Not Enough White People Killed?

More than 50,000 dead in Haiti, hundreds of thousands injured, millions homeless, the "worst disaster the UN has ever faced", but Fairfax and Murdoch news readers have already moved on. Nothing related to Haiti, none of the incredible stories of survival, or the stunning reports from journalists who've found themselves in a literal hell of Earth, makes the most read stories lists.

Stories about a Moscow video billboard broadcasting porn, however, been extremely popular.

Murdoch's news.com.au :



Fairfax (click to enlarge) :




And this from news.com.au yesterday :



And to the side this story :


Those million orphaned girls in Haiti are apparently not as brave as an Australian girl in a yacht.



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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.

Less Kids Killing Themselves? Media Not Interested

This is probably the best piece of Australian news you'll hear today, or this month, and you can think the internet for at least of this good news :

During the past decade the suicide rate among young Australians has almost halved.

It is an extraordinary public health achievement, but one which has received little publicity.

Experts say a massive public education campaign and improvement in the treatment of depression are the key reasons for the success.

Here's how the rise of internet usage amongst teenagers added to the suicides averted :

The Reach Out website now gets 130,000 visits per month from young people.

The website's managers say being online is a big advantage.

"For a young person who suspects things are not OK, they might not know who to turn to or be afraid to talk to someone about it because they are afraid they will be judged," project manager Anna McKenzie said.

"So to be able to simply go online, Google something and have a look without anyone needing to know, that's really invaluable and that's what a lot of young people are doing at Reachout."

The Reach Out website was set up 10 years ago when Australia had one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the western world.

John Howard's decision to tighten gun laws in 1996 is also getting some of the credit, along with better methods of treating depression :

"After the new gun laws were introduced, the rate of gun suicide dropped twice as fast," Sydney University's associate professor Philip Alpers said.

"If you reduce the availability of firearms, especially to impulsive young men, then the number of people dying by gunshot reduces."

Less kids are killing themselves, for a variety of reasons, but the desire to end your life before you end high school appears to still be widespread, with less follow through, however :

"We've just had a national survey of mental health in Australia, rates of illness are as high as they ever were," Professor Hickie said.

"The good thing is that rates of suicide have gone down so we haven't yet dealt with the underlying problem, but we have got better at dealing with one of the worst outcomes."

Here's a damn good piece of news about Australian youth that should hit all the front pages and lead every evening news broadcast. It won't.

What an opportunity for the crumbling Australian mainstream media to put to death the gruesome lie that if "If It Bleeds, It Must Lead" that has so orientated so many journalists to believe that Nobody Wants To Hear Good News.

Turn the fact that the Australian youth suicide rate has HALVED in only ten years into the same kind of surreally hyped headline grabber as the average celebrity-related non-event and see what happens. See how the readers react.

The media may be surprised at just how many people want to hear good news, these days.

It certainly makes a pleasant change.

The Full Story Is Here


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Yeah, But That's Different....

According to Mumbrella, Channel Nine morning news chose not to report on the Air France mid-air explosion because the same news bulletin was going to be shown on Qantas flights :

A spokesman for Nine sent a brief email to Mumbrella saying: “We never report news involving plane incidents on Qantas inflight news bulletins.”

And yet they have no problem showing terrifying footage of house fires on the evening news to an audience primarily sitting around in houses.

I'm Heading For My Pandemic Bunker, Australian Swine Flu Cases Have Soared 300%

Dramatic breaking news from the never hysterical Rupert Murdoch online media portal, news.com.au :



Good God! Triple! Within a matter of days. This is out of control. Is it now time to salt the corpses of your neighbours for post-pandemic survival rations? Before any of us do anything that drastic, let's go to the story :

Australia now has three confirmed cases of swine flu.

Oh.

Well, the headline was true. There was one confirmed case of an Australian becoming infected with HumanBirdPig Flu, and now there's two more.

So yes, HumanBirdPig Flu cases in Australia have tripled, they have, in fact, soared 300%.

Headline hit baiting at its best.

UPDATE : Just a quick note to point out that I'm not mocking the people who are sick with swine flu, but the senational nature of the reporting. This can be an extremely nasty flu, and small children in particular who get it are going to feel extremely unwell, and going on what has happened elsewhere in the world, some of those children will die from the virus.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I believe that hundreds if not thousands of Australians have already caught ManBirdPig Flu, but wrote off the symptoms as 'normal' influenza, or a particularly nasty case of the flu they catch most years, and didn't seek medical attention.

