Posts by Alfie
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While Peter Dunne's department is playing silly buggers and delaying Helen Kelly's application to use medicinal cannabis, the NSW government is putting millions into cannabis research. State premier Mike Baird sees Australia leading the world in this area.
All of us have been moved by the stories we have seen, people who are suffering in all types of situations and circumstances and there is clear anecdotal evidence medical cannabis is making a difference.
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Here’s The Independent’s statement on the decision which shows their digital arm is healthy.
Rapid digital growth in the past three years has made independent.co.uk the UK’s fastest-growing quality newspaper site. Its monthly audience has grown 33.3% in the last 12 months to nearly 70 million global unique users. The site is profitable and is expected to see revenue growth of 50% this year.
As one of those 70m users who browses The Independent most days along with a raft of other international news sites, I’m sure we’ll see more traditional newspapers heading down the digital-only path before long.
Despite being an avid news reader, I can’t remember the last time I bought a print copy of any paper. Probably around the same time as I wrote my last cheque.
In my misspent youth I worked at the Evening Star in Dunedin as a mail boy during school holidays, and I loved the place. Those massive rolls of newsprint, the smell of printing ink, hot type, the noise of the huge presses churning out thousands of neatly folded copies every day, and the archives with copies of every paper they’d ever produced during the previous hundred years. It was a magic environment.
While modern newsrooms still look similar, there’s no longer a need for the factory and logistical parts of the business as the expense involved in producing physical papers and trucking them around the country becomes harder to justify every day.
While papers like The Independent will survive and will continue to attract an audience by focussing on quality journalism, lesser organs (such as The Press example Ian mentions above) seize the opportunity to cross-promote their other assets in the guise of news. That does their audience a disservice and in the long term that strategy must be destined to fail.
Such blatant self-promotion without any warning or disclaimer surely breaches ethical guidelines, and I suspect a complaint to the Press Council would stand a good chance of success.
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Speaking of talent-free zones, has anyone else noticed that those annoying 30 sec Glucina promos disappeared from TV3 the day Newshub launched?
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While it hasn’t made the masthead on the Herald front page yet, we’re told that John Key’s wastrel son has scored a job as a DJ on Mediaworks’ George FM. I seem to recall that he’d found a job last year advising businesses, or something equally unlikely. Maybe that didn’t work out so well.
The new appointment has upset one current DJ who’s worked for George since 1998. The station has since warned its staff not to say bad things about young Max.
The Herald informs us that Key the younger will unveil his “new single” on the show next week. Surely to have a “new” single, you need to have had others in the past? I know a lot of musos who’d throw up at the mere implication that Key Jnr has somehow joined their ranks.
Nepotism aside, I’m sure we can be confident that daddy’s friendship with Mediaworks CEO Mark Weldon played no part at all in the decision making process. None, nada, ziltch.
Yeah right!
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to izogi,
Does anyone know if there’s a way to disable this without completely disabling Flash?
I haven't see Flash ads on Stuff for so long I'd forgotten how to do it. The latest version of AdBlock Plus has a great option to get rid of any annoyance.
Fire up any Stuff page with an annoying autoplay video, right click the AdBlock logo, choose "Select element to hide" then nail the bugger. I try to use wildcards wherever possible to knock out future annoyances.
Looking through my list of blocked items on Stuff I see this one:
s0.2mdn.net/instream/video/client.js
I can't guarantee that's the culprit, but it should be. If not, unblock that and try another one.
The good news is that Flash is on the way out. Google is banning Flash ads in favour of HTML video and there's a general move in the tech world to kill off Flash altogether. That can't come soon enough.
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A Northland woman has become the first person in the country to receive publicly-funded Sativex (medicinal cannabis) to control severe epilepsy. But not without a huge battle, help from a generous benefactor, then a contribution from Winz and finally the Northland District Health Board.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
... monetary lapse... statuary holidays...
Not a day goes by without several typos on our major news sites, mainly on Stuff. Mispellings, apostrophe S in plurals (I hate that), basic stuff which anyone aspiring to be a journalist should have learned by the 5th form.
In the past such obvious errors would have been picked up by sub-editors before publication, but they don't seem to be a thing any longer. Any news site loses credibility when it's littered with typos and bad grammar.
I primarily visit Stuff for local stories and see they've buggered around with their layout again. Until last week you clicked on 'National' news which produced a page with a few thumbnail stories at the top and another link to 'More National News', which produced another page of maybe 30-40 local headlines. Too many clicks, but it was usable.
Starting this week most of that local news has simply disappeared. The 'National' link goes to "More top stories" with only 10 local links. Where did the rest of the news go? And why are they forcing me to choose from such a reduced number of headlines? Have they decided to target only readers with short attention spans?
As a news junkie I'm definitely spending less time on Stuff nowadays, and more time on international news sites. That must surely contradict Fairfax's goal of attracting eyeballs.
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As our local media lay off experienced staff and seek to monetarise assets in some sort of crazed, clickbait-inspired death spiral, it's reassuring to know that real journalism still exists elsewhere in the world. Take Der Spiegel -- they consistently produce quality investigative stories and a recent article -- Good Journalism Is Crucial Amid All the Lies and Hysteria -- explains their attitude towards their craft.
In times like these, especially, the quality media cannot allow cost-saving measures to kill the very thing that sets them apart from the loudmouths -- namely their capacity for research and reporting, i.e., local reporters, foreign correspondents and investigative teams. We need to take the time necessary to have a true understanding of contexts and be able to explain them properly, and we must maintain a moderate tone and not allow ourselves to descend into the ruckus. Modern life demands immediate gratification, but journalism requires clear thinking and calm.
Bravo! It's worth pointing out that Spiegel is owned by the journalists who work there.
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An open letter to TPP protesters from Steven Dildo Joyce
All protesters are anti-trade... ISDR more helpful than hindrance "... trust us... blah... blah... blah.
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Despite the Key-friendly journos portraying the thousands of people who took part in the Auckland TPPA protest as just the usual bunch of losers, not all media are blindly promoting the government line.
Respected business journalist Rod Oram has consistently provided detailed commentary and analysis. Likewise, John Campbell on RNZ is doing a great job. Thanks guys!
If I took only one thing away from the public meeting with Jane Kelsey and Lori Wallach, it's that the signing of the TTP means nothing until it's been ratified by all parties. According to Wallach, that may never happen because all of the major US presidential candidates are opposed to the deal.
She says that in that case, the biggest risk for NZ is that we change a number of our laws -- labour, intellectual property, etc -- in preparation for a ratification which never eventuates. She cited a similar US / Korea agreement as precedent and I imagine Key & Co already have a list of law changes intended to make NZ more "corporate friendly".
If the TPP is ratified, the scary monster for me is the Investor State Disputes Settlement (ISDS) process. While that could potentially cost our country billions, it's not so much legal action by US corporates as the mere threat of legal action which might force our government to alter policies. We've had a taste of this already with the Saudi sheep scandal, although there's a good chance that the threatened legal action in that case was merely a McCully invention to cover up some blatant bribery.
And don't forget, cancelling a law change following threats has happened in NZ already.