The National Times, The Punch, and a bonus lift-out section featuring the Governor of Guam

(Above: George Bush with the governor of Guam?)

Down the road we roll with the re-badged National Times, and after a couple of days contemplating the revolution, we still we wonder what it's all about, apart from an internal re-organization of the opinion section of both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

As a result, the poor burghers of Melbourne now have to suffer the thoughts of Gerard Henderson under their own masthead, whereas in the past they sometimes had to click their mouse to visit the strange, foreign land of the emerald city masthead and its weird, exotic offerings.

And Sydney-siders get offered up a rotating round of bloogers from exotic places, like The Age's religion editor Barney Zwartz brooding on God after Auschwitz (which at least is better than Gerard Henderson contending no one remembers the concentration camps) or arguing that John Calvin does not deserve the wowser label, even if Calvin was a first class wowser. Like he was harsh, censorious and rigorous, but that's just the way they did it in those days, so never mind, he was just a wowser amongst wowsers and therefore not really as much of a wowser as some other wowsers. Phew, give me Shakespeare any day.

But I'm not sure where this blurring of parochial boundaries is heading, or how it will lure cash paying readers. Do we really need a blog by Helen Coonan, or her thoughts on Labor's blitzkrieg of regulations?

Let me re-phrase that, Coonan is welcome to blog about the evils of Labor, as endlessly as she likes, but does Fairfax Media need her thoughts within their new header as a way of attracting the punters? Reading Coonan is roughly like having teeth pulled or enduring question time in the house. Been there, done that.

Yet by my count there are some fifteen bloggers now camped under the Herald's broad tent. How many will sustain the pace, and how many will have a thought worth reading, rather than churning out the standard pulp we might expect from politicians and pundits? My guess is a few, and the rest will become the wasteland that makes up large areas of The Punch, Australia's most tepid, torpid, half-assed, cheap skate conversation.

How many need to hook up with Lawrence Money and his sudden strange discovery that Aussies are known as skips amongst young buckos of Greek extraction (The dark side of multiculturalism). Money is one of the weirder outgrowths of Melbourne's cultural life, and while they're welcome to him, surely he's best kept hidden under a bush?

Lordy, next thing you know, Money will be discovering that Skippy was a hit on Australian television and sold to a host of countries.

My own personal voyage of discovery began today with the sudden realization that Greeks are sometimes called 'wogs' by skippies. Yep, I have that cosmic level of understanding from being level 8 clear.

Money then rabbits on about multi-separatism which reminds me of nothing so much as how one nice boy once told me Catholics of Irish extraction bred like rabbits, and should be treated as pests, either shipped back home in freezers, or turned into hats and dog food.

I guess the point being that there are so many loons and so little time, that the Fairfax bods have decided on a peculiar hierarchy. First there's the top of the pops - today it's Tom Keneally on immigration, and the ever reliable Annabel Crabb doing politics.

Then next down the page it's "The Columnists" featuring the likes of Peter Hartcher, and strange blow ins (to a Sydney sider) like Catherine Deveny, who makes as much sense as reading a treatise about Gary Ablett Junior.

Then below them there are "The Contributors", which feature the likes of Tony Abbott, so you can understand why you have to scroll down the page.

And only then do the dedicated get to a rolling 'best of' which features four of "The Bloggers", just above a half hearted attempt to link to some global opinion. To get to the real heart of the loons and Fairfax loon land, you have to actively click in search of more blogs. Enough already.

It's a murky, messy format, with the bloggers rightly put in their place at the bottom of the pecking order.

So what's new? Nothing really, except the homogenization of inter-city content, which sees feature writers from both cities mingle. Oh and lurking over in the right hand corner is The Goanna, carrying on about stiletto-armed warfare between federal female Labor and Liberal politicians, but hardly acting as per mission statement - endeavouring to flush out lurking secrets - since what he describes went down in Question Time on the floor of parliament. I guess we'll have to wait his fresh revelations on the size of the stilettos Julia Gillard wears to get to a real political secret.

Well good luck with all of that I say, and you can access the page here at the gateway, which strangely at the moment sits under the header "opinion" as it's always done. Only the logo National Times and the format is different.

