new editor for The Canberra Times

I can’t believe how much people pay out on Canberra Times. Firstly, let me make it clear the only association I have with them is that I am a customer who has it reliably delivered to his door at $1 a day.

I am extremely happy with the CT. I smirk at people on RiotACT paying out on the paper given that most of the stories on RA seem to be lifted from the CT or are equally parochial stories such as a club had a big line that got a little rough.

The Canberra Times has lots of Canberra news, great world news, great letters section, all the good comics, a reliable sports section, cars on Friday, Computers on Monday, some great reads in the weekend including travel stories and movie reviews, puzzles, sudoko, monster sudoko, finance and stock market, public service news, an excellent annual funrun and results, balanced opinion pieces (normally more left wing, but this is a left wing thinking town), some excellent recipes and restaurant reviews etc. etc.

What the hell are people complaining about?

Amelia – Canberra may be a small town in numbers, but it is an unusual demographic of well educated academic and politican people.

This is why the rural press standard small town paper recipe did not work.

Id use ‘self-aggrandising’ at the pub – probably if I was talking about a politician.

I think we’ve discovered who the dumbed down CT is aimed at – do you read it CanberraResident?

astrojax, thanks for the Sunday morning laugh. Not a public Servant – never have been; it’s not good to make assumptions. You’ve been to that thesaurus again with “sobriquet”. Mr Gates has mised it? What does it mean I wonder?

Neanderthal? Bwa! You’ve been cleaning that mirror again haven’t you? 😉

I’d love to hear you use the term “self-aggrandising” at the local watering hole after a few too many beers … or in your case, wines, I suspect. I’ve won and I’m done.

Three problems with the Canberra Times which Peter Fray probably won’t be able to change, but let’s see:

1. Mark Baker is a journo, not a leader and certainly as an editor, he was hopeless at engendering any spirit on the floor. If Fray is going to motivate and enthuse, he’s going to need to be a good people person.

2. The paper pays crap money. That’s Rural Press’ influence, but you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, and at the rate the news room has been bleeding staff, they’re up to their 18th new journalist in 2008. Now that’s a huge turnover in less than three months, especially for such a small title.

3. The website is a disaster, because it’s mastered out of Rural Press. No one in Canberra has any ability to go into the site and load, pull down or whatever. It’s centralised and hence, it’s absolute, unmitigated crap.

Peter Fray…if you can make a difference, let’s see it!

Hint??

lol I-filed, I’m certain I know who you’re speaking of!!

no, canberra resident, i don’t ‘get it now’ and i don’t think i missed your point. most/all of amelie’s post used pretty common-day language, unless you might be a bit of a neanderthal. some people do use such terms on a pretty well daily basis, and not just to try to sound more educated than some dissenters on this board.

and a statement: ‘ Simplicity is the key to good writing.’ is a pretty puerile response. you’ve been a public servant far too long and ought to spend some of those earned flex hours off reading some genuine literature and see some real ‘good writing’. a senate estimates brief does not qualify for this sobriquet, i’m afraid.

so tell us all, which parts of amelie’s post were allegedly written by this two year old, then? and while we’re going, which parts of my post were self aggrandising?

or do you wanna just get back to the cave..?

Now that sounds like an inside story worthy of investigation…who investigates the investigators (sic)?
Maybe Media Watch…

While he’s at it, he could relieve the APS EL2 who has been moonlighting there nights cash-in-hand for years – and turning up to his $100,000+ APS senior media job from about 11.00 am to about 4.00 pm most days, half-asleep and underperforming.

I’m with Amelie re the quality of the CT. Lived in a few places and the paper is pretty good compared to some I’ve had to put up with. I’d say it’s better than the Courier Mail in Brissy and the Westralian. Not hard to beat the Australian these days either…

And while they may bring in columns from other papers in the stable, those – like Karen Middleton – are generally pretty good. Crispin Hull and Peter Martin’s columns are good from the local level, but I’m amazed David Barnett is still on the payroll. One of his recent columns about the apology was bigotted and just plain offensive.

I can’t stand the broadsheet paper format, and although we’ve had this conversation before I’ll say it again – just having pages small enough to fit on the dining table at breakfast without kicking the rest of the family off does not mean that the content has to go tabloid as well.

