I find the ABC is still pretty good and is where I get most of my political analysis and current affairs (4 Corners, Foreign Correspondent, Insiders and so on). Their print side is reporting not in-depth journalism but decent enough for that. The opinion section occasionally has an interesting read. For print media there are a few online alternatives springing up. http://www.theglobalmail.org/ http://newmatilda.com/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/ The first is run from a philanthropic donation and is probably the most promising. The other two are more straight commentary. I think The Punch is Murdoch owned but not as obviously biased as The Australian in its headline selection, story focus etc. I also know of one overseas crowd-funded journalism effort: http://www.propublica.org/ But if you are looking for an actual hard copy newspaper containing good journalism you are out of luck :( On 20 June 2012 12:10, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:

Peter Ross wrote:

...

Before I came here, I was used to choose between various German newspapers who appeared to be run independently, and considered it as being at the heart of a working democracy.

The obvious solution would be to keep reading them. In the last six months I've certainly read more articles from the Guardian than I have from the Age or SMH... _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing list luv-talk@lists.luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-talk

On 06/20/2012 02:41 PM, thelionroars wrote:

For print media there are a few online alternatives springing up.

http://www.theglobalmail.org/ http://newmatilda.com/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/

Thanks for those. I find interesting writing on: theconversation.edu.au ben

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

...

...

"She is also asking for the right to make significant editorial decisions such as the ability to hire and fire editors."

Which will turn The Age into a mining newsletter. poo...who wants to read that.

Lots of people want to read the Herald-Sun, rubbish sells.

But the hard numbers show that they are in decline. ...and rubbish exists online as well does it not? News of The World didn't go away, they just changed their name. ;-)

...

A golden age of Journalism born of the democratisation that is the Internet. All those experienced editorial staff that are about to lose their jobs have skills and their employers sacking them should (hopefully) fuel passion.

I reckon this will be a perfect time for some start up action. In a place where the main stream just can not go.

A start up doesn't have to hold on to their profitability like the incumbents do. Starting a news site in competition with an on line only Age would not cost much. All that would be need is good content born of good journos. A dumped Fairfax Journo would have great opportunity ahead.

Getting a revenue stream is hard.  There are some professional bloggers who make decent money from advertising, but there aren't many of them and the things that they do often aren't what you would want from professional journalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crikey.com.au

Agreed, but I reckon that a new model has an opportunity to emerge.....one where people are willing to pay if the content is relevant to them. Political spin doctors on all sides should be deeply worried.

Then there's the issue of legal liability, the Crikey Wikipedia page is worth reading...

...

I'll bet my house that several new Online only news brands will emerge very quickly in the next few months. Some may fail, but in the end...

Stephen Mayne bet his house on Crikey...

Perhaps a little too early? Surely the environment these days is more pliant?

...

Fairfax and News are doomed ! Their current moves are meant to placate the markets and try and show that they are able to remain relevant.

Let's hope that they go away.  Let's all spread the URLs for various alternatives to printed news to everyone we know and advise them on how to buy cheap tablets to read the news on.

...and that Russell is what I truly hope will happen. Surely your own (excellent )blog is an example.

http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/10-inch-tablet-pc-android-16gb/

Kogan has some decent deals on Android tablets.  I've got on of the above on order, I paid for a $180 tablet with 8G but they changed me to that one because they sold more of the 8G tablet than they could buy.

...hmmm looks interesting. Did you see Kogan's stance on IE 7? If you buy from his site using IE 7 you now have to pay a 6.5% premium. This is a place that Mr Harvey can not go... Disruption without cost has to be the sweetest revenge. :-) BW

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:

Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

...

A start up doesn't have to hold on to their profitability like the incumbents do. Starting a news site in competition with an on line only Age would not cost much. All that would be need is good content born of good journos.

