Digital Rupert Wants You To Pay To Read His News So He Can Datamine Your Personal Info For Advertisers

"News Is Very Expensive To Create"

By Darryl Mason

Here's Richard Freudenstein, CEO of Digital Rupert, explaining to the recent Sydney Advertising & Marketing Summit how the Murdoch media will not only charge for online content but will also suck up personal details about readers and make them available to advertisers.

In short, the Murdoch media want you to pay so they can target ads directly at you.

"The problem is that the traditional advertiser-supported model is not enough, by itself, to pay for the level of investment in journalism that society needs.

So to make up the difference we have to look at charging for content.

The question is having been given it for free, will people now pay for online news content?

The first thing to remember is that people happily pay for news every day.

Indeed nearly 19 million newspapers are bought in Australia every week.

So clearly there is a healthy market for news.

But the future for Murdoch media is not newspapers, that old "dinosaur industry" as Stephen Mayne calls them, but Digital Rupert's holy grail/messiah: The E-Reader.

"a high-definition full colour e-reader, containing all your favourite newspapers and magazines from around the world...."

Sounds awesome.

But wait....

"It will deliver high definition ads which, when touched, will run a video, give detailed product information, download a brochure, or run a price comparison across local retailers.

An exciting proposition, I’m sure you’ll agree."

So you will have to pay to have some hyper-reality ad leaping out of the middle of a story shouting your name and telling you how absolutely rocking you will look in this new electric car.

Who will this paid content e-reader near-future world of Murdoch news be actually serving. The consumer, or the advertiser?

Some refreshing honesty from Digital Rupert's CEO :

Indeed, uppermost in our minds is that whatever the platform is, it must work effectively for not only our readers, but also for you – our agencies and advertisers.

We’re confident that the combination of print, online, mobile and e-reader presents a terrific opportunity for advertisers.

We’ll have a large, highly engaged opt-in audience who are open to advertising messages.

Now it sounds fucking shit, particularly if I'm paying for it.

And we all know what 'opt-in' means. If you don't read the contract and/or agreement carefully enough and see the part where you have to 'opt-out' to stop the bombardment of advertisers, you will automatically be 'opted-in.' Some still seem surprised to learn that someone else can own the rights of their photos when they publish them on social networking sites.

But here's the hook for those who want to drive you bonkers with ads, it's the real brilliance of getting people to pay for online content in the first place: the customer be able to sign on to get the news anonymously, there will be mandatory details that will have to be supplied, along with the payments. Not solely for security reasons, but so your personal details and interests and online habits can be auctioned to advertisers. Data-mined in other words.

"....we’ll have their full registration details – location and demographic details. We’ll know their consumption habits and we’ll be able to target them across multiple platforms."

I don't know if you've ever been "targeted across multiple platforms", but it doesn't sound pleasant.

So this is the future of Murdoch "quality journalism"?

It's the digital equivalent of what one of my old newspaper bosses told me about the value of news and feature stories in his publications : "They fill the space around the ads. They give readers something else to look at."

And finally this revelation from the Digital Rupert CEO :

But when it comes down to it, people want the news, and they want news they can trust.

The problem is that such news is very expensive to create.

Did he just confirm that the Murdoch media "create news" instead of simply reporting it?

There is a very exciting e-reader news revolution about to begin, but there will be many who will find a way to make it profitable without data-mining their customers and storming their brains with electronic advertising designed to distract you from what you're trying to read, or watch, or hear.

"The Media Can't Be Trusted To Tell The Truth"

By Darryl Mason

Jonathan Holmes, host of Media Watch, in a debate, lists a series of recent debacles from the mainstream media :

On July 21, four days after the Jakarta hotel bombings, Seven News reported: ‘‘Another bomb has exploded in Jakarta. The device went off just moments ago at a building near the Australian embassy.’’ No, it didn’t. No bomb, no unexploded bomb, no suspicious package. Nothing but a couple of hoax phone calls.

On June 20, the first edition of The Daily Telegraph and other News Ltd papers read: ‘‘Revealed: Email that could topple a Government.’’ That email may yet topple an opposition leader. But it won’t do any harm to the journalist who ‘‘revealed’’ its content, or the editors who decided to publish it, even though it turned out to be a fake.

Then there’s page one of The Sunday Telegraph on March 15: ‘‘PAULINE BETRAYED. Provocative: A young Pauline Hanson pouts for the camera in racy lingerie … ’’

The Sunday Telegraph editor promised to quit if the 'Hanson' photos turned out to be fake. They were fake, the editor didn't quit.

Holmes is just scratching the surface. He argues one of the biggest problems gouging away at the credibility of mainstream media today is not solely a lack of journalists, or highly skilled journalists, but the Deadline Now! atmosphere of 24 hour breaking news on TV, on radio, and online.

Fewer and fewer people are under pressure to produce more and more. That means less time to research, less time to write, less time to check, fewer subeditors to knock copy into shape.