The Sunday Times is however generally lame – seems to take the tabloid approach – why do Sunday editors take the position that we turn our brains off on Sunday, as opposed to actually having some more time to read/digest articles with more depth.

And yes as others have said – the website absolutely sux. They should visit how the Sunshine Coast Daily has been going since they went very Web 2.0.

Perhaps a new editor is just what the doctor ordered…

Can he get Jack Waterford to stop referring to very distant country ancestors as though he was brought up by squatters? He mentions it every second article. Jack, most of us are city cousins and it’s nothing special.

I think we criticise the Times becuase it used to be a lot better. It used to be the leading political paper with local Canberra news thrown in.

Then it was bought by rural press and they sacked most of the journalists, and hired a few 18 year olds who write most of the paper – hence the reliance on regurgitation press releases, and filling pages with enormous photos.

It has improved a bit from it’s worst stage, but is not back to its best.

Hmmm, my guess is that Amelie is a law student. First, people almost never mention the Crimes interstate – hardly anyone else even knows it exists. Second, law students recognise Waterford’s name as the applicant in a bunch of early (indeed, pioneering) FOI cases.

I got over Waterford when the Crimes published a letter from “Dr Peter Phelps of Queanbeyan” purporting to give the view of the average man in the pub in terms of who should be denied the vote under proposed reforms to the Electoral Act. Those proposed reforms being the work of Phelps’ boss, the egregious Senator Eric Abetz, then Special Minister of State. It took two weeks and a hefty nudge from Crikey.com.au before Waterford twigged to the connexion and decried the conflict.

When the Editor-in-Chief of the journal of record in the nation’s capital doesn’t even recognise the name of a Minister’s Chief of Staff (and Phelps was never the shy and retiring type), then “living treasure” is not the expression that first springs to mind.

I hadn’t realised there were so many grammar Nazis on the site. I can assure everyone that I was not trying to write in a self-aggrandising style, or impressive everyone by employing my extensive vocabulary (as I simply don’t have one). Last I looked, exemplary and puerile were common usage.

Putting that aside, to respond:
Say what you will about Waterford, when people mention the Times interstate, Waterford is the name that people know.Simple as that.

I agree with Duke and everyone else that the site is no good (see my first post).

And Duke, you make a good point (much more sensiblee than your initial post) about Canberra being full of academics and writers. The Times could certainly make more use of them.

It is a would-be-big paper in a small town.People should remember that. I don’t knoow why they would buy the SMH or the Telegraph if they live in Canberra and want Canberra news. The Tele in particular is absolute garbage, not just because it is a tabloid. Compared to the Herald Sun it is a joke, too. At least the Times is trying to say something intelligent.
But another good point Duke made – RiotAct does have some juicy stuff that the Times misses. A decent Times site would fix that – but would we RiotAct-ers want that?

Oh, and don’t get me started on the daily op-ed piece next to the letters to editor – presumably written by Waterford.

Has the guy not heard of a full-stop? When the Editor in Chief thinks it’s good journalism to write 100 word sentences you know the rot starts from the top.

Amelie – I’ve commented on the CT before in other posts and on the whole I think the paper is adequate, but only that. It could be a lot better.

The news and writing is ample, but it’s hardly exciting, intriguing or even dynamic – it’s just dull. As rightly pointed out by another poster, there’s more news/events/gossip on Riotact than the CT.

And there’s no excuse for it. This city is full of academics, writers, experts and students who could give a real boost to the CT in terms of news and writing.

There is no excuse for that horrible website either. There’s got to be a thousand IT and graphic students in Canberra who would kill for an internship at the CT. A revolving internship program would ensure the website is updated regularly with young talent running it……and it would hardly cost the CT a cent because they don’t pay interns.

The big fear about newspaper websites is they take sales away from the broadsheet, but just look at SMH.com – it just keeps getting bigger and better and advertisers are flocking to it!

But I stand by my original charge: There are too many nutters making too much noise and like Pavlovs dog, the CT salivates at the thought of giving these idiots column inches.

These people do not represent the whole community, only a tiny portion, and publishing their rants as if it’s the mainstream view is misleading and is, I believe, having a negative effect on our town.

