The Weekend Oz‘s Behrendt complex. Weekend Australian editor Nick Cater took a rare trip out of the HQ to add the latest instalment to his paper’s obsessive war against Aboriginal leader Larissa Behrendt — a bizarre reply in which those who wondered what a stray tweet had to do with the debate about various futures for Aboriginal people were held to be avoiding the debate.
Highlights included praise for Jack Lang(!), for attacking “longhairs”(!!) in one paragraph, and a denunciation of conspiracy theories in another, which suggests Nick should read more about Jack Lang, and the usual condescendingly redundant adjectival praise for prominent Aboriginal people (Professor Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson will be pleased to know that Nick thinks they’re “intelligent”.)
But weirdest of all is this:
“… I have always believed that a story as complex as this requires reporters on the ground, or in this case sitting in the dirt …”
What? A story about one person in Sydney tweeting about another person on a TV show? Yep, that’s the Oz, brought to you every morning from the Surry Hills humpy. — Guy Rundle
A Bolt appeal. Sadly, no one in this city has seen The Bolt Report (London I mean, not Sydney). But clearly it’s all going very well, to judge by this blog entry:
Andrew Bolt — Monday, May 09, 11 (11:23 pm)
Tell us what’s what.
Early suggestions for “Spin of the Week” or other sharp observation for The Bolt Report also very welcome. The first to suggest one that gets to air wins one of my last personal copies of Still Not Sorry.
A midnight appeal for material? How do you feel about committing to a weekly show, Andrew? Still not sorry? — Jack Lee
How not to plug your own publication. Here’s omnipresent UK yoofbot Laurie Penny on the magazine she writes a column for, The New Statesman:
Solidarity forever. — Kim Serca
Front page of the day. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a tie! First, today’s Daily Telegraph is dedicated to this evening’s federal budget and features the dapper pairing of Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy:
And today’s New York Daily News front page is superb. First we had Osama the pot smoker; now we have Osama the vi-gra user:
The Department of Corrections. Let’s start with an elephant themed correction from yesterday’s Globe and Mail from Canada:
And who’s to judge the United Arab Emirate’s The National for getting its Illawarra Flame Trees wrong:
Last but not least, The Australian today issued a correction for getting federal budget information incorrect. Damn those typographical errors!:
Facebook group urges advertisers to boycott Bolt
“A Facebook group has been set up to pressure advertisers to withdraw their support for Network Ten’s The Bolt Report, which made its debut on Sunday morning. Called “Operation: Bolt Cutter”, the page contains contact details of the key advertisers in every city where the show, anchored by Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, aired. The event group has 545 ‘attendees’.” — mUmBrella
LinkedIn prepares for US flotation
“It will become the first major social network in the West to go public, following the Chinese network Renren which said in the first week of May it will raise $743m in a flotation on the New York stock exchange. Though others are larger, notably Facebook with around 700 million users worldwide, the business orientation of LinkedIn’s members make them potentially more valuable to advertisers because of their influence and power.” — The Guardian
Apple now world’s biggest brand
“The value of Apple’s brand has increased by 84 per cent over the last 12 months, leap-frogging over Google which has been rated as the world’s largest brand for four consecutive years, according to global research agency Millward Brown.” — The Australian
Meet the workers dying to meet your iPad 2 demand
“Workers at Chengdu say they are routinely humiliated and scolded by management. One was forced to stand in a corner with his hands behind his back because he giggled with a colleague. Others have been required to write confession letters to their supervisors after making mistakes and in some cases read the letters out in front of colleagues.” — The Age
For top news sites, Facebook more popular than Twitter
“Facebook is a more valuable source of traffic to top news sites than Twitter, according a Pew Research Center study released Monday … Part of the discrepancy between Facebook and Twitter referrals is their disparate user bases. Facebook has more than 500 million users while Twitter has 200 million accounts — many of them inactive.” — Masahable
Re: A Bolt appeal. Nice one. This book was such a success and is in such demand, that last time I checked “Still Not Sorry” has not been available on any of the main online booksellers for years. Obviously Blot is sitting on a big pile of remaindered copies and is desperate to clear space in his garage.