(Above: a few soothing images to set the tone for what follows).Just one more thing.
A few intertubes surfers might have been distressed to read the Fairfax piece Vogue deletes glamour story on Assad's wife.
Oh it's grand, with a splash and a nice beguiling chic photo ...
If you read the piece, you might have concluded Juliet Buck's profile of Syria's first lady has been scrubbed from the web, when in fact it only takes a couple of jumps to discover it in all its glory.
First the pond visited the Atlantic's The Only Remaining Online Copy of Vogue's Asma al-Assad Profile.
And then it followed the link thoughtfully provided, over to Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert (story by Joan Juliet Buck, photographed by James Nachtwey).
Who knows how long it will stay up - information just wants to be free - but at the moment, a quick pdf and it's yours to hold and love.
What it also does is act as a timely reminder that old-school Fairfax journalism, which consists of re-printing a story from The Washington Post, which yabbers on about how the Vogue story had disappeared, is redundant on so many levels, the pond found it hard to count them.
Worse still, when you head off to the original story, published April 26th on the Post site by Paul Farhi, you find a link to the Atlantic piece, and a link to the Rose in the Desert story on the aforesaid site (which happens to be maintained by a Syrian journalist).
Yet in the Fairfax version of a story about a disappeared story, their edited story disappears the links to the disappeared story which wouldn't have been so disappeared ... if they hadn't disappeared the links ...
Or some such thing.
The pond had to read a half dozen times the rubbish edit in Fairfax to confirm it was a bowdlerised, bastardised reprint of a half-baked kind, stripped of the only links that really mattered.
Will Fairfax ever discover the full to overflowing intertubes?
It seems not bloody likely ... and yet they had the cheek to make a splash out of their cheap, two bob rip-off ...
First it's the ABC printing the controversy when it comes to climate science, and now Fairfax performs the unique feat of disappearing up its fundament ...
(Below: glamourous, chic, and not so bloody gone after all, you cackling geese).
Dear loon,
ReplyDeleteThis is the first Australian political blog I turn to each morning. You write articles regularly, and always have interesting things to say in a competent and thorough manner. It's a pleasure to read you. Keep up the good work.