It needs to make enough revenue to be sustainable, from advertising, subscriptions or another source. The main costs would be:

1. Employment of journalists and covering of their work-related expenses.

2. Server capacity and bandwidth.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex Server cost is nothing. The EX servers from Hetzner seem to provide the best value for money for dedicated servers. CDN and scalable cloud options such as EC2 can be cheaper depending on what you do. But at the low end Hetzner are really good. As an aside if anyone knows of an option that they think is better than Hetzner then please let me know. Anyway my blog is using a fraction of the resources of a Hetzner server and the Google advertising gives revenue equivalent to two Hetzner servers - even though my blog is relatively resource intensive (I haven't implemented caching) and not particularly profitable.

3. Web development, system administration, etc.

Again that's not a big deal for a site of any reasonable size. Let's assume that the lead sysadmin gets a salary comparable to an editor and web developers get paid a bit less than journalists. For a site of any reasonable size journalists would have to outnumber web developers. You would maybe have 3 people in a sysadmin team for something like Crikey, two of whom would get paid a lot less than journalists. As the business scales up the ratio of journalists to IT people would improve. For a small organisation you could have one sysadmin working part-time with occasional contracts for web development work.

As to income, the online advertising market is significantly in favour of targeted advertising - Web search, social networking sites, and so on. I don't know how successful a new media outlet could be in this environment. Subscription revenue would also be available, however, according to a variety of models (e.g., the first n articles that you retrieve from a given IP address are free, but you're asked to pay thereafter, just to mention one possibility).

Has online subscription ever worked though? Crikey didn't seem to be particularly profitable even though they always had good content. Paper can be restricted easily. You sell someone a paper for $2 and they can give it away to others, but after a few dozen people have read it there's not much left (think of what happens to a paper left on a train or at a bar). Restricting digital information doesn't work so well, there's no good way of handing something to one person but restricting others. You can make it login based (so it can't be read easily on the train) or downloadable which can be shared.

The requirement here would be to gain enough subscribers to keep the prices down to a level that would sustain a readership. The quality of the content would also influence the subscriber count.

What would people pay per year? If they pay $50 per year then you would need 2,000 subscribers per journalist (the salary plus incidental expenses of a journalist couldn't be less than $100K). How many journalists are needed to make something that's worth $50 per year? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 07:09:58PM +1000, Brent Wallis wrote:

Gday,

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Peter Ross <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> wrote:

...

"Australia has unwittingly become a social experiment. A ruthless experiment on the fate of a society when a single media conglomerate, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owns 167 newspapers and controls around 70% of the printed media market."

Could not agree more. The early (real) labour governments (Hawke/Keating) placed rules on cross ownership which prevented such things happening. Changing that was one of the Howard governments first steps in office. I believe history will show that it was one of his gravest errors.

actually, from his POV it's not an error at all. The result, a very biased right-wing pro-business-interest reactionary and regressive press, is exactly what he wanted.

I see opportunity ahead.

for astro-turfers, maybe. they'll get access to hundreds of qualified and experienced journalists at a bargain price, all competing with each other to shill their products / propaganda for a pittance.

A golden age of Journalism born of the democratisation that is the Internet. All those experienced editorial staff that are about to lose their jobs have skills and their employers sacking them should (hopefully) fuel passion.

a handful might take that risk. the rest have mortgages to pay and families to feed, house, clothe and educate. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #201: RPC_PMAP_FAILURE

Alex Hutton <highspeeddub@gmail.com> wrote:

But independent media is hardly dieing. It is stronger than ever thanks to the internet. Anyone can easily access a seemingly endless array of opinions on any topic he might choose.

Opinions, yes indeed. Careful, time-consuming, investigative reporting? That's more the purview of professional journalists, precisely because it requires knowledge, time and effective fact-finding skills. Those who legitimately worry about the decline of traditional news organizations, the print media especially, are concerned about the high-quality end of journalism where investigations are carried out and truth disclosed in the public interest.

On 21 June 2012 20:33, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:

Alex Hutton <highspeeddub@gmail.com> wrote:

...

But independent media is hardly dieing. It is stronger than ever thanks to the internet. Anyone can easily access a seemingly endless array of opinions on any topic he might choose.