The majority of Australians do not go to the doctor or hospital when they catch the influenza strains that pass amongst us every year around this time.

This means that a few dozen who had ManBirdPig Flu did not feel ill enough to stay home or go to a doctor, and ended up spreading it amongst friends and family and fellow commuters.

Short of a major mutation and/or a further melding of this virus with other influenza viruses, like H5N1 (bird flu), I don't think ManBirdPig Flu is going to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people here. But it will probably claim a few hundred lives, or more, before our immune systems learn how to fight it, and adapt to its presence in the flutopia of viruses and bacteria our bodies are continually at war against.

UPDATE : According to a "sensitive but unclassified" May 19 report from the US Centre For Disease Control, 64% of all confirmed or probable ManBirdPig Flu cases in the US occurred in people aged 5 - 24 years old. This is a New Flu that attacks the immune systems of the young and healthy.

The Curse Of Crap Headlines

Rugby league legend Dale Shearer is not in a good way this morning. He's in a critical condition, after crashing his car into a pole while reportedly fleeing from police, driving home from a party. There's speculation he may have been drinking before the accident, but that hasn't been confirmed. Not altogether an unusual incident or accident in Australia, but obviously newsworthy because Shearer is so famous.

But what the fuck is up with this?


That's from the front page of News.com.au, the portal news site for all of Rupert Murdoch's Australian online newspapers.

"Now it appears Dale Shearer....is the victim of a ghastly curse."

Does it? Maybe if you're sniffing Ajax.

Did some old witch point a bone at Shearer and declare, "You will drive dangerously fast and out of control when you see the police"?

The article the News.com.au front page links to says nothing about a 'curse', and is a straightforward piece of reporting about the tragic outcome of what appears to be Shearer fleeing from police and losing control of his car.

The Daily Telegraph headline and story the News.com.au 'Deadly Curse' headline box links to doesn't say anything at all about a Ghastly Curse. The word 'curse' isn't even used. Though it does mention Shearer lost his wife recently to cancer.

So curses are causing cancer and car accidents, according to News.com.au.

How monumentally fucking stupid and trashy can a mainstream news site get?

Not even the most ethically barren blogger would try and pull off something like that.

UPDATE : Err, now it appears, the Australian novelist recently jailed in Thailand for daring to print a harsh word or two about that country's royal family is somehow involved in Shearer's crash. And this headline box now appears on The Daily Telegraph site as well :



And I thought I made some embarrassing mistakes on this blog.

We've Already Moved On

By Darryl Mason

Did the media 9/11 the Victoria Fires to death?

Have we had about as much as we can take of survivor stories and hearing about the tragic loss suffered by so many fellow Australians?

If you read one more opinion piece about "back burning" and "fuel loads" will you mutter "Fuck those hillbillies, they wanted to live in the bush, I'm sick of hearing about this shit" like a middle-aged man did at my local 7/11 as he flicked through a Daily Telegraph while queuing, drawing nods and shrugs, but no outrage, from others also waiting in line?

Will you be watching the live cross to Sunday's memorial service, or 'The Day Of National Mourning' as it's also known, or does that pile of unwatched DVDs seem more than a little tempting?

There are still plenty of interesting, and shocking, stories flowing from the aftermath of the Victoria Fires, but outside of news about a fireman who fell victim to a 'widow maker' and another about Google Earth's problems with government bureacracy when it tried to map the fires live, all stories related to the Victoria Fires just aren't rating any more, at all, on the Top Stories lists of our major mainstream online news sites.

It's back to business as usual for millions of Australians who get their news online, with celebrity shit, crocodiles, diet, tech and sex stories proving to be as popular as they always were, and will no doubt continue to be.












And from ABC News Online :

Tragedy Porn, Did It Do It For You?

By Darryl Mason

The Professional Idiot thinks he has found a potential comment volcano in the ugly truths that Ross Gittins writes about here. The Professional Idiot takes a couple of reasonable arguments that Gittens raises - for example, that the media coverage of the Victorian bushfires has been hyperbolic and Spielbergian in its gratuitously obvious manipulation of our emotions - and claims that those wanting to help out the victims must be "sick". Gittins says no such thing. It's a concoction of The Professional Idiot's poisoned mind.

The Professional Idiot wants his readers to go all out in hammering Gittens - "Please don’t restrain your criticism of Gittins," he goads, "Any pity you may feel for him is just a sign of your depravity" - but it completely backfires, with about 80% of commenters agreeing that Gittins is pretty much exactly right when he says that the media focus on the Victorian bushfires (to the exclusion of other tragedies and daily tales of loss and hardship) bordered on pornographic, and that while Australians are lining up to help out the survivors this time, they are mostly missing in action when, say, The Red Cross, appeals for blood donors at any other time during the average year.

