Margo Kingston

Margo Kingston

Co-publisher and editor-in-chief at No Fibs
Margo Kingston is a retired Australian journalist and climate change activist. She is best known for her stint as Phillip Adams’ ‘Canberra Babylon’ contributor and her work at The Sydney Morning Herald and #Webdiary. Since 2012, Kingston has been a citizen journalist, reporting and commenting on Australian politics via Twitter and No Fibs.
Margo Kingston

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Tim Dunlop when he joined Webdiary in 2001 after completing his doctorate, “Towards a Theory of Deliberative Democracy’, the idea that civil discussion and debate among citizens should determine political decisions.

An intellectual who has always put theory into practice, Tim sent me an epically long  critique of dairy deregulation which triggered a robust reply from Mark Latham and mass print outs by dairy farmers to hand out at protests. 

After moving to the USA Tim wrote the popular blog The Road to Surfdom, focused on the Iraq war debate. We met in person in 2006 after I’d retired hurt and he was about to begin a two year stint as a blogger for News Corp, terminated when he dared critique the editor of The Australian. 

He began his first book, the New Front Page, an examination of social media’s impact on journalism, with the Webdiary story, published in 2013 just after I’d begun my citizen journalism adventure after seven year’s retirement.

“Of course!”, I exclaimed when I learned Tim was so inspired by the election result that he’d shut his office door to write Voices of us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy.

There’ll be many theoretical takes on the what, how and why Australians delivered a profound disruption of the status quo at the election and Tim has produced the thought provoking first take. Always the idealist, Tim says “we must must work to entrench the Voices of methodology of grassroots democracy so that our system of Government is truly transformed”.

It was an enormous pleasure to interview Tim on matters of mutual obsession, participatory journalism and participatory democracy.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS