Posts from June 2012

She built a career on making millions for the rich, but her true achievement has been using her legal and financial nous to make money for the world’s poorest. David Leser meets the ISIS Foundation’s Audette Exel in Kathmandu. To enter the Alice in Wonderland-like existence of Audette Exel, you could do worse than go down the …

Two years after Heath Ledger scandalised sections of middle America with his near-miraculous performance as a gay cowboy, he would light up the screen with another tour de force, this time as the lovelorn, heroin-soaked poet, Dan, in the Australian cult movie, Candy. Little known outside Australia, this film was based on a loosely autobiographical …

As Julian Assange awaits a British Supreme Court challenge to his extradition to Sweden this story looks at the early life of a computer wizard who became one of the most wanted men in the world. Nearly two decades ago in the hills outside Melbourne Julian Assange would go to sleep in the early hours …

The Canadian teenage superstar has just turned 18 and the Justin Juggernaut continues. David Leser recalls the Bieber tour Down Under and his awakening to Bieber Fever. The tender hearts of Australia’s female youth are probably still palpitating, but now that he has departed our shores it might be a good time to get some …

Here’s my recent chat with George Negus on ABC North Coast radio with Joanne Shoebridge. We discussed media ethics in the wake of the Craig Thompson affair, and the collapse of the old business model in funding investigative journalism.

Okay, I’ve joined the new social media. My Facebook is up and running. Twitter is tweeting. My blog is blogging. My smart phone is smarting. The old telephone keeps ringing. The fax has stopped working but the email inbox is a tidal wave that King Canute can’t stop. It reminds me of why I was …

There’s been blood on the floor of the Fairfax newsrooms this week with the announcement of nearly 2000 job losses amongst journalists and printers over the next three years, and the scaling down of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age from broadsheets to tabloids. Many blame Fairfax’s sliding fortunes on the internet revolution and …

Gina Rinehart is on her way to becoming the richest person on the planet and gaining control of the highly influential Fairfax Media, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age and Australian Financial Review. A new book has just been published on Rinehart and an ABC Four Corners profile aired this week. Rinehart’s looming …