My return to journalism via Twitter was enabled by several readers and contributors to Webdiary, which I’m told by online media academic Axel Bruns was the world’s first Mainstream media interactive blog. I’m now committed to telling my story in journalism in a professional memoir, which will comprise part of a PhD. In A collaborative thesis by @margokingston: Stories of citizen journalism with Webdiary and @NoFibs, I launched a new No Fibs series where I hope Webdiary and No Fibs readers will tell their stories, which I will reference in my thesis. No Fibs’ chief sub-editor and arts editor Michael Burge wrote the first post in the series, Voyage to the […]
Ordinary people speaking with an extraordinary voice @MargaretOConno5 reports
By Margaret O’Connor @MargaretOConno5 13 December 2013 It’s Monday December 2 and thirty degrees. The nation’s capital is sliding into a languorous warm late afternoon. I trundle into the Parliament House car park and try, with difficulty, to find a park, because northeast Victoria has come to town. Inside the House of Representatives Chamber, the public seating area opposite is a sea of orange t-shirts worn by enthusiastic Indi citizens, the ones who showed us a thing or two about ordinary people claiming back influence and control over Australian politics at the September federal election. Down below, newly-elected Clive Palmer MP arrives and sits next to Cathy McGowan MP, the […]
Michelle Grattan’s best work is yet to come
By Margo Kingston February 9, 2013 Michelle Grattan. I’ve loved her and hated her over the years. One invariably has a complicated relationship with a great person. Soon after the 1993 election, under pressure from then editor of The Age Alan Kohler to step back from day-to-day journalism, she left her spiritual home to become the first female editor of a metropolitan newspaper, The Canberra Times. Its owner Kerry Stokes made her promises he failed to keep, and two years later she resigned rather than accept a huge payout to leave quietly. I was one of her journos at The Age Canberra Bureau when she took that job, and was pissed off with her for […]