Opinions, yes indeed. Careful, time-consuming, investigative reporting? That's more the purview of professional journalists, precisely because it requires knowledge, time and effective fact-finding skills.

It really depends upon what there is demand for. If consumers demand a high standard of journalism and are willing to pay for it then that is what will be supplied. Consider that you as an individual could commission a journalist (or better yet, an investigator) to investigate into a particular matter that you might be interested in, then you could release the findings yourself and perhaps charge a small fee for it in order to recoup your costs. Cheers, Alex

To start with, their foundational article of faith, the "free market" that they bleat on and on about does not exist, never has existed, and never can exist - it's a theoretical ideal that assumes a perfectly frictionless market with perfectly *rational* actors (both buyers and sellers) who *always* act in their own best interest, and that there are no systemic factors that inhibit competition. It's a thought-experiment, not a description (or even a prescription) of the real world.

This is quite correct. The "free market" which advocates speak of is synonymous with perfect competition which, as Craig states, doesn't exist and actually can't exist. There will never be markets that have, for example, no barriers to entry, or an infinite number of buyers and sellers. It does however provide a theoretical yardstick to evaluate how real markets work, and what is required to satisfy the actual conditions (i.e., both positive and negative liberties). A very good introduction to the subject is the classic by Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933). All the best, Lev

Craig Sanders wrote:

To start with, their foundational article of faith, the "free market" that they bleat on and on about does not exist, never has existed, and never can exist - it's a theoretical ideal that assumes a perfectly frictionless market with perfectly *rational* actors (both buyers and sellers) who *always* act in their own best interest, and that there are no systemic factors that inhibit competition. It's a thought-experiment, not a description (or even a prescription) of the real world.

+1, thank you for putting it so succinctly.

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 06:23:45PM +1000, Alex Hutton wrote:

Craig Sanders wrote:

...

To start with, their foundational article of faith, the "free market" that they bleat on and on about does not exist, never has existed, and never can exist - it's a theoretical ideal that assumes a perfectly frictionless market with perfectly *rational* actors (both buyers and sellers) who *always* act in their own best interest, and that there are no systemic factors that inhibit competition. It's a thought-experiment, not a description (or even a prescription) of the real world.

A free market does not require [blah,blah,blah]

you know, if you're going to blather on about something, you'd sound a little less foolish if you actually bothered to do some minimal research on the subject. it might enable you to get away with pretending you had some understanding of what you were talking about.

...

ps: please read up on real libertarianism, as defined in the rest of the world, and before american anarcho-capitalists hijacked the term. here's a good starting point:

No thanks. I do not see how you can have compulsory central planning and still call it a system of anarchy.

you obviously didn't read ANY of that page. i'll bet you just saw the word 'socialism' and responded in a knee-jerk fashion. where's the "compulsory central planning" in this (the first three paragraphs of the linked wikipedia article)? Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism, and sometimes left libertarianism) is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic society without private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialists believe in converting present-day private property into the commons or public goods, while retaining respect for personal property. Libertarian socialism is opposed to coercive forms of social organization. It promotes free association in place of government and opposes the social relations of capitalism, such as wage labor. The term libertarian socialism is used by some socialists to differentiate their philosophy from state socialism or by some as a synonym for left anarchism. Adherents of libertarian socialism assert that a society based on freedom and equality can be achieved through abolishing authoritarian institutions that control certain means of production and subordinate the majority to an owning class or political and economic elite. Libertarian socialism also constitutes a tendency of thought that promotes the identification, criticism, and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of life. Accordingly, libertarian socialists believe that "the exercise of power in any institutionalized form - whether economic, political, religious, or sexual - brutalizes both the wielder of power and the one over whom it is exercised". Libertarian socialists generally place their hopes in decentralized means of direct democracy such as libertarian municipalism, citizens' assemblies, trade unions, and workers' councils. i guess in your alternate reality of Loony Libertaria, "decentralised democracy" is synonymous with "compulsory central planning". one of the primary differences between american style Libertarianism (aka anarcho-capitalism) and the above is that anarcho-capitalists believe that wealth (or more correctly, control over the means of production) entitles someone to economically enslave other people, and that such slavery is GOOD for everyone involved and good for society. libertarian socialists disagree, vehemently.

