Talking Point

The Shire: No smoke without ire

By Craig Regan

What’s inducing that queasy feeling? The revelation that Network TEN is making a reality TV show called “The Shire” or the sneering comments from latte-sipping journalists who couldn’t find their way out of Sydney’s inner-west with a seeing-eye dog and a GPS?

“Reality TV” is an oxymoron. There’s nothing “real” about it. What goes to air is selectively-edited lowlights, cut in a way to bring out the worst in us.

A declaration of interest: I lived in the Sutherland Shire for 20 years. I’ve swum at Cronulla Beach. I’ve shopped at Miranda Fair and I’ve sat on the hill at Shark Park. I didn’t go to the Australia Day riots - but I know someone who helped start them. On the advice of police and following death threats, he was last heard of living in Melbourne with a shaved head and under an assumed name.

I don’t have an emotional connection to The Shire and recognise that some people who were born there will die there without ever feeling a need to cross the Georges River.

The Shire is an up-market version of Sydney’s Northern Beaches – like Manly-Warringah it’s an insular peninsular but without the bush ticks.

The Shire’s coastal end shares the same characteristics of most urbanised beach suburbs with a high transient population. The inland parts are middle class suburbia dotted with older houses and more recently built McMansions.

Four-in-ten people who live in The Shire also work there. Eighty percent of the locals are Australian-born. There are fewer Chinese as a proportion of population than anywhere else in Sydney and it’s generally an ageing and conservative area. 

So what’s in it for reality TV?

Big audiences. It’s OK to hate The Shire. It’s not elitist and it’s not like deriding lower socio-economic areas like Sydney’s south-west. Having a football team that’s never won a premiership is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s Lara Bingle, the stereotypical blonde Shire girl. Ricky Pointing also calls the area home - but let’s gloss over that.

Filming someone making a fool of themselves in Cronulla Mall after the pub shuts is like filming interviews with Mid-Western Americans and leaving in only the idiotic statements. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

When the local mayor - fittingly, a former fashion catwalk veteran- starts threatening legal action and says she’ll barricade roads into the area, you know the producers are going to have plenty of material to work with.

Press Gallery influence and coming up the middle in a two-horse race

By Craig Regan

The political parlance is “coming up the middle” and it refers to a dark horse candidate taking advantage of the inability of front-runners to muster a majority of votes.

Like jockeys riding Melbourne Cup prospects, Bill Shorten and Stephen Smith both want to sit off the leaders and only make their run when the finish line comes into sight.

Are Greg Combet and Simon Crean credible alternatives? Or Wayne Swan, who for now is Gillard’s deputy. That’s getting way ahead of the game.

Right now it’s all about Gillard and Rudd. That’s Julia, who can’t cross the road without causing a 10-car pile-up and Kevin, the comeback kid whose evaluation of his self worth is much more substantial than his Parliamentary support base.

There’s supposed to be a hard-core of 40 Caucus members who will vote ABR (Anybody But Rudd) while Ruddster’s own bloc of votes is widely accepted as sitting around 30. That leaves 30 backing Gillard - plus most, if not all, of the ABRs.

With a comfortable majority of seats, Gillard could bring on a spill, send a vanquished Rudd to the backbenches and get on with the job of being a Prime Minister. A comfortable majority, of course, is one thing she lacks.

Pushing that button could provoke Rudd to resign from Parliament, bringing on a by-election that Labor would be hard-pressed to win. Talk about a rock and a hard place – and there’s that looming Queensland State election that’s shaping as a Labor bloodbath.

Resolving the leadership issue before then – even bloodlessly - isn’t going to reverse ingrained perceptions of divisiveness. A messy change could make it worse.

Gillard’s leadership never got out of the starting gates and is dying a death of a million cuts. Rudd’s Prime Ministership was riddled with mistakes but his popularity with men and women in the street is strong – mostly because he’s not Julia.

One under-reported factor is the role of the Press Gallery. Media love colour and movement and leadership changes are on every correspondent’s bucket list.

Some Gallery reporters have obviously been targeted by political operatives with leaks that talk up the prospect of change. One prominent Canberra scribe has even been berated on Twitter for his use of limited off-the-record sources.

It’s a harsh assessment because “off the record” is the lifeblood of political reporting in Australia. If newsrooms followed the US practice of not publishing a story without independent corroboration, we’d be living in a political news vacuum (which some would consider a good thing.)

