Tag: four corners

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Talking ASIO hack on BBC World Service

BBC World Service logoMonday night’s Four Corners episode claimed, amongst other thing, that Chinese hackers had stolen the plans to the new headquarters of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). It made global news, and as a result, I ended up being interviewed on the BBC World Service program World Have Your Say.

The 15-minute live panel discussion also included Four Corners journalist Andrew Fowler, one of the BBC’s journalists based in China, and a journalist from The New York Times.

I quite enjoyed the chat, but it also showed how new all this stuff is to a mainstream audience.

Here’s the audio of the full 30-minute program. It starts off with a discussion of the current situation in Syria, and then we start at about the 14-minute mark.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.3MB)

The audio is of course ©2013 British Broadcasting Corporation. The audio player is linked directly to the BBC’s copy of the MP3 file. If that ever breaks, let me know and I’ll post my copy.

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Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!

Crikey logo

[I promised Crikey that I’d write something about the Future of Media Summit 2008. This rant is what emerged. You can also read it over at Crikey, where there’s a different stream of comments.]

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whingeing. Whingeing about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.

The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new “participatory media” and “citizen journalism” would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But “these people”, as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.

Bollocks.

Continue reading “Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!”