Rohan McLeod wrote :

...

-the consequence of globalisation is to move jobs to places with low labor costs and raise unemployment elsewhere. -the consequence of inadequately regulated stock-markets are non-productive booms and busts there is a longer 'rant' here:

Those two points are largely due to fractional reserve lending, central banking and fiat currency.

oh no, you're a gold-standard loon too. let's see, do you have the trifecta - do you believe that there is a conspiracy involving Prince Philip and the World Wildlife Federation to depopulate the world? That "environmentalism" is just a code-word for "genocide"?

All of which are forms of intervention in the market by governments.

as are: copyrights, patents, property laws, national borders, passports, health and safety regulations, financial regulations, stock markets, limitation of liability for companies, granting of corporate charters, legal recognition of corporations as "persons", and millions of other things. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #98: The vendor put the bug there.

On Fri, 22 Jun 2012, Alex Hutton <highspeeddub@gmail.com> wrote:

A free market does not require that people behave as perfectly rational actors who always act in their own best interest.

A free market requires regulation. Every time you make a transaction you rely on the ability to trust the other party or parties involved. That ability is granted by legislation and government enforcement mechanisms. Such regulation is essential for anyone who wants to charge high prices for their goods and services. Otherwise you just have the "market for lemons" because most buyers expect to get low quality goods and won't pay for quality when they don't expect to get it.

The point is, people who act contrary to their best interests will face consequences that are contrary to their best interests. And if they choose to improve their actions they will improve the consequences of their actions.

Alternatively "conservative" Americans can just keep voting Republican and allow things to keep getting worse. There was an interesting interview on youtube with an insane Tea Party woman who was campaigning against health care reform. It turned out that her husband had no health care...

Rohan McLeod wrote :

...

-the consequence of globalisation is to move jobs to places with low labor costs and raise unemployment elsewhere. -the consequence of inadequately regulated stock-markets are non-productive booms and busts there is a longer 'rant' here: Those two points are largely due to fractional reserve lending, central banking and fiat currency. All of which are forms of intervention in the market by governments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve The US has a stockpile of 8,133.5 tonnes of gold worth about $495B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_(currency) The US has $850.7B in circulation, so they would need to almost double their gold stockpile to have a gold backed currency. The other countries in the list seem to have a worse ratio of gold stockpile to circulating currency. Apparently about 1/5 of the gold mined in the entire history of the human race is in government stockpiles. If all current currency reserves were backed by gold then the stockpiles would total 69720 tonnes or 42% of all gold ever mined. Then with a fixed gold price the mining companies wouldn't be able to vary their output according to supply and demand and the gold production would entirely cease when mining costs increased above the fixed price of gold. Of course there is also the issue that the vast majority of the financial world doesn't deal with even paper money. Cash is the small-change of the financial system. Stockmarket booms and busts would not be affected by a gold standard because they don't deal in hard currency anyway. The gold standard only worked for a pre-industrial world. But it's also good for distracting people who know that the current US system isn't working and who otherwise might create political pressure for some problems to be solved. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

[Fiat currencies and the gold standard]

Incidentally, WP's bitcoin article seems to indicate it is not a fiat currency; that there is some fundamental (presumably mathematical) basis whereby there is a fixed number of bitcoins that can ever exist. My cryptography is not strong enough to tell if that's true, and my economics is not strong enough to understand the implications if it is, but I daresay it's more interesting and useful than talking about the gold standard.

There is no requirement of perfection or frictionless interaction.