Which is why the media, arguably, can be trusted less than ever to tell the truth.

Holmes posits a greater problem, however, about what modern journalism in mainstream media actually means :

"The media are not in the business of telling us the truth. The media are in the business of telling us stories.

"That simple little word dominates any professional conversation between journalists. I’m working on a story. It’s a good story, a great story, a balltearer of a yarn. Or, it’s a dud story, it’s a non-story, there’s no story.

"The idea of the story, of course, dates back to the time when people made little distinction between fact and fiction. Was Homer telling us the truth about the Trojan Wars? Did the Cyclops really have one eye, or Perseus winged feet? Does it matter? They’re great stories.

"They’re about love, and fear, and rage, and jealousy, and courage in adversity – the same emotions that 2500 years later sell copies of the Tele, or attract viewers to A Current Affair.

"But the media, of course, are supposed to tell us true stories."

How 20th century of you, Mr Holmes. This is the age of manufactured news media realities. The story is everything. Does it matter if it doesn't turn out to be true? It's fun for a few days, and the truth reality is always a bit of a bummer.

The reality a series of stories builds up, even if they are only brushed lightly with the truth, in the media over days, or weeks, or years, becomes for some all the truth they need to know. Or want to know.

Why shatter the manufactured reality with too many distracting facts?

Today, if you want to live in a reality where the future of the planet faces "dire consequences" resulting from our addiction to old energy sources and only the wisdom of carbon tax profiteers like Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch can save us all, you can follow certain columnists, haunt certain news sites and blog sites, all of which will mostly continue to enforce that reality. And addd to it.

Or you can believe the climate crisis is one big fat conspiracy created by those who stand to most benefit from the implementation of a global carbon tax.

You can, depending on the radio shows you listen to and the newspapers and bloggers you read, live in Sydney and truly believe that you are under constant direct threat from Al Qaeda (via Somalia/Lebanon/Pakistan/Iran) linked Islamist terrorists.

You can easily find enough material on a handful of mainstream news sites to reinforce that dangerous reality most days, and ignore anything that tells you otherwise, that threatens to bite away at the manufactured reality you enjoy with those annoying teeth of truth.

Whatever your choice of fear, it's easy to find a selection of news media and online screeds to feed it and sustain it. You can get Google to send you news alerts every time a story or blog post involving your favourite fear is published online.

Personally, I live in perpetual fear of both UFO invasions and surviving into the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a massive meteor impact. Fortunately, my double fear is countered by supreme confidence that the world-crushing meteor will arrive just as the UFO invasion begins and destroy them all, resulting in the meteor being obliterated into harmless but beautiful fiery dust in our night skies.

You'd be amazed at how stories find their way online from across the world every week about looming UFO invasions and planet-killing meteor strikes. Then again, you may already know. You probably read the mainstream media as well.

The rest of the Jonathan Holmes piece is here.

You Say "Significant Slump", I Say "Fraction"

Duncan Riley asks did John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, deceive the market when he claimed, on July 1, that :

...newspaper ad revenue in Australia has been growing – not declining over the past 5 years as it has in the US and the UK. Even in the past year, the decline in ad revenue in Australia is a fraction of what’s been happening overseas.

ABC’s AM reported on August 6 :

Rupert Murdoch says his papers in Australia have endured a 30 per cent slump in classified ads and a 12 per cent drop in display ads in the fourth quarter, and that’s thanks mainly to a drop-off in car and real estate and employment advertisements,

Riley zeros in on the use of the word "fraction" by Hartigan, and rightly so.

Psycho Chaser, Kiss Kiss Away....

If you're a fan of The Chaser, and you were wondering how Chas is getting on a couple of weeks after dyeing one side of his hair blonde, and getting a half face full of botox, so 50% of him would look like Daniel Craig, well, wonder no more :



Chas : "botox makes you smile like a psychotic."

It sure does.

More On Chas' Half Body Makeover And The Finale Of The War On Everything Here.


A Look Back Over The Chaser's War On Everything From The Ostrahyun's
Archive :

I'm Offended, And So Is My Dog

They Complain When You Go Too Far, And They Complain When You Don't Go Far Enough

No Matter How Far They Go, The Mainstream Media Will Never Campaign To Have The Chaser Taken Off The Air

We Will Laugh At Their Coffins

November, 2007 : The Chaser Responds To Liberal Party's Pro-Terrorism "Chaser-Style Prank"

October, 2007 : Lessons From APEC, Fight Terrorism By Jailing Comedians

'Canadian' Motorcade Carrying Osama Bin Laden Almost Reaches President Bush's Sydney Hotel - Fake Beard Confiscated

Digital Rupert Clings To Old 20th Century Habits & Hubris

By Darryl Mason

A few more quotes from Rupert Murdoch on why he's so confident enough people will pay to read his kind of news so as to stop his whole empire from plummeting like the Twin Towers.