Messy desks are so yesterday? I don't think so

By Craig Regan

Messy desks really are conducive to organised outcomes, according to this study from some Dutch researchers. If you've ever been inside a print newsroom, you'll know that the level of chaos is higher in proportion to the number of pages in the newspaper being produced.

Most of Lighthouse's consultants are from a journalistic background, which covers the gamut of papers, TV and radio. We recall the days when stacks of newspapers used to pile higher than medium density housing and radio announcers used to wade through piles of cassettes or cartridges.

All of us remember typing copy on small sheets of paper, one paragraph to each, and passing them to a sub-editor to finesse before our words of wisdom became type.

My first computerised newsroom used standalone terminals and you walked a floppy disc to the editor to have your yarn entered into the system.

If you were working for AAP, the national wire service, and you were out of the office, your best friend was a headset-wearing lady called a copytaker who took down your every word as you composed sentences from a public phone booth. 

Digitisation has changed the daily workings of media in many ways. Newsrooms still aren't pristine places but the need for hard copy archives has gone the way of hot metal presses. The clippings library now lives on a hard drive. Some TV studios rely on robotic cameras to do the work of people.

From the journalist's perspective, desktop research is a practical and often preferred mode of fact-gathering. There are fewer reporters, doing more with less. More interviews are conducted over a phone than face-to-face.

So the journo's have cleaned up their act and newsrooms look like sterile decontamination zones in a clean freak's version of the Jupiter 2? Not quite as thingsjournalistslike.com shows in this post. 

But back to that Dutch study which have been conducted only after seeing this great Tumblr site that's searching for the world's most chaotic workspace.  

There was something else i was going to write but I'm still looking for my notes...somewhere...

 

 

 

 

Drawing Mr Pitman’s long bow

 

By Michael Grealy

 

At a recent reunion of cadet journalists who began their careers at The Adelaide Advertiser in 1972, conversation turned to shorthand and the expectation that we would attain speeds of 120 words a minute or have our passage to graded journalist delayed until we did.

Back then, 40 years ago, we studied the shorthand based on sound that had been developed by a young school-teacher from Bath, Isaac Pitman.

Pitman’s shorthand, or Stenographic Sound-Hand, first appeared in a book published in 1837 by Samuel Bagster of Paternoster Row, London. Price, four-pence.

The 175th anniversary of Pitman’s milestone is unlikely to get much coverage in London this year, given the inevitable celebrations of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the English throne, which also occurred in 1837, not to mention the current Queen’s 60th anniversary as monarch and, of course, the London Olympics.

So here’s a little of how Pitman launched the shorthand that would be adapted later for 15 languages from French and Spanish to Hindi and Arabic. 

The introduction in his book was enthusiastic, to say the least. He wrote: “That short-hand is an invaluable acquirement, every one practically possessed of it is convinced; and without making one’s self liable to the charge of arrogancy, it may be asserted, that the person who makes a regular use of it, is raised almost as high above the individual who knows only long-hand, as the man of science with the power of steam at his back, is above the common labourer.”

He piled on the alliteration: “It is the plainest practical plan of putting pen to paper for the production of peerless poems or profound and powerful prose for the press or private pursuits, ever published.”

Pitman (1813-1897) promised a thousand advantages accompanying the practice of the art of short-hand. “Every composer finds that frequently his thoughts outstrip his pen and many embryo ideas perish as soon as they are conceived, there being no means for their delivery according to our present circuitous mode of writing.”

Pitman said short-hand was Invaluable for clergy, barristers and all that attend courts of law, journalists and travellers. “Without Stenography, there would be no reporters – without reporters, no newspapers – without newspapers, no readers – and without readers, England would be thrown back two or three centuries in the march of civilisation.”

Over the years, I’ve found Pitman’s legacy pretty effective in meeting many a deadline, as a primary note-taking tool or a backup to generations of tape recorders and smartphones. Granted, my Pitman scrawls have remained a mystery to some colleagues while their employment of the newer Teeline has left me in the dark.

Pitman’s shorthand may be an amusing anachronism from the British Empire for today’s digital recorder-packing journalists.

But I note with interest that Australian Associated Press, which takes training of its journalists seriously, says shorthand is part of its program for cadets who are shown how to write “fast and tight.”

“Underpinning the program are intensive weekly lessons in Teeline shorthand, in which cadets must achieve 120 words per minute to graduate,” AAP warns on its careers site.

Sir Isaac Pitman’s ‘sound-hand’ may be a thing of the past but some things are constant, 40 years on.