Actually there is. Even the first paragraph of Wikipedia makes this clear. A free market arises when market transactions are unregulated, theoretically allowing price to be set by supply and demand.[1] Free markets contrast with controlled markets in which prices, supply or demand is directly controlled. Various economic theories require specific properties of free markets, for example, a perfect market with perfect information and perfect competition. Regulation which does not affect these specific properties can be in place without disqualifying the market as being "free", freely operating under the forces of supply and demand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

...

ps: please read up on real libertarianism, as defined in the rest of the world, and before american anarcho-capitalists hijacked the term. here's a good starting point:

No thanks. I do not see how you can have compulsory central planning and still call it a system of anarchy.

Anarchy is the absence of the state, not the absence of a government; that much has been well-acknowledged since the 19th century. On the matter of "libertarianism", as a matter of historical fact.. a) The first person to identify as a libertarian in the political sense was Joseph Dejacque, an anarcho-communist and signatory to the First International. b) The first periodical to identify with libertarian politics was "Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social" which was a hot-bed of anarchist, socialist and communist thought. c) To this day in the United States, the first political organisation to use the named is the Libertarian Book Club, which distributes anarcho-syndalist and council communist texts. Hope this helps, Lev

On Mon, 25 Jun 2012, Alex Hutton <highspeeddub@gmail.com> wrote:

Getting back to my original point. I really don't see what can be done about people buying up newspapers. Any intervention is going to cause more problems than it would solve. Having a government department decide what can and can't be published or arbitrating on what they decide to be 'unbiased' can hardly be better than simply allowing people to buy and read the newspapers that they like. If a newspaper becomes biased and self-serving, then people are free to read something else.

The government could of course restrict how much of the nation's media is owned by one person or organisation, prevent the people who own the media from forming cartels, and generally do all the things that they used to do before Howard which seemed to work reasonably well.

Another point, in relation to investigative journalism and the cost of it, in the case of commercial investigation, market reports, technical news and that sort of thing, there tends to be a high level of availability of that sort of stuff because there is real value in it. In the case of investigating into issues that governments actively try to obfuscate... it can mean a great deal of work for a journalist to try and get through all the chicanery and bureaucracy. But having a publicly funded / determined unit of investigative journalists for the sake of investigating into government activity and 'making democracy work'... it seems like trying to make two wrongs to make a right. Instead why not just remove as much function of government as possible and allow free enterprise to take over?

Government organisations actually do a good job of policing each other and keeping power in check if they are allowed to do so. This is why every country that you would want to live in has a separation of powers. When government functions are removed and free enterprise takes over you end up with a third-world country or a former Soviet state. That destroys most of the legitimate economy as there is a lack of trust and makes things very unpleasant for the citizens. The US is a good example of how these things go. Just read the news reports about bankrupt states and counties that are doing things such as laying off police and neglecting to repair public infrastructure to save money. But if you like that sort of thing then apply for a green-card. With the more efficient deportation of illegal immigrants and making the country less desirable to skilled workers the US should be running short of immigrants in the neat future. It's your chance to live the Libertarian dream! -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

Hi On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:08 PM, <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:

There's plenty that can be done. You can legally break up monopolies as anti-competitive behaviour. You can limit cross-media ownership. You can extend defamation legislation so it applies to groups as well as individuals. You can establish minimum standards of qualification for a press license. You can have an public media print newspaper that's an independent statutory authority (e.g., the ABC in print).

I agree. But there is a big fat n greasy unmentioned elephant in all of the change happening at the moment. One that can only be broken by groundswell encouragement of free beer press and gov regulation at this point IMHO would be a result of the big boys playing a slight of hand.: Buying a dead tree newspaper and reading it only gives the incumbents an "idea" as to what individuals read. Registering and paying for ones digital access means that an individuals name and address can be directly matched to what ones reads how often, when and how. Honestly, any form of government media control will only serve as a facade to the truly scary possibilities ahead. ie: There will be a digital source available to those with the where with all that would allow corporates to hone in on an individuals preferences in terms of media consumption. Imagine if that data was matched to your "lame book", "twit", "gag-" and Coles fly buy card.??? This is where our governments need to regulate. The fluff getting around about about a public interest test is a nonsense not worth wasting money on. I don't mind paying for my news....but I WILL NOT use a digital source to get it if I have to pay with my visa. BW

Jason White wrote:

Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Buying a dead tree newspaper and reading it only gives the incumbents an "idea" as to what individuals read. Registering and paying for ones digital access means that an individuals name and address can be directly matched to what ones reads how often, when and how.