"Quality journalism is not cheap."

Yes, we all agree on that. Very true. No-one can argue with that.

Or maybe Rupert just found out that his News Of The World has paid out a couple of million to people its journalists spied on, getting busted in the process. That's expensive 'journalism'. But is it 'quality journalism?

Or dodgy as all fuck?

So what other kind of quality journalism does Digital Rupert think will pull in the bucks from the online news reading public?

"When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical."

Okay, so he's banking on the collapsed celebrity media market to save his empire. It won't happen. There is no lock on information and news anymore. Put it behind a pay wall and it will just take a few more minutes longer to find its way into the public domain.

Any even minor-interest celebrity news is all across Twitter and Facebook and a thousand other blogs, social networking sites and indie media, often faster than anyone in the Murdoch media can get in front of a keyboard. Any spectacular or juicy details of 'How Bastard Brad Broke Weepy Jen's Heart, Again!' will be everywhere, regardless of pay walls and copyright.

And Digital Rupert aims to protect those 'Rampaging Sex Addicted Football Star Cuts Off Own Penis'-type stories from being duplicated and circulated.

"We'll be asserting our copyright at every point."

He's dreaming. Copyright is dead.

What if someone who witnesses a terrible disaster or terrorist attack demands to be cut in for some of the revenue generated by what Digital Rupert believes will the kinds of big stories that people will pay to read online? What if everyone interviewed by a Murdoch journalist decided to "retain their copyright" until they saw some cash. What then?

The whole You Will Pay! digital media devolution has begun, and for news junkies and media flunkies alike, it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds.

But it's not going to put a lot of bloggers and independent news sites out of business. If anything, the blocking of access to Murdoch news sites will increase traffic to those who Free Publish.

There's no law against someone reporting what a journalist has reported behind a corporate media pay wall.

Not yet anyway.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.


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One cloudy Sydney winter sunset....


















Photos By Darryl Mason



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Enjoy It While It's Still Free

This is the sort of deep, probing illumination you will soon have to pay to be dazzled by. Tim Blair :

"over-reacting and behaving unjustly"....It's almost a definition of terrorism.

If you say so.

The Orstrahyun Hails The Murdoch 'Death To Free Information' Movement

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch's News.com.au 'heralds' the end of Free News. Yeah, go away free information. How we hate you.




I'm as reluctant as The Professional Idiot and Tim "Immeasurable Hurt" Blair are to announce that soon you will have to pay to read this blog.

But you will.

I'm sorry, but days of Free Information are gone now.

Wake up to yourself. You know it's true. Rupert said so. Yes, he lost a couple of billion dollars, but so what? He's the Sun King.

Like Rupert's 'quality journalism', you will soon have to pay to read this blog.

Or I will no longer be able to bring infrequently posted, vaguely coherent, content before your eyeballs.

It's that simple.

So here's how The Orstrahyun 'You Will Pay!' business model will work :

1) I will data-mine any and all personal information I can find out about you, then I'll find out where you live.

2) I will turn up at your front door expecting a decent dinner (no vegan shit) at least twice a year. "My family's asleep" and "who the fuck are you?" will not be acceptable excuses for non-honourance of our verbital food-for-blog-stuff contract.

3) After dinner, you will only be allowed to show me holiday photos of places I haven't been, and you will accept that I can shout "Oh, Boring!" whenever I want to.

4) You will have to supply drinks before and after the dinner. You don't have to come on all flash. This is not a shakedown. Woodstock Bourbon & Cola in a can is fine, but if you're rich, you will be expected to break out the Wild Turkey Special Blend.

Death to Free News (And Blogs)!


And don't miss this. The Inquisitr has an hilarious story where a media buyer claims Murdoch is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo because their search engines drive traffic to Murdoch media sites. The bastards!


UPDATE : Only hours after Rupert Murdoch announces he wants to have a go at foolishly attempting to destroy the link-based free-sharing New Media culture by locking his content behind pay walls, Reuters announces that not only do they want independent bloggers, like me, to link to their news stories, they are also happy for bloggers to excerpt their news stories and build new content from it. As long as we all play fair.

Of course, compared to the bloated executive excesses of Murdoch's News, Reuters is a lean and mean operation. But they aren't taking a chance by encouraging bloggers to link to and share their content. They don't have a choice. Murdoch thinks he can still Own The News. He becomes more like Mister Burns every year.

Rupert Murdoch still doesn't get it. Reuters gets it.

So on day one of the New Murdoch 'You Will Pay!' Digital Media Reality, the legend of 20th century Old Media goes and gets trumped by Reuters, who clearly understand the way it has to be.

What a monumental fuckarama the rollout of Murdoch's 'You Will Pay!' new media devolution promises to be. It's a shame so many Australian employees will lose their jobs as the awful reality of Murdoch mega fail sinks in.