You need to have lived in Canberra more than two months to notice this subtle yet horrible ‘theme’ occuring at the CT.

astrojax, I suspected someone would miss my point, and sure enough … that someone was you. It’s not about knowing the meaning of words. Certain parts of the above rant look to be written by a two year old, whilst other parts do not. There is no consistency in her writing style. Get it now? I suspect not given yours is the same – self-aggrandising???? Not a term most people would use on a daily basis. Simplicity is the key to good writing. It’s not a competition about who can use the most obscure words in the English language; it just shows how desperate the writer is to sound educated, when in fact they are nothing of the sort.

Waterford falls into the same category, but in an “old twat” kind of way …to use your pub-lingo expression.

I remember when the CT was the paper everyone read, and Canberra was MUCH smaller then. Now, finding a copy in the place where I work proved impossible, a few months back.

It can be a national-type paper and cover local stuff well, but for the past few years, it hasn’t. I mean, the SMH which seems to be the paper which replaced the CT locally, is so Sydney-centric it’s noticeable, and yet many of us prefer it to the CT.

Bring back Ian Mathews.

Oh, and the website is an embarassment, it’s a disgrace. The little freebie papers in the US have websites 100% better. You don’t have to have an all-in thing with whirligigs like the SMH, but the current thing is a pathetic joke.

i concur, waterford a treasure?? he’s a fatuous cantakerous old arrogant self-aggrandising old twat who is well past his use-by date.

that said, i actually don’t think [shut up, more is coming] that the crimes is really that bad. amelie makes the point i was going to – we’re a little over 300k in population, a small small town really. in that context, the crimes comes up fairly well. i don’t buy the arguments on parochialism – all papers world-wide have a parochial bent, even in cities of 15 million (have a squizz through the ny times and tell me the ratio of articles on nyc stories to, say, LA or london stories. and use an electron microscope to find anything on australia. the crimes’ world coverage is pretty good really.

but the website is one of the worst ever ever in newspaper-world. absolutely abyssmal. atrocious and useless and for some reason takes almost an eternity to load on my work machine, which is highspeed, of course, often as not crashing everythig else with it…

and the standard of photography also reflects the small pool of talent – do they have more than one lens??

oh, and canberra resident, not everyone needs a thesaurus to use puerile or exemplary – only one of which might apply to you…

Amelie – this cracked me up “Jack Waterford is a national treasure”. Have you been on the turps, or are you related to the ugly old bugger?

The rest of your rant contained waaaaaaay too many words which you’ve taken straight out of a thesaurus. Puerile, tactile, exemplary? Yes, it’s that obvious, so it’s back to the junior drawing “BORED” for you. Hint: if you’re gonna use a thesaurus … apply the same rule to your entire thesis; thesaurus band-aid job, very immature. My 2 year old could do better.

I’m a new Canberra (>2 months) and an even newer Riotact-er. This is the first time I’ve been bothered to comment on the site, and i reckon i comment with good reason.

I have to ask, what is the problem people on this site have with the Times?

I see it sometimes, and it seems to me to be a good paper. It’s a broadsheet, it has a good range of op-ed writers, and simply put, Jack Waterford is a national treasure.

It surely has a smaller budget than the SMH/Age/Australian – not to mention the big tabloids – but it seems to cover big stories well. Plus, it breaks canberra stories, such as the story about the taxi strike in january.
surely a paper like the times should be doing exactly that?
I hate to disabuse some of the posters on these forums of their delusions of grandeur, but Canberra is a small town. No two ways about it. It amazed me to even discover it has a broadsheet paper (I will grant the website is garbage). But how could anyone wish for yet another dumbed down tabloid? It is striving to be a quality paper.

And can I ask, too, has anyone on this site any idea who Mark Baker is? His record at the age is exemplary. Fair play to the man for wanting to be with his family.

What has anyone on this site done to contribute to public debate within the national capital, and what has anyone on this site done in the way of serious journalistic work? It’s a lot easier to sit on a fence and take potshots in a puerile and facile manner.
I’m no expert, and I don’t know where the Times sits in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve read newspapers all my life, and the Times is not bad. If you want the best in the world, read the guardian. If you want to support your bush capital, shut up and read the Times, take it warts and all. Stop throwing stones for the sake of it.
PS – what would a riotact newspaper look like? 2 pages of scuttlebutt and crap? forum conversations conducted at the intellectual level of a two year old?

