When things are good, it’s important to have someone to keep your feet on the ground
He’s had a gutful! Josh Bornstein on Twitter yesterday:
I’m standing up against attacks from the Murdoch Press. Will you stand with me?
Not just any part of the Murdoch press, either. The page on GetUp!’s website that Bornstein links to:
The Australian launched eight recent front-page attacks against the GetUp movement, littered with errors, falsehoods and flat out lies. … Sign the letter to Paul Whittaker, editor of The Australian …
To help GetUp! get its facts straight, the editor of The Australian is:
John Lehmann.
Paul Whittaker is:
The editor-in-chief.
And while we’re here, the editor of The Weekend Australian is:
Michelle Gunn. (We hope all this has been of some assistance.)
Away from the rage, the world keeps turning. AdNews on Thursday:
News Corp’s The Australian has taken top honours at this year’s PANPA Newspaper of the Year Awards. The Australian won in both the Daily Newspaper of the Year and the Weekend Newspaper of the Year categories.
Then there’s Luke Buckmaster in Crikey yesterday:
Why is nobody talking about The Queen and Zak Grieve? The Australian’s excellent six-part short-form documentary series, made in collaboration with Screen Australia, has barely registered a blip on the social media radar since premiering a couple of weeks ago, and is the subject of barely any news articles not published by the newspaper itself. It is a deeply compelling and at times superbly made true-crime series, available online ahead of a chunkier, stitched-together, 90-minute version to be screened on Foxtel later this month. The presenter/writer is the Oz’s national crime reporter, Walkey award-winning Dan Box, who navigates potential legal and ethical minefields with an unflappably cool head.
Buckmaster continues:
The UK-born Box is an excellent, circumspect interviewer, who appears to intuitively understand when to gently probe his subjects, for the gradual teasing out of information, and when to pose direct challenges or assertions. He also understands the simple but profound power of the word “why?” … There are moments when it is abundantly clear that Box is a class act. Perhaps none more so than when the journalist finds himself at Grieve’s home spending time with Zak’s mother, Glenice. He earned the trust of the young man’s family, and it was trust well placed. Glenice takes a call from Zak himself and puts him on loudspeaker. Here we have it: the very subject of the show, in jail for a murder his own trial judge said he couldn’t have committed, and he’s able and willing to talk. The camera crew are ready. For most journalists (or podcasters, vodcasters, filmmakers, etc) one word would surely come to mind: jackpot. But Box goes in the opposite direction. He speaks to Zak only to explain that the crew have inadvertently recorded bits of the conversation between he and his mum, and asks whether he grants his permission to potentially include bits of it. Then, instead of speaking to Grieve and getting answers straight from the horse’s mouth, Box retreats from the conversation entirely.
Bless their good taste. Crikey appreciating Dan Box’s work on December 22, 2016:
We sledge them a lot, but The Australian’s Bowraville podcast is by far the best thing they produced this year.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh trying to “help” on Twitter yesterday:
If you were born after 1990, you might be wondering what this red box is ... Is this a parking meter? Is it a funky form of public art? Is it a place to put my coffee? Well, in fact, it’s a postbox.