UPDATE : Success! My 'You Must Pay!' proposal to readers of The Ostrahyun is already showing results only a few hours after launching. I've now received twelve invitations to dinner via comments, Twitter (@darrylmason) and e-mail, in Sydney, Brisbane, Wyong, Adelaide, Cronulla, Melbourne, Baja California, Boston and Exeter, England. There was, however, a general reluctance to supply bourbon with the meals, but regardless....

I was wrong. The 'You Must Pay' system clearly works. Go for it, Rupert!


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It Had To Happen In Reality Before Anyone Would Believe It As Fiction

By Darryl Mason

So, I've been playing around with a novel/screenplay idea for a few years, based around a small, dying, city newspaper and a serial killer.

The scenario goes like this :

The newspaper owner and lead journalist are desperate, as advertisers bail for the internet and circulation/sales plunge, they are living in the last days of the city newspaper business. The newspaper owner's mini-media empire is old school, he's only now just getting his content online, and he knows he's only a few months away from total financial implosion. He needs an exclusive story that will make his paper famous and rocket circulation, in print and online. A story that takes a while to unfold. Something that will capture the public imagination, make them choose a side, get addicted to the story, for months.

The journalist is a former legendary crime reporter, who had his family slaughtered a decade ago by the brother of a crim he helped put in prison. The journalist is a broken man. He got off the booze and painkillers a few years ago, but hooks hard nto ecstasy instead, an addiction that has stripped his emotional personality of extreme highs and grinding lows. He's not so bothered by that. He sleeps better.

The journalist was planning for the series of true crime books he wrote about Sydney's crime splattered streets, in the 1970s and 1980s, to eventually be optioned for movies, and to continue selling well enough to fund his retirement. That was before the internet came along, and a TV series about the underbelly of Sydney's organised crime scene that strip-mined his
books for historical detail, interview transcripts, criminal CVs, everything, without paying him, without even giving him a credit. He's suing, but the legal costs have cleaned him out. So he's generally pretty fucked off with the world right now.

He needs The Story. The newspaper owner needs The Story. Over a midnight bottle of rare scotch in the office, the journalist and owner put together a solution to not only their dire financial situations, but the city's dark and terrible Problem as well.

The city has a plague of pedophiles. Kids are being abducted in broad daylight, all but snatched from their parents arms. The police force is under-resourced, there's no money to take on some of the worst offenders because they exist at the top of the social order. The most vile of them are rich, well protected, paying all the right bribes. And they don't make mistakes. There is a steady drumbeat of calls from the public, protests, rallies, "who will do something about these monsters?"

The journalist, using his old contacts, tracks down a former target of his investigations. A teenager who was cleared of killing four of his neighbours. The journalist knows the kid did it, the kid knows he did it, but nothing ever stuck. He was never convicted. The kid, now in his early 30s, has nothing going on his life, and listens to the journalist's proposition, and promise : kill the pedophiles, one every two weeks or so, write letters about what you're doing for my paper and I will make you a front page star, you will become a folk hero. A legend to the frightened families of this city. You will do what the police cannot. And they will love you for it.

The unreformed killer now has his life mission, and he goes to work, and by the third murder, his moniker is famous not only in the city, but around the world. The stories and reports go viral. The serial killer's letters to the newspaper are read by millions. His words are turned into songs. Hit songs. But all the letters are written by the journalist, once he discovers what an appalling writer the killer actually is.

The newspaper, now loaded with exclusives about the serial killer, and his targets, and letters from the public and former victims of those killed, triples its circulation, and the journalist's exclusive reports go into mass syndication, the bare bones newspaper website pulls in a million visitors a day from across the planet. The serial killer also occasionally pops up in comments at the website, addressing his 'fans', and the police, who are all but reluctantly trying to track him down. But when the serial killer shows no interest in providing these comments, the journalist again has to write his words for him, and find a way to keep himself anonymous online. This interaction with the serial killer makes the website even more popular, and nobody knows when he might show up in comments. Or on what story.

A small river of gold runs into the newspaper now, all thanks to this killing spree. The journalist gets interviewed on CNN and the BBC. The owner is stoked. Until one of his friends is killed. Then an innocent man is killed, wrong place wrong time. Then it happens again.

The newspaper owner is terrified, it's gone wrong, he wants out, he wants the journalist to either kill the serial killer, or hire someone to do the job for him. If the journalist doesn't agree to working with the owner to extract themselves from the mess, and now growing public outrage, the owner will hire lawyers and give him up to the police.

The journalist has to make a decision about who he must kill. The serial killer, or his boss.

Or. the serial killer dies at the height of his fame, the journalist finds him dead at a murder scene, and the journalist decides to hide the serial killer's body and continue his work.

Maybe.

So anyway, I wasn't intending to outline most of the story to you, but once you get started explaining something like that, it's hard not to pile on the detail.