Here's the two snippets The Professional Idiot provides to provoke his readers :

The outpouring of public concern over the terrible Victorian bushfires, the rush to give blood, the huge amount of donations, the efforts of governments to do all they can to help, the way business has swung behind the appeal for assistance - it makes you proud to be an Aussie.

Is that how you feel? I don’t. I find it all strangely disturbing and distasteful.

And it's served to strengthen my suspicion that the community's reaction to natural disasters is exploitative, voyeuristic, unfair, self-gratifying and even pathological.

Selective quoting at its best. And strange, too, seeing as The Professional Idiot usually fills his blog with hundreds and hundreds of words written by others. Not this time. Gittins nails so many extremely valid points about the media and public reaction to the undeniably horrific human tragedy of the Victorian Fires 2009 (Part One) that The Professional Idiot must be seething with jealousy. Gittins already controversial piece makes most of TPI's recent efforts at trying to Capture The Emotion of the tragedy seem so much trivial fluff. It must be doubly grating for The Professional Idiot that so many of his readers so overwhelmingly agree with Gittins.

Here's some of the hassh reality from Gittins that The Professional Idiot chose to ignore because he is exactly the kind of Tabloid Media that Ross Gittins so relentlessly hammers and holds in contempt (excerpts) :

...media coverage of this (disaster has) gone way over the top. And it's served to strengthen my suspicion that the community's reaction to natural disasters is exploitative, voyeuristic, unfair, self-gratifying and even pathological.

Natural disasters are a time when emotions and appearances reign supreme and rational thought goes overboard. Let a victim corner a politician on talkback radio and he'll agree to almost anything. The media devote such huge resources of space and airtime to covering natural disasters for an obvious reason: they believe it will increase their circulations and ratings.

But don't blame it all on the media. They do what they do because they know it's what their audience wants.

I've never liked having my emotions revved up by the media, but it's clear most people do. They want the media to give their feelings of sympathy, sorrow and grief a good workout.

The unspeakable truth is that most people enjoy a good natural disaster. We're fascinated by the misfortune of others. It's a form of entertainment, just as people find weepies and horror movies entertaining. As part of this, audiences want as much personal, intimate detail about the victims' trauma as possible, and the media deliver.

I suspect we use natural disasters to add interest and excitement to our humdrum lives. Modern city life leaves us with weaker connections to our extended families and neighbours, so whereas once we could let our emotions loose on the misadventures of people we knew, now we need the mass media to provide our emotional exercise.

Our preoccupation lasts a week or two before the media senses our waning interest and turns away, waiting for the next natural disaster to get excited about.

Our emotion-driven caring is highly selective. People with problems get wonderful treatment provided their problems make good TV footage and for the 15 minutes they're in the media spotlight. People with chronic (old-hat), unphotogenic problems get ignored.

Media Watch examined the Tragedy Porn of the Australian media last night, and how some journalists stomped their way through crime scenes, homes to which owners had been denied access. The transcript is here.

You only have to look at the Top Stories listings at our online mainstream media to see that our interest in the victims of the Victorian Fires is already waning.

Then again, how much emotion can anybody be expected to commit to such a tragedy? Life goes on, everybody's got their own problems to deal with, and the media goes back to hunting, and waiting, for the next moment of National Caring that reminds us, indeed, how much we really do care. Or want to care.

Or want to feel like we are caring.

It's hard to imagine that anything could happen that will let loose again such an outpouring of National Caring, but it will.

What's next? A massive train wreck? An earthquake sinking half of Sydney's CBD? A tsunami wiping out dozens of villages along our endless coastline? A cyclone carrying away most of Cairns?

And what will the reaction be the next time a firestorm wipes out an Australian town or three? Will we be more sympathetic, or less? Will there be a guilty reaction from feeling, 'Been there, done that'?

Will another holocaust seem more horrific or less, if the bodycount is only 50 instead of more than 200?

The Sydney Morning Herald on the no-really? shocking revelation that The Woman Who Fell In Love With A Stranger's Jacket is actually a, very successful, exercise in viral marketing :



You've Been Had? No, I think you'll find it was the Sydney Morning Herald, and every single mainstream news echo chamber in Australia that has been had. Not me, not you, but all of them. They ran the ridiculous story as a factual event, even though most of the journalists who covered it suspected from the start that it was all as dodgy as.