These days it doesn't take long for a thought bubble or an experiment to be seen on the interweb and to be judged, and Margaret Simmons perhaps delivered the cruelest judgement of all. Harmless, she said, here.

Harmless? Well I suppose we all need to nod off over the computer every now and again, but I got bored and moved along. And what did I find? Sound of swishing segue noise, along with flashing lights, and cut to this bit in GQ about George Bush on Sarah Palin:

If my colleagues at the White House were even momentarily scared straight about McCain over the convention fracas, the clarity wore off just as quickly as it came when the very conservative governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, was picked as McCain’s running mate. I didn’t have anything against Governor Palin from what I knew about her, which was next to nothing. The instantaneous reaction to Palin at the White House, however, was almost frenzied. I think what was really going on was that everyone secretly hated themselves for supporting McCain, so they latched onto Palin with over-the-top enthusiasm. Even the normally levelheaded Raul Yanes, the president’s staff secretary, was overtaken by Palin mania. He’d been slightly annoyed with me for not jumping on the McCain bandwagon and for saying aloud that I thought McCain would lose. Now, of course, I had to be enthusiastic about the ticket. “You still think we’re going to lose?” he asked me laughingly.
“Yep,” I replied.
Raul looked incredulous. “Well, you obviously don’t believe in facts!”
I was about to be engulfed by a tidal wave of Palin euphoria when someone—someone I didn’t expect—planted my feet back on the ground. After Palin’s selection was announced, the same people who demanded I acknowledge the brilliance of McCain’s choice expected the president to join them in their high-fiving tizzy. It was clear, though, that the president, ever the skilled politician, had concerns about the choice of Palin, which he called “interesting.” That was the equivalent of calling a fireworks display “satisfactory.”
“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Interesting? The governor of Guam? Well say what you will about George Bush, he clearly has a sense of humor.

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.
“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

You can find the rest of it here under Me Talk Presidential One Day, by Matt Latimer, describing his time as speechwriter for George W. Bush during the final years of his presidency. Sure, it's an excerpt designed to promote Latimer's forthcoming book, but it shows how information, columns, whatever, are now a global business only a mouse click away.

And Fairfax thinks by having Helen Coonan within their shingle they might some day be able to charge for their elite "opinion page" content?

Well good luck with that, but why not have a read of Reflections of a Newsosaur as he contemplates the news that Only 51% of pubs think pay walls will fly.

One of the more interesting points?

In another dimension of the survey, Harmon and Swanson found a sharp disparity between the stated concerns of publishers over content piracy and their lack of attention to the issue.

While 85% of publishers said they are concerned about online publishers who use their copyrighted content without permission, only 25% said they were engaged in some sort of “active tracking” to combat copyright scofflaws.

Well if they head on over to The Punch, Chairman Rupert Murdoch's brave bold step into the new world of digital content, they'll find breaches aplenty. For example, an embedded clip from YouTube featuring Rove talking with Chairman Rudd, as taken from Network Ten. Permission asked and granted for use of the clip?

Oh puh-lease. Don't be silly.

Fair comment relevance? Oh puh-lease, it's just there as a bit of visual content so that Shane Evans can do a bilious hatchet job on Chairman Rudd - In politics, chutzpah is just a polite word for hubris.

And of course end it ends with this kind of blather:

As sure as Nemesis follows hubris, every question not asked or answered is an opportunity for arrogance and ego to triumph over sound policy and effective governance. For a poll driven administration this is proving to be a winning formula, so don’t expect less acting or more accountability from the Rudd government anytime soon. Unfortunately for us, when the party’s over and Nemesis comes to give what’s due, democracy demands we’ll all pay for it.

Well as surely as nemesis and night follows day, and western civilization ends as we all have to pay for it, you can see why they put up the Rove clip. It's the only way to generate any traffic when confronted with this kind of half-assed rhetoric.

Thus Fairfax imitates Murdoch imitates Fairfax, but the wider world eludes them as it knocks on the door with a click of the mouse.

Which is why I look forward to the next phase in the pirate wars, as content publishers try to keep their property behind paywalls, and pirate sites do huge business providing pirate coverage. It worked for the movie industry and it worked for music. Roll on the newspaper paywall, so I can become a pirate all over again ...