I pitched that idea to a couple of producers in 2007 who kind of liked the idea but said it was impossible to pull off as a movie because the whole basic plot was so unrealistic. A journalist hiring someone to commit murders so his newspaper had murders to report on? Fucking ridiculous. Yeah, it was. I already knew that, which is probably why I never wrote anything more on it than a couple of screenplay outlines, and a few trial chapters of the novel.

The point of all that, is this story from today's headlines :

A Brazilian TV host ordered murders and then presented exclusive stories about the crimes on his show, police say.

Wallace Souza built up a huge audience on the program Canal Livre by regularly obtaining dramatic film of police raids and arrests, The Sun reports. "Investigations indicate they created scenes themselves," a police chief said. "They determined which crimes would be committed in order to generate news for the program."

The TV presenter is charged with murder, gun possession, drug trafficking and threatening witnesses.

Who thought something as nuts as that above outline would actually turn out to be not all that far from the truth?

The true crime TV host who actually hires people to commit the crimes he can exclusively report on will be an episode of Law & Order before I get around to getting the tale down.

Doesn't matter.

I've just been inspired by CNBC to write a different kind of thriller.

This time the prime minister is the serial killer.

The prime minister's staff, naturally, want to keep the bloody goings on secret, until they start disappearing themselves. Nobody cared when it was just lobbyists who were the PM's victims.

I think I'll call it 'In Due Season.'

John Laws : "I'll Be Back (Please?)"

John Laws, fresh from his disastrous self-demolition on Melbourne radio, eyes a return to the airwaves, reports Mumbrella :

“I miss it all quite a lot. I would be telling a lie if I said I did not miss it because I do, particularly when there are issues that I would like to be involved in and make mischief.

“If somebody asked me at the right time I would probably do it because I do miss it. And I miss it when there are things going on that I think need an irreverent look.”

Laws also revealed that he still speaks to some of his regular callers, on the phone, at home. So why doesn't he record the calls and podcast them? Or simply live stream them? There's has to be a few thousand Australians who'd tune into Laws online. He could do a live broadcast over the net straight into every nursing home who'd broadcast him.

Unless he only wants to make his return for the dollars. But it doesn't sound like that. Laws sounds downright lonely, and utterly aware of his irrelevancy.

John Laws also thinks Kyle Sandilands is "annoying", "devoid of talent" and "stupid."

Remember Laws' reaction to being called an "idiot" by Neil Mitchell?

Mumbrella has more.

Turnbull Resigns...Probably

UPDATE : Malcolm Turnbull refuses to resign, preferring to drag out the humiliation and public mockery for a few weeks, or months, more. Whatever.


By Darryl Mason (channeling the recently deceased Grods)

You can read all the news and quotes about the (confirmation pending) resignation of Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull elsewhere, there is more important issues to discuss right now.

This one :



This is for you, Bren :

Get your motor running,
Head out on the highway,
Get down to the Liberal Party HQ
You can take on Abbott & Costello
(You're a doctor after all)

Yeah Bren you can make this happen,
Take the leadership in a love embrace
Fire up your cans of pensioner soup
And explode into Rudd's face
(You're a doctor after all)

You were born, born to be mild
You can fly so high
Even if you've never voted Liberal in your life


I know, I know. Just let me dream this pleasant Bren dream a little longer, before the cold moist nightmare of Tony Abbott as Liberal Party Leader begins....


.

Goodnight Cockhead

By Darryl Mason

With an ego this vast and royal and regal, and a fall so very hard and fast and public, 'the king' should probably be on suicide watch right now :



That's not fake. That's Kye Sandilands actual production company logo.

He can forget about TV and radio for the time being. 'Multimedia'? How quaint to see that word still being used. He could do a film, but from the impression you get of reading Australians' feelings towards Sandilands right now, most would only want to see the film if it ended with him giving live organ donations.

In one of the most exhilarating fuckups by a manufactured celebrity, Kyle Sandilands has lost his main sponsors, the corporations that pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be associated with his Brand.

Sandilands has also lost his 'Number One' radio show and his gig on Australian Idol. His name, his Brand, has plunged in value to advertisers. He's just another loudmouth obnoxious fuckwit to most Australians now he doesn't have these high-profile gigs anymore. He might as well be a blogger.

Sandilands corporate sponsors, of course, wanted him to be controversial, they wanted him to grab headlines for outrageous behaviour, for going off, for doing the stuff that teenagers might think is cool, even if, or because, much of it was cruel.

But no corporation with shareholders wants someone they're paying six figures to to suddenly have their name, their Brand, anywhere near endless headlines that throb ugly with the words '14 YEAR OLD GIRL' and 'RAPE SCANDAL'.

As far as corporate advertisers go, Sandilands might as well have been caught frotting a pregnant panda that he'd just bludgeoned to death with a handful of puppies.

