Does Anyone Have A G’Day World Archive?
Posted on 28. Dec, 2008 by Cameron in General
If anyone out there has a good collection of old G’Day World episodes – say from 001 to 300 – could you let me know? My old PC hard drive died about a year ago and I think I’ve lost most of them.
The Evangelical Heretic
Posted on 27. Dec, 2008 by Cameron Reilly in religion
I listened to this episode of “This American Life” in the car tonight and it’s fascinating. It’s basically the story of a hugely popular black evangelical preacher in Oklahoma, Carlton Pearson, who spent 30 years building a congregation in the thousands, was invited to the White House by three Presidents… and then one day decided Hell didn’t exist, that the God he believed in wouldn’t invent something like that, that they’d got it all wrong. He decided that EVERYONE was going to heaven, whether they believed in Jesus or not. EVERYONE. Atheists, Muslims, Jews, you name it. And guess what happened? He was declared a heretic by the other evangelical preachers, including those whose careers he’d launched, and 95% of his congregation left. Check it out.
The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he’d worked for over his entire life.
Rosanne’s belly at Woodford
Posted on 27. Dec, 2008 by Cameron in General, new media
This morning I sat on a 90 minute panel at the Woodford Folk Festival with Rosanne Bersten (whose 8-month pregnant belly is seen on the right with a henna tatoo), Cristen Tilley, an Exec Producer with ABC News Online in Brisbane, and freelance journalist, formerly wtih Crikey, Sarah Stokely. The panel was mysteriously called “Can I Get A Witness” and not many people turned up. As is to be expected when you are on a panel with three journalists, they steered the conversation mostly around “who’s going to fund journalism”, while I, as usual, had the attitude of “let’s blow it all up and see what happens”. I got into a couple of arguments with Sarah about the cost of new media and why people don’t trust the media. One guy in the audience mentioned that the Australian military are trying to figure out how to use new media as a recruitment tool. Cristen said the ABC are desperate to get more user-generated content. Sarah mentioned Nick Holmes a Court‘s recent scuffle with the NSW cops and we discussed the need for financial support for citizen journalists so they can get legal protection from police brutality and defend libel and slander suits. Rosanne used WikiLeaks as a great example of citizen media being used for serious, investigative journalism. In the final stretch, I said that 15 years from now, I expect that many of us will be wearing or carrying some kind of permanent video camera that captures everything we say and do during the day, which will be uploaded to a server, indexed against audio content, time and date stamped, with face recognition pulling out the names of the people in the video, and then some of us will make it public and some will make it private. People laughed but I was totally serious. Think back 15 years to 1993. Can you remember what your mobile phone looked like (if you even had one?). Mine was a LED Motorola brick. Do you think anyone would have believed that in 2008 we’d be walking around with 3G (what’s that?) and wifi (what’s that?) enabled iPhones, uploading our shit on the fly to Flickr and YouTube with 750,000 people following our every movement on Twitter?
New York Times Revenue in Free Fall
Posted on 26. Dec, 2008 by Cameron Reilly in media 2.0, new media
- Revenue was down 13.9 percent, an acceleration from October’s 9.4 percent drop.
- Ad revenue was down 20.9 percent, an acceleration from October’s 16.2 percent drop.
- The really awful news: Internet ad revenue and overall Internet revenue actually declined in November, down 3.8 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.