It does, and marketers could then use that information to customize their messages to the interests and preferences of each reader.

This already happens. http://dontbubble.us/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=2&hp=&pag... (original article)

All of this has been reported upon in public; it isn't wild speculation.

Exactly.

On 26 June 2012 19:33, Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't mind paying for my news....but I WILL NOT use a digital source to get it if I have to pay with my visa.

An issue I have is that an extra login will be required. So one option is that I keep this login secure and only login from trusted computers from environments with no risk of having people watch as I type in my password. This means I won't get to read the paper as often as before. Or I ignore the security issues, and enter the password anywhere on any computer, and the chances of somebody being able to steal the password increase. For many people this will be a shared password that is used by other systems. Another issue is that I, probably would end up paying to watch all this dodgy advertising, none of it ever holding any interest to me. Or the decreasing quality of the journalism. These are both real reasons why I don't get the paper in dead tree format as often as I otherwise would. e.g. The Saturday Age is higher cost, and for for this you get even more advertising, at least last I looked. Not to mention I won't be able to share links to articles with other people who I think might be interested. People get stuck behind this idea that people won't pay for the sake of not paying, however I don't think that is the issue here. I would seriously consider paying for a good quality product. The changes will be good for me, because I won't pay, and as a result will end up with more time :-) -- Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au>

Hi Alex, On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Alex Hutton wrote:

Consider that you as an individual could commission a journalist (or better yet, an investigator) to investigate into a particular matter that you might be interested in,

No. I can't. And the majority of people can't. I don't have the income necessary to sponsor a journalist. BTW, In Germany, there is one newspaper founded in the last 50 years, the tageszeitung (taz - http://www.taz.de) who is sponsored by members, in a way communal radio (e.g.) is here. It is there since early 80ies, grown out of grassroot movements (Green, anti-war, ant-nuclear). It is struggling to survive for most of its life. The German market is ca. 4 times the Australian population. A similar Australian newspaper, online or not, should share content with international, english-speaking media, to become sustainable. The Huffington Post has localized websites, New York, San Francisco, and U.K. That looks like a model to to me. BTW: even the "metropolitean" Australian press seems to be very city-centric, and then the rest of the world is covered by European or American views. Occasionally I read The Australian, and one of the resons is: It covers the Australian outback, including Aboriginal affairs, in a way The Age doesn't. The surrounding island countries are very foreign for us too. Papua-Neuguinea is the country with the Kokoda trail, isn't it? And Singapore is the place thousands soldiers became Japanese prisoners of war. I don't want to belittle this, it is part of Australian history, and good to know. But the current politics, including our dealings with them (e.g. our mining interests), of these places, these countries are virtually unknown to the majority of Australians. An English or American view does not shine a light here. My Chinese wife bought a Taiwanese magazine recently. It was interestingly written in English and Chinese side by side, and covered topics completely unknown to me. Given that my company has business relations to Taiwan, it isn't really far-far away. But in regards of knowledge of their society, it is. Coming back to the orginal topic, I learnt over the last days that a take-over attempt around 1990 sparked protest and a movement, including an attempt of "Friends of Fairfax" (or similar) to buy the newspapers, and a rally lead by Whithlam and Hawke, and leading to a contract guaranteeing the acknowledgement of editorial indepencence by the board. It seemed to matter to the public then. It still does? I joke sometimes that Australians cannot breed a Hitler because they are too lazy to be fanatics. Which is a good thing. The other side of the coin seems to be complacency, the majority seems to care about anything anymore, and I find it quite frustrating. Regards Peter