ideas
Cyberstumped: Big Media offline
Video never did kill the radio star, and nor will the internet and digital news kill newspapers. Similarly, despite what the sales department and bean counters will tell you, the recession we almost had is not responsible for the precarious balance sheets at many traditional media organisations. News companies are slicing costs and dicing journalists almost entirely for one reason: vision – or a Blind Pew-like absence of it.
Showman Mel’s river of dreams
Mel loves his job. He doesn’t love it quite as much as acting on Broadway, which he did for 33 years, but there can’t be that many more genuinely, infectiously enthusiastic tour guides across these United States as TourMobile’s Mel. He might be the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.
How faith, and America, can heal
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is many things Australians dislike about Americans: political, patriotic and preachy. But unlike the worst of the United States, the play is also deeply questioning of its place in the world. It prosecutes American exceptionalism and the greyness of, and uneasiness between, faith and justice.
How Bartlet made me an idealist
The juxtaposition between the fictional White House of The West Wing and the real-life geopolitical events played out on the news stoked a burning cynicism of the political process. More than that, it planted the seed of romantic idealism of how the world should work that continues to nag me every day.
A symbolic step means so much
Today we celebrate another ‘birthday’ of our reigning monarch. The old biddy turned 83 in April, in fact, but generously gives us a June holiday each year. It is an annual reminder of the really big symbol the country has been on the verge of adopting for over a decade yet can’t quite make happen. It is a symbol, yes; tangibly immeasurable in its impact like most. But it is a symbol so brilliantly bright as to potentially embrace all Australians under one flag like nothing before.
The Right does love you. Mostly
The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen writes of the myth – “based on lazy and crude logic” – that conservatives lack compassion. But her brand of tough love isn’t love at all. At least not the inclusive style of love the Christian Right likes to preach. Conservative compassion comes with many conditions.
I am always right. Almost always
I am unshaken in my resolve to uphold personal truth. But it comes with a level of intolerance, of righteous duplicity, that doesn’t quite sit comfortably with me. There is a fine line between defending your core beliefs and being a zealot. But do we censor our biggest ideas?
If all you have are big ideas…
And in this fledgling blog dedicated to big (and small) ideas, the very antithesis to why they are important. Angels in America, a Broadway play-turned-Hollywood television mini-series, has had more affect on my than anything else I’ve seen on a screen of any size. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, declared as one of the most important works of contemporary literature, is teeming with ideas. On everything: sex, religion, politics, justice and the so-called American Dream.
The importance of ideas
“Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.” Those are the words of pioneering American newsman Edward R. Murrow. I love the quote, and his many others like it. It may sound a particularly high-minded agenda for what will inevitably be another inconsequential blog-of-consciousness. But I reckon it’s a good place to start.
Who am I? A journo, that’s who
I’m a journalist. And if that’s as far as you read, the characterisation sits just fine with me. Broadly curious, deeply engaged; a writer, a reader, a listener, a restless thinker, a zealous debater. A media junkie for whom interventions have failed, as much an occupational hazard as it is an obsessive hobby. A life-long devotee of dead tree media not afraid to get his fingers ink-stained for a great broadsheet read, but excited by the opportunities of digital convergence and a paperless media future (you can be both).
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