The media, every branch and wing of it, has gone hard on this story. It's rare you see such a public crucifixion by the media of one of their own biggest stars, even one who hammered in his own nails.

It's been an online orgy for the Murdoch media in particular, and a successful one, with huge viewerships, and comment counts raging beyond 500 for multiple stories. And this time, they didn't have to print unverified old titty photos and claim, on the promise of self-sackings if they were wrong, that the nipples belonged to Pauline Hanson, to get such heavy traffic and ad revenue zing.

Sandilands did all of this to himself, and his genuinely weird attempt to explain himself in The Punch, acting like he wasn't in control of his own show and hey, he knows people that have been raped, so....only further fuelled and fevered the coverage, and the (probably temporary) destruction of his career.


Media Watch last night revealed an episode of incredible cruelty and humiliation heaped onto genuinely upset young people, all of it totally refereed by Sandilands. What he did to these two young women is far worse than his moronic attempt to get a laugh out of a rape confession by asking, "was that your only (sexual) experience?"


As far as I'm concerned, Kyle Sandilands should have known he was doomed from the moment he decided to fuck with Ernie Dingo.

.

RIP Grods : 2004 - 2009

By Darryl Mason

Andrew Bolt on Twitter actually breaks a story of great importance :

The blog that made my friend Tim Blair cry and phone his lawyers (http://www.grods.com/) is gone.

It's true. Grods is gone. "Teh End", as editor in chief Scott Bridges puts it, in this final, poignant, fleshlight-free Grods post.

If you don't know what Grods is, or was, it's too late now. It's over. Gone.

Well, not completely gone. Grods has been archived with the National Library of Australia. Here's the NLA's description of Grods :

Grods Corp is a blog with many contributors from around Australia and the world. It comments on all aspects of Australian and international culture, including political, media, environmental and societal issues.

No mention of fleshlights.

But to get a heaped dinner plate full-flavoured idea of what Grods was, and what it achieved in its five years online, it's best to turn to these actual testimonials from readers, which were proudly displayed on the now disappeared site :

“Internet elitist.”
- Tim Blair

“Your kind of blog makes my stomach churn. Why am I reading it then? I don’t know…"
- Fimsy

“Orthographic Nazi.”
– Iain Hall

“You’ve been pretty boring for weeks, and I use you as my principal source of leftist-oriented entertainment.”
– Strider

“Mindless, fascist-driven drivel”
– Prodos

“GrodsCrap”
– Prodos

“some internet dump”
– Tim Blair twice!

“Wow. What a post. Most (sic) be a new low… even for this site.”
– Bob

“Grodscum”
– Rebellion

“sad flaccid amoeba”
– Elijah

“Your website is a disgrace, a bunch of ego inflated wannabe’s casting judgement on situations you know nothing about”
– Julie

“Brendan Nelson tragic in denial”
– Club Troppo

“…brought the scribbling on public toilet walls into the computer age”
– Josh

“hyper-intelligent lefties”
– J.F. Beck “

"This blog post is the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s badness creates a vortex.”
– Cormorant

“[GrodsCorp] is 100% abuse and mostly fiction”
– Dr (sic) John “TingTong”

“bastion of immaturity and sex fetishes”
– Private Tom

[Scott is a] modern-day totalitarian socialist vegetarian"
– ;;;;

[GrodsCorp] is 100% abuse and mostly fiction”
– Dr (sic) John “TingTong” Ray

"intellectually baron"
- Albi

“This post, and its comment thread, exemplifies the problem with this whole blog: an inability to move beyond the politics of the playground.”
– daddy dave

“left-wing hate site”
– J.F. Beck

“Why don’t you GrodsCorp or rather GrotsCreeps, FREAKS get a life. You lefty retarded commo zombies belong in a zoo… Do everyone a favour and go jump in an active volcano or stay in the sewers where you belong!”
– Paul Johansenn

“No wonder you guys have no cred, you’re all assholes. You treat people with contempt. Good luck getting your opinions heard, fucktards.”
- Top Country Boy

Grods was all of the above, and more :

Death By Wanking

This is an example, from the BloggingCatGate Scandal of earlier this year, of the usual quality of comments to be found at Grods :


(click to enlarge)

Club Wah pays tribute.

As does The Bastard Son.

The former editor in chief of Grods, Scott Bridges, is now writing for New Matilda and Crikey and has a great writing career ahead of him. The Orstrahyun wishes this socialist, totalitarian vegetarian, and internet elitist, the best of all luck, and safe travels.


I miss Grods already. I'm sure Brendan Nelson feels the same way.

The Australian blogstream just got a whole lot more boring.

John Laws Stars In A Staggering On Air Meltdown

By Darryl Mason

If you spent the mornings of your early school years in the 1970s getting dressed and breakfasted in a household in suburban Sydney, you very likely endured hearing John Laws' voice gruffing through the house most mornings.