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

"We Can Change The Way The Public Thinks About These Issues"

By Darryl Mason

Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

Mr Murdoch's comments were revealed in the minutes from evidence he gave behind closed doors on 17 September in New York, during the committee's inquiry into media ownership.

But the News Corporation chairman said he took a different approach with The Times and The Sunday Times. While he often asked what those papers were doing, he never instructed them or interfered, he said.

The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe

Which raises the obvious question, how many of the 70% of all Australian newspapers that Rupert Murdoch controls does he instruct to back or attack chosen politicians, political parties or political causes?

Is the Sydney Daily Telegraph as editorially independent of Murdoch's influence as the London Sunday Times?

Or can The Australian newspaper claim that honor?

Was the Herald Sun free to back Howard over Rudd in the elections? Or was the Herald Sun's pro-Howard line more for reasons of 'balance'?

Perhaps the UK parliamentary enquiry revelations explain why Murdoch blogger Andrew Bolt (whose blog features on the main news.com.au portal, as well as the Herald Sun and Courier Mail websites, reaching hundreds of thousands of Australian online readers) was so enthusiastically pumping the fact that, just before the election, the Sydney Daily Telegraph backed Rudd, while the Herald Sun did not, and why Bolt was earlier so vehemently denying that Murdoch's papers went hard after Howard when he refused to step down.

Murdoch's revelation of purposeful editorial control should not be a revelation to readers of The Orstrahyun blog.

As regular readers would remember, Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Here's Rupert Murdoch explaining how this would be done on the issue of 'waking up' his readers to the reality of climate change :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"Now... there are limits to how far we can push this issue in our content."

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

Within weeks of Rupert explaining how effectively his vast media empire can wage a psychological war on its viewers and readers to influence their beliefs and behaviour, most of his dozens of Australian city and suburban newspapers became champions of fighting climate change, launching special liftouts, dedicated websites and awareness campaigns over the next few months, under such Al Gore mantras as 'Saving Planet Earth'.

UPDATE : On September 10, 2001, John Howard had a long, private dinner with Rupert Murdoch in Washington, DC. Howard was suffering some of the worst poll numbers of his career, and the Liberal Party was scoring its worst poll ratings since the mid-1970s. But Tampa was heating up and 9/11 was about to shock the nation.

Murdoch allowed himself to be interviewed by the media when he exited the restaurant, in scenes that were repeated in early 2007, in New York City, with then Labor prime ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd.

From an ABC Radio report on the Howard-Murdoch 2001 dinner :

For two hours the two men sat alone in the upmarket Oxidental Grill deep in conversation. At 10:00pm local time they emerged and Mr Murdoch was asked by waiting journalists who'd win the next election.

RUPERT MURDOCH: No, we never discussed it.

REPORTER: Do you think Mr Howard deserves a third term in Office, Mr Murdoch?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Mm?

REPORTER: Do you think the Prime Minister deserves a third term in Office?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

REPORTER: Mr Murdoch, how do you think Kim Beazley would go as Prime Minister?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It would be very interesting.

REPORTER: Were they productive discussions with Mr Murdoch?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, we had a pleasant dinner.

REPORTER: Did you talk politics?

JOHN HOWARD: We talked everything.

MARK WILLACY: There's little doubt about that, given Rupert Murdoch's interest in media policy and the extraordinary influence of his Australian print empire. His response when asked if John Howard deserved a third term is well worth another listen:

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

Rupert Murdoch was far more forthcoming on Kevin Rudd when he was asked by a journalist in April, 2007, whether or not he thought the contender would make a good prime minister. The reply then was, "Oh, I'm sure..." Big smile.

A note we received yesterday, from a person who claimed to be a former staffer in John Howard's office, said that it was common gossip within many government departments that when John Howard refused to hand over the leadership to Peter Costello at the end of 2006, Rupert Murdoch was less than happy. And that editors of at least two Murdoch Australian city papers, likewise, were less than happy.

The self-claimed former Howard staffer said that when Rupert Murdoch publicly appeared with Kevin Rudd in New York City in April, 2007, laughing and grinning after a long meeting at the News Corp. headquarters, and then dinner together, a climate of doom descended amongst many in the prime minister's department. The belief was that Murdoch had given Kevin Rudd the Big Tick, particularly after the "Oh, I'm sure" quote was aired, which meant Howard was probably finished.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph soon became very obvious champions of Kevin Rudd, and Howard suffered a sustained stream of extremely negative Daily Telegraph front pages, featuring large photos showing Howard looking old, stressed and confused.

