Fairfax axes specialised Good Food Guides. After publication of the next round of Good Cafe Guides in the The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in June, Fairfax will no longer publish the Good Food Pub Guide, Good Food Under $30 or the Good Cafe Guide. The axing of the guides was announced to staff in an email late last week. Management assured journalists it won’t mean the end of the Good Food Guides, only some of their more specialised spinoffs. Last week, Fairfax announced in an email that 15 redundancies would be made in Life Media, the division that publishes Fairfax’s lifestyle content including the Good Food guides. — Myriam Robin
The right to use Packer/Gyngell fight pics. The $200,000 News Corp paid for photos of James Packer and David Gyngell’s bout only got it seven days’ worth of publication rights, The Australian revealed this morning. But what does that mean for its websites? Numerous articles on News.com.au, as well as the tabloid websites, ran the pictures online. Will News Corp now have to remove these photos from its websites?
Crikey asked Media Mode, the agency that sold News the photos, and director Sarah-Jo McKay told us News Corp was allowed to archive the images within the original articles for an agreed length of time. “In my experience this nothing unusual and is the case with the majority of image sales/uses in online media. The exclusivity, however, has now expired,” she said. McKay declined to reveal how long News can run the photos in its archives.
New Idea now has the print rights to the photos for the next seven days (the Oz reports they went for just $5000). The online rights, however, are up for grabs. — Myriam Robin
Is the media making indigenous Australia sick? Risky drinking occurs at a similar rate in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to that in the broader community. In addition, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more likely to abstain from alcohol than other Australians, and alcohol causes less disease and death in the Aboriginal population than other factors. Yet the media tells a different story.
In a recent study into media reporting of topics related to indigenous health, over 74% of all articles were negative, and over 30% of the negative articles related to alcohol. This seems disproportionate given that alcohol causes only 6% of the burden of disease, whereas tobacco and obesity cause 17% and 16% respectively. In addition, there is little acknowledgement in the media that more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people abstain from alcohol (37%) than other Australians.
What is the impact of how the media reports alcohol issues in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities? The way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are portrayed in the media has a very real impact on their lives. The media often relies on stereotyping, which can lead to racism. Racism has links to poorer health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Many Australians have little experience with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and culture, and the media is one of their primary sources of information. Research from Australia and internationally has established the role that the media plays in perpetrating racism, discrimination and stereotyping. Stereotyping can influence the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people think about themselves and also the way other Australians consider them. Stereotyping can also influence how successful someone is. It follows that the media may affect people’s chance of success through stereotyping. — Summer May Finlay (more at Croakey)
Perils of content management systems. It only takes a click to publish something these days, which is why we assume this made Fairfax’s websites last Friday. When people on Twitter started sharing the article around, it promptly disappeared. Subeditor’s revenge, or unintended error? We think probably the latter …
Insider trading hits The Block. Channel Nine could be in a bit of legal hot water after accusations of fishy business surrounding a purchase on hit show The Block. According to media reports, the 26-year-old National Australia Bank staffer alleged to be at the centre of a $7 million foreign exchange insider trading scandal successfully bid for an apartment designed by the twin female contestants on Nine’s reality show last month. Fairfax and other media reported overnight that banker Lukas Kamay bid $2.375 million — $616,000 above reserve — for the three-bedroom loft apartment designed by twins Alisa and Lysandra in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Albert Park.
The reports say Kamay put down a $500,000 deposit for the fully furnished property, which is now among the assets frozen by Australian Federal Police and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Kamay is accused of paying Australian Bureau of Statistics employee Christopher Hill, 24, between $50,000 and $60,000 to obtain unreleased ABS information to make millions of dollars on foreign exchange markets. Nine’s problem is that money — the deposit and the rest of the $2.375 million — will now be considered lost.
If the deposit has been paid, the feds will try to reclaim that, and if the property has been settled, then that has now been frozen. If there’s money to pay, who pays? If Nine wants to keep faith with the twins and maintain the credibility of The Block, it will have to stump up the money, or sell off the apartment and try and raise the money that way. But if the police have the apartment, will they sell the property and try and raise enough money to go towards meeting the alleged illicit profits? Who would have thought that The Block and Nine would be caught up in the fallout of one of the biggest insider trading cases yet reported in this country? — Glenn Dyer
Video of the Day: Jessica Mauboy flies the flag at Eurovision. Think they’ll have us back …?
Crikey is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while we review, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.