Note to new Editor of CT:

Ditch Jessica Wright.

A weekly summary of RiotACT

Isn’t it already ?

A weekly summary of RiotACT would raise the quality, especially if it only quoted my stuff.

Wouldn’t it be really likely to go into the “Sued immediately on publication” history category?

I read the Northside Chronicle when it comes around. I think a RiotACT newspaper would be the shiznit

Hey, I like Hingo’s idea. A RiotACT newspaper! I never look at the Canberra Times. I feel faintly embarrassed by it.

Real articles would be nice instead of ‘reporting’ directly from Canberra Airpot (when Brand Depot opened) or ACT Government press releases.

New editor….same crappy newspaper

Toad

Would you prefer the CT to be a rebadged Hun, with four pages of local news, sports results, details as a centre liftout?

Perhaps a change of direction is needed? Such as
a small part of Chennai

Why does the Canberra Age need an editor?

It just lifts stuff from the SMH/Age and passes off op-ed pieces from the likes of robert fisk as headline news.

One suggestion though.

Go to tabloid size for the weekly editions – it fits the bottom of the birdcage better.

Give David Barnett a daily column – and sit it on the same page as Dilbert and other trivial and comedy pieces…

Editor,

Problem 1):
For the last few years, the quality and coverage of events (both local, regional, and national) in the Canberra Times has suffered, and the newspaper has become little more than a parochial rag, filled with craven and inarticulate ‘journalists’, who don’t seem particularly interested in ‘investigative journalism’ or ‘running coverage’ as understood by the city in which it is published.

How will you address this problem, and when can we expect the improvement to reach copy?

Problem 2):
The Canberra Times claims a circulation of roughly ten times that of the Katherine Times. That newspaper is of only slightly lower quality and is more parochial by only the barest of margins, but at least the Katherine Times can claim a regular readership outside its state, and its readers will generally admit to reading it.
Claiming that someone reads the Canberra Times, on the other hand, is seen as a grave and merciless slur.

How do you intend to address this perception?

Problem 3):
Your webiste is terrible, out of date, rarely updated, does not contain anything near the levels of content expected by the current standards of the nation, and looks like it was designed by early Gen X dot-communists in the peak of the First Bubble and never reviewed.
This prevents both online advertisers wanting to pay you for running their ads, and prevents readers from coming to your site to be informed.

How will this be addressed?

Problem 4)
Will you fire that dumb slapper of a girl you let write for the Sunday Times. I have only read her work when it has appeared elsewhere, as due to problems (1), (2) and (3), neither I nor my youthful, cashed up contemporaries will buy or read your paper.

Unless these problems are addressed, we are likely to avoid partaking in it, and instead make jokes about it, just as we did with Limestone Lizzy.

Regards,

Member of the Public.

They’d do well to have a times2 esque article in the CT that was RA submitted. For a reasonable price of course…

Ditto to most of the sentiments above. Like the guy in “On the Waterfront”, the CT could have been a contender. In fact, there were years when it was.

Can we get some seriousness back in, and not just in the opinion pages? If Pryor has retired, get him as a consultant. Get some literate and thoughtful opinion/colour from Warden and, when they feel up to doing more than going through the motions, Waterford, Hull and Campbell. In the lit stuff, use Geoff Page and Frank O’Shea more and apparent teenagers less. But some serious news, rather than quoted media releases, would be good too.

The website is canine. If the CT is going to do it, it should look at the SMH and the Age and use them as models.

Overall, the CT has been such a drag in recent years that I have forced myself to read it much of the time and bemoaned the absence of a Canberra Morning Herald or Age. (Not that the SMH is doing itself any fabours with an increasing amount of bubbleheaded tripe).

funny you should mention that hingo, we’re giving some consideration to a weekly riotact newsletter which will give a rundown of some of the great riots going on here & things you may have missed if you’re not an every-day reader.

How about a website that is actually useful? RiotACT shits all over the Times, simply because it’s interactive, updated as things happen, and is a local news service.

I have never bought that glorified dunny rag and I don’t intend to either. How about a RiotACT newspaper?

How about some journalism? You know, going out and finding things and reporting on them. No more “Dog lost in Duffy” stories. We’re the goddamn capital of Australia, not some…pooptown…or something.