May 22, 2012

Reporter asked to cross floor

Charles Sturt Council

I’m slow catching up with the local news, but this extraordinary article from the Weekly Times Messenger caught my eye: “Charles Sturt Council has asked media representatives to sit on opposite sides of the chamber’s gallery in each meeting in order to get a different perspective of the debate. The council’s staff approached a Weekly Times Messenger Reporter last week and asked her to stop sitting on the same side of the chamber each meeting.

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Micropayments for bloggers

Cash for blogging

There has been a lot of discussion about newspapers charging for online content, but not much has been said about bloggers doing the same. A company called Fraxion Payments has now made it possible for bloggers to charge as little as one cent per article. “Creators of quality content can now charge for their work,” [...]

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Anti capitalist who hates lower case names

As a copy editor it irritates me when organisations adopt names that don’t use capital letters. The practice has become common in the internet age. It defies all grammatical rules for a name to be uncapitalised. I’m a ruthless anti capitalist and kill stray capitals whenever I see them, especially in titles. The president of [...]

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Challenging the Santa myth

I received several calls today about our “street sweeper” question in the paper. This is a daily vox pop where we ask people to comment briefly on a topical issue. The controversial question was: “Should young children be led to believe in Santa?” I had more complaints about that than anything else in the past [...]

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Informed consent

ladette

I was surprised the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against the Sunday Age for obtaining information from a source without informed consent. The girl was drunk when she spoke to the newspaper, which is what the story was about. I remember reading it. The story was on “ladettes” … young women who drink a [...]

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