Even at five years old, it was easy to know that John Laws was an arsehole.

The former king of Australian radio did a lot of great charity work during his five decades on air, he often counselled elderly, lonely people, but he also spent a lot of his time shouting at those who bothered to call in, abusing them, humiliating them. He incited racism and intolerance. His shows could often be extremely nasty and vindictive. But he was king. He could call anyone whatever he wanted, and he did. It's good to be the king.

That was then.

Now? John Laws is retired, and clearly bored. He decided to zero in on a recent comment made by Melbourne talk radio's Neil Mitchell, where he supposedly called Laws "an idiot" and someone who had clearly been involved in "grubby" behaviour, particularly during the Cash For Comments scandal. Laws called into Mitchell's program to demand an apology.

Mitchell didn't have to induce Laws into humiliating himself live on air. The former "Golden Tonsils" provided a pre-full-dementia self-demolition as he struggled to comprehend how anyone could think he'd ever done anything wrong. Ever.

If Laws had not treated so many people so abominably, for so many years, it would be quite sad to hear this old man - who was a hero just about every male neighbour, relative or school teacher, over 30, that I encountered during my childhood - struggling to remember what he said only a minute or two before.

Idiot John Laws Takes Incredible Offence At Being Called An Idiot

By the end of the conversation, Laws seems to understand what a fool he has just made of himself. Neil Mitchell clearly gave the presumably near-senile Laws ample opportunities to get out of the embarrassing phone call, but Laws kept going, to the point where he actually started whining and threatening legal action.

And yet, two years ago, during the following Media Watch exchange, Laws seemed all but completely on top of his game in justifying himself, despite believing that accepting money to praise corporations on air that he had only recently criticised - cash for comments - was not deceiving his listeners.



Anonymous Lefty :

Another lesson from this: if you’re a news media figure who has a prominent platform in the national debate, and you start threatening people with defamation, you look like a complete and utter hypocrite and buffoon. You become an object of mockery and derision. You lose professional credibility.

Look at how idiotic Laws sounded when he tried the stunt. A fearless crusader for truth, threatening to UNLEASH THE LAWYERS because someone called him a mean name?

The Chaser's take on John Laws :



Another icon of the John Howard generation stumbles and falls, stripped of his power. He won't be the last.

"Basically, You're A Commercial Wanker"

By Darryl Mason

Let's not go all the way over Kyle Sandilands seriously gruesome attempt to get a laugh - "is that you're only (sexual) experience?" - out of a 14 year old girl's confession that she'd been raped when she was 12.

Instead, let's revisit an earlier episode of on air fuckwittery from this violent idiot.

To start, below is a song from Frenzal Rhomb. The lead singer, Jay Whalley, didn't take shit from fuckwits, which didn't do a lot for his professional music career. Of course, it never does.



Frenzal Rhomb had a very dedicated audience. Entering the mosh pit at a Frenzal Rhomb festival gig in the 1990s was like plunging into a cyclone made of humans.

It was intense on a scale that you wound up so pummelled, battered and out of breath you thought you might die, but didn't care.

If Frenzal Rhomb were about to start a show, the crowd was already wired, thumping to go. That was never a good time for a corporate radio personality, basically the enemy of Australian punk rock, to step onstage and start talking. Enter Kyle Sandilands' radio partner, Jackie O. :



Jackie O, already hours late for her 'host' duties at the music festival in WA, was heckled by the crowd and the band, and probably the roadies, music journalists, parents of members of other bands who'd played that day....basically, "Get the fuck off the stage!"

And she didn't go.

Frenzal Rhomb tried to get Jackie O. off the stage, where she was dying the worst kind of onstage death there is (not knowing how monumentally everyone there just wants you to disappear), and they were not polite about it. Then again, why should they have been? Jackie O. was a no show for the whole day, and suddenly there she is, getting in the way of the fucking gig.

To Kyle Sandilands (proof positive that having the personality of a deranged guinea pig will not stop you from enjoying a successful career in radio), Frenzal Rhomb had insulted Jackie O. So he decided to take on the Rhomb's Jay Whalley in the one arena where Sandilands knew he could beat the the little punk into a quivering mess. One the phone, on his own radio show.

What a goose.



Whalley winds up Sandilands, easily, over many minutes, leading into the ultimate denouncement of a fake like Sandilands, who entertains a fantasy that he is a maverick in the music industry, and nobody's slave. Whalley tells Sandilands he is the enemy of good music in Australia, music that is about something, that means something, that he is commercial radio lackey, and it snaps Sandilands mind.

UPDATE : Actually, I think I like this stain wiping by Ernie Dingo better :

Get Rooted, All Of You

If you were watching Spicks & Specks earlier this week and you were being driven mad by how much you were absolutely sure you knew the voice of the lead singer of the band Root! but you couldn't remember where you'd heard the singer's voice before because he didn't look familiar and how the hell could you know that voice so well but not know the face? and dammit! you were this close to remembering, but were also far too groxed to attempt even the most basic of googling, the singer of Root!, Damien Cowell, was formerly the main singer, rapper, punk poet, songwriter and genius-shadowed cultural eflluviant of TISM, Humphrey B Flaubert.