But then again, one city newspaper doesn't win an election. Does it?

Aussies Trust Bloggers As Much As Mainstream Media Sites

'Known Brand' Media Losing Value, Authority, Readership

First, a rambling comment :

Long before the first news blogs, and a few years before most of the mainstream media went online, I used to get e-mails from friends in different parts of the world who would write short summaries of interesting news stories from their local city newspapers. Some of those stories would make their way into Australian newspapers a few days, or weeks later, but most did not. I, likewise, used to write a kind of newsletter with stories from Australia to these friends. Our shared circulation list grew into the hundreds, and we all thoroughly enjoyed summarising our local news, or deciphering it. In many ways, these newsletters we used to share were a precursor to news blogs, like 'The Orstrahyun'. What we were doing wasn't particularly innovative. E-mail newsletters were bouncing around university campuses, military bases and science research labs in the late 1970s.

It was remarkable how quickly we grew to trust each other's take on the news, to the point where most of us would read each other's newsletters in preference to what began to flow through the internet when newspapers like the UK Guardian and the New York Times went online in the mid-1990s. I lost most of those 1990s e-mails, but I remember how often my e-mail friends in England or Germany or Spain or Mexico or Russia were right about a slowly emerging news story, days before the mainstream media confirmed what we had been discussing and debating.

I only mention all this in relation to the story below, which highlights the fact that a growing number of Australians are placing more trust in news blogs than the mainstream media. That might not be much of a revelation to the readers here, but it is interesting to note that the distrust of the mainstream media also appears to extend to their websites and their news blogs.

And the mainstream media, which once so utterly dominated how Australians got their news, are getting nervous, because their audiences are not growing exponentially, and because they know they are no longer the only choice for how millions of Australians will get their news.

story continues after...
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Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's Online Novel ED DAY

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story continues....


Australian news blogs finding audiences in their thousands is a relatively new phenomenon. We were late starters compared to the American, British and Japanese bloggers. The independent news blogs, up until only two years ago, that did pull more than a few hundred readers found a large slice of their readership through link-alliances with American blogs. Crikey was one of the few exceptions to this rule.

This blog pulls anything from 1800 to 5000 individual readers per day, with about 80% of the readers coming from inside Australia. The next biggest regular chunk of readers are Americans, then Brits, then Germans, Canadians and French. A few hundred regular foreign readers, from what I've gleamed from your e-mails, are ex-pats or tourists, looking for a different take on the news from home.

To say that my mind has been blown by the growth of readers in the past 18 months (particularly in the past six months) would be an understatement. This site is now only a few thousand readers away from providing something between a part-time and full-time living. The genorosity of readers saying thanks through the PayPal link (above right) is greatly appreciated, and I probably should have thanked you publicly on this blog much earlier.

As with the e-mail newsletters I mentioned above, much of the growth of readership here apparently comes from readers e-mailing links to stories they've found here to their friends, who then become semi-regular readers themselves.
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It's still a strange thing to be sent a link to a story on this blog by someone on the long CC lists my e-mail address has been added to, perhaps not realizing the person they're sending it to is the one who posted it.

There's no reason why news blogs will do anything but grow in readership, and influence, in the coming years. It was only eight or nine months ago that supposedly reputable mainstream
media commentators were spouting that blogs would have little influence on the federal election.
Yeah, they were hoping.

Okay, enough ramble.

The claims that Australians are trusting news blogs, as much as the mainstream media sites, to get their news comes from no less an authority on consumerism than the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). One Graeme Samuel :

"What is even more worrying for traditional media organisations is that some of their assumptions about users trusting known brands are starting to look a little shaky," Mr Samuel told a Walkley business lunch in Sydney today.

"For a growing base of users, (blogs) are all equally valid sources of news, information, entertainment and gossip, and users are not necessarily discriminating between traditional and new sources."

Mr Samuel said although "old" media companies still dominated many of the most visited sites, they could no longer assume users would always default back to "traditional houses of journalism".

This meant the media had to find new ways of remaining relevant to a fragmented and disloyal audience.

I'd presume most readers of independent news blogs read them for the same reasons I do : they publish stories you don't always find in the mainstream media, they provide mostly fearless and sometimes outrageously entertaining comment, they show there is more than one or three sides to a story, they punch holes in the sacred myths that so much of the mainstream media continually perpetuate and they let readers know that just because the mainstream media claims something is true doesn't necessarily mean that it is.