I read an interesting article on Errol Flynn in The Australian last weekend. You can find it here. The article explores how Flynn’s exceptinal acting skills and rebellious attitude contributed to his allure and success. It says…
“By his mid-40s his personal life had become a disaster. Married three times, he was financially crippled by alimony payments and descended into alcohol and heroin addictions. He suffered poor health due to a heart condition and was hooked on seducing young women. In 1942 he was charged with three counts of statutory rape …

Next time you’re at the breakfast table with your partner, try this: collect a bowl of popcorn and tip it all over their newspaper. See if you get a reaction.

I’m not sure who is more to blame here – Fairfax or MBF? Whatever the case, it’s bloody annoying and both deserved to get scolded with hot coffee for treating their audience like this.

After all of the media discussion we’ve had about sex and respect for women in league this week, do you think the Courier-Mail could have picked a better home page story for today?

And what’s that down there… right down in the bottom corner there?

Lucky. I thought he was a rugby league player. He could have been crucified.

These were the headlines on the homepage of two of Australia’s major news sources yesterday :

Different stories, same day, same headline. I’ve got a feeling someone was saving these headlines for a rainy day or they might just be a bit wet around the ears. Boom tish! 
Credit to a very pretty and intelligent lady who found them. 

As you might have seen, there is an election going on in Queensland. Voting is tomorrow actually. We get to choose between Anna and the Borg. Seriously, there’s more life at The Cure’s afterparty.
Naturally the front page of Brisbane’s only daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail, is all about the election…
 
 
But what’s that little grey box? It reads…
“Given the choice between a politician (Ms Bligh) who wants taxpayers to keep paying for government inefficiency and one who wants to seek out waste (Mr Springborg), the choice is simple. The Courier-Mail believes …

You have definitely heard of Queensland Tourism’s Best Job In The World. You may have also heard that Osama bin Laden applied for the position… and was rejected. I know the people who put together the video (and no, it is not me). I observed as it evolved from a Friday afternoon joke to appearing as homepage headlines on international news sites and generating comment from politicians.
While the whole exercise was rather pointless, it is further proof of the power that the internet has in generating mass audiences very quickly. …

I was talking to a colleague talking today about the Victorian bushfires. They made a great point that disasters such as these reveal the polar opposites in the Australian people. There is the good, the brave, the strong represented by the victims, firefighters and generous donators. And there is the cowardly, the disturbed and the heartless represented by the arsonists, looters and scammers. Thankfully, the former far outweigh the latter.
It’s also great to see former baddies turn into goodies – for the moment anyway. We have the major banks donating …

What’s going to win the TV ratings for the three major networks this year? Boobs, bums, bullets, bonking, brawls, balls, bruises and bad language if you ask Nine. The problem is: how do you promote realistically in primetime? You can’t. And that’s why Channel Nine have attempted to release it virally and ‘anonymously’.
First, we had the Underbelly 2 uncut preview. The suspicion was that it was ‘leaked’ by Nine (forgive me, there will be a lot of inverted commers used because I am implying eg. Thorpie has a male ‘friend’). …

This morning I read Michael Sainsbury’s opinion piece in The Australian regarding Fairfax’s inability to maintain consistent brand values across online and print mediums. It included this insight:
“But The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age brands have been scarred by their print and online incoherence. Some even argue that often fluffy and irrelevant internet content is starting to fatally drive the papers, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald.” 
And it got me thinking, what if we took this to the total extreme and the popularity of online stories solely determined the main …

Digital radio. It’s radio as you know it, plus… whatever we want to make of it. That’s what I got out of Commercial Radio Australia’s digital roadshow that arrived in Brisbane this week.
Digital radio is set to launch on May 1, 2009. The CRA have been hard at work putting all the elements together for launch, starting off with the new logo above and the positioning line “it’s radio as you know it, plus”.
Personally I think the logo looks like the Red Cross for smurfs but anyway…
I …