Above: Coverage in Business Desk, with me pictured with Lucire fashion and beauty editor Sopheak Seng. Big thanks to Daniel Dunkley, who wrote this piece about me and my publishing work in Business Desk, well worth subscribing to (coincidentally, I spotted an article about my friend and classmate Hamish Edwards today, too). I […]
Read More… from On publishing in 2021, as told to Business Desk
Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff. Some highlights: As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space – like the media, politics or corporate leadership – if you play by the rules. […]
Read More… from A refreshing piece on diversity in our mainstream media
Well, that was a rather sycophantic interview with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, on Radio New Zealand, as the online encyclopædia turns 20. So I was rather excited when a Tweeter said he was going to interview Wales and asked for questions from the public. I responded: Why did your co-founder Larry Sanger accuse […]
Read More… from Who’d like to ask the hard questions of Wikipedia as it turns 20?
When I ran for office, there was often a noticeable difference between how I was treated by locally owned media and foreign- owned media. There are exceptions to that rule—The New Zealand Herald and Sky TV gave me a good run while Radio New Zealand opted to do a candidates’ round-up in two separate campaigns […]
Another late-night calculation of COVID-19 cases as a proportion of total tests done, so the figures will be out of date again, and I’ve also discovered that the total testing numbers some countries are giving are out of date. The ones with asterisks below are those that haven’t cited increased testing numbers (at least none […]
Now for something actually important beyond my first world problems. Journalist Suzie Dawson has a fantastic piece outlining how the smear of ‘serial rapist’ is part of the playbook used against senior members of Wikileaks. Her article is well worth reading, especially in light of how the mainstream media have spun the narrative against […]
I find it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat […]
Facebook’s woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even […]
Read More… from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
With how widespread Facebook’s false malware accusations were—Facebook itself claims millions were “helped” by them in a three-month period—it was surprising how no one in the tech press covered the story. I never understood why not, since it was one of many misdeeds that made Facebook such a basket case of a website. You’d think […]
Techcrunch broke the news about Bahtiyar Duysak, the German who worked for Twitter who, on analysing one of US president Donald Trump’s Tweets, considered that he had broken the website’s T&Cs, and shut it down. This blog post isn’t going to go in depth into the rights or wrongs of this. What it does […]