Some more Root!



I didn't know Tex Perkin's real name was Greg.

The End Of The War...The Funny One, Anyway

By Darryl Mason

Do you know who this beautiful, bronzed young man is?



What about now?



You'll have to watch The Chaser's last War On Everything tonight to find out why Chas Licciardello did this to himself, but here's the recipe for his 50% full body makeover :

Licciardello has had 34 Botox injections, eight Restylane lip injections, teeth whitening, four coats of spray tan, hair and eyebrow bleaching, and leg and chest waxing.

The Botox, fat lips and tan will take up to two months to wear off.

And he did it, just to make you laugh.

The last show is easily one of their best. They saved some of their most hilariously outrageous bits for the finale. The stigmata segment is deliriously gruesome, very, very bloody. If it doesn't get cut.

At last night's taping, a few moments before the end, The Chaser team watch, on monitors, the final segment that will close the show :



(click to enlarge)

Is the final bit of the final War On Everything funny enough?



Yes, it is.


Chris Taylor said they'd pulled off something like 180 public stunts over 50-something episodes. An extraordinary amount of work, considering one gag in tonight's episode - a crowd of tourists at Circular Quay each try to get a passer-by to take "just one more photo" - chewed up an entire morning for about a minute of screen time.

While The Chaser's War On Everything ends on Australian TV tonight, outside of 11pm repeats on ABC2 (for decades to come), the best bits that are not too confusing to Americans and the British are being screened right now, in the US and England, with sales of the series rolling in from plenty of other countries around the world. For all those who attempt to claim The War On Everything was a waste of taxpayers' money, the syndication of the series and warehouse emptying DVD sales will prove the low-budget Chaser series turned out to be very profitable indeed.

Chas said they have no idea of exactly what they will do next, but whatever it is the five of them will stay together. There will be no Chaser equivalent of the KISS solo albums. At least until it's time for a violent, hate-drenched break-up, followed by years of sniping and feuding, before the inevitable reunion.

The War On Everything set just before it was dismantled :







It was a great War, lots of laughs and nobody died.


Julian Morrow has promised The Orstrahyun an interview in the next couple of weeks, a sort of look back over the four years of The Chaser. If he bails, the questions part of the interview will be conducted, in due season, through Rose Tattoo's mammothic PA, on the back of a truck, parked outside Morrow's home. At 2am. On a weeknight.

I'll have a story up here soon about the location shooting of the "Just One More Photo" gag that airs tonight.

Few seem to have heard of Big Train, a brilliant sketch comedy show from Britain in the late 1990s. Did it never air on SBS or ABC?

A few friends told me this often twisted attempt to reinvent sketch comedy, or put it out of its misery, was an acquired taste, it was too strange and obscure and it often made the viewer have to think too hard to get at the laughs, I told them they were wankers :



More Big Train here

Police Enjoy Excellent Free Rock Festival At Byron Bay With Smiling Happy People

By Darryl Mason

The NSW government missed yet another golden opportunity to raise a couple of hundred dollars in taxes over the weekend.

More than 200 people were caught with drugs at the Splendour in the Grass music festival...

Out of a crowd of 17,500 people. In Byron Bay. At a music festival where the Hilltop Hoods, Happy Mondays and Living End were playing.

One-hundred-and-twenty people were ordered to face court on drug charges, while another 89 were let off with a caution for having cannabis.

From the cautions issued by police to "Shit! I can't believe I left that in my pocket!" cannabis carriers at some of the festivals this year, it would appear you can get busted with no more than two cigarette-sized joints and not get fined, or have to turn up at court.

Police should ditch the cannabis 'cautions' altogether and thank the festival goers for not getting violently fucked out of their minds on alcohol. Ask a police officer who'd they'd rather deal with : a giggling kebab-obsessed cannabis user, or someone so savagely drunk and fired with aggro that even a taser to the nuts doesn't wind them down.

Put it this way, there are few, if any, cannabis-related glassings.

If the NSW government granted a permit to music festival organisers so vendors could, under police supervision, sell, say, two moderately strong joints, or happy cookies, to each ticket holder over 18, taxed at the same rate the government taxes alcohol sales, at least $200,000 would have been raised.

Similar rules for drink driving would also apply to cannabis imbibers.

The majority of people who now attend expensive music festivals don't want to bucket a quarter ounce in an afternoon, or get blitzed on scuds the size of wallpaper rolls. They want a couple of puffs, or a few bites of a brownie, to help kick the music along.

Then Wayne Swann and Malcolm Turnbull could sway together at Simon & Garfunkel without being criminals.