be sitting around wondering what Corey is up to. He is a retarded phenomena created by a media with nothing to report and elevated to fame by a poor A Current Affair presenter who has no interviewing skills whatsoever."

"Why not put him on Wikipedia and have articles on him everyday? Your agenda is clear - to steer us away from the real news and news behind the news that affects our daily lives."

"Why would you need to still be putting this LOSER in the news. Thought we had seen the last of this jerk. Media must be hard up for news stories.

"...look how far we have come. NEWS.COM.AU should hang your heads in shame at still reporting on this kid."

"Someone was awake at 2:00am writing this "news" article?"