australia – Media

2017/05/19

3 things BuzzFeed News thinks about before sending a push alert

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump met Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in New York. While the big story in the U.S. that day was the passage of the Republican healthcare bill in the House of Representatives, the meeting was major news in Australia. As a result, BuzzFeed News decided to send an alert to its app users who have chosen to follow Australia news in its news app. The alert read: “There were some delays, but Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump finally met in person. Here’s how it went down. 👴🏻 ❤️ 👴🏻 ” Yes, it included the emoji, which has purposefully become a hallmark of the BuzzFeed News app, Brianne O’Brien, the lead news curation editor at BuzzFeed’s London office said on a panel at the ONA Dublin conference on Friday. After BuzzFeed launched its news app in 2015, two-thirds of the downloads were from

2017/05/15

Australia’s kid-focused newspaper Crinkling News wants to teach media literacy to young readers

Saffron Howden knew she was on the right track with Crinkling News, her Australian kid-focused weekly newspaper, within a few days of Donald Trump being elected. Even among Australian schoolchildren, there was a lot of trepidation about the implications of a Donald Trump presidency. One school introduced art therapy to help kids process their emotions. The uncertainty that kids felt in November — much of which persists among both the young and not-so-young — underscored Howden’s initial motivation a year ago to create a newspaper written for the country’s young news consumers, ages 7 to 15. The world can be a scary place, she argues, and the country’s largest media companies were doing a poor job of explaining things in a way that kids could understand. “I was hearing a lot of stories from parents about how their kids really wanted to read the newspaper, but the parents felt like

2017/05/05

Trump: ‘Of Course the Australians Have Better Healthcare Than We Do –– Everybody Does’

Yesterday President Donald Trump told Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that his country has “better health care than we do.” When Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders filled in for Sean Spicer today, she was asked about those remarks and said, “The president was complimenting a foreign leader on the operations of their health care system and it didn’t mean anything more than that.” She added, “He believes that they have a good health care system for Australia.” President Trump elaborated this afternoon that the reason he said Australia has better health care than we do is because “everybody does”:

Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do –everybody does. ObamaCare is dead! But our healthcare will soon be great.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2017

[image via screengrab] — — Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

2017/05/04

‘Ghoulish’: Australian Company Turns IVF Embryos Into Jewelry

A company in Australia is facing scrutiny from conservatives after a Wednesday article revealed that they were turning unused embryos from in-vitro fertilization into “sacred art.” The Australian parenting blog Kidspot highlighted Baby Bee Hummingbirds, an enterprise started by Amy McGlade in 2014. McGlade’s company reportedly has made “over 4000 pieces of jewelry using breastmilk, placenta, hair, ashes, or cord stumps – including 50 made with embryos.” The blog post featured a couple in New South Wales who didn’t know what to do with the embryos that remained after undergoing IVF treatment that led to the birth of their twins. The couple rightly considered them to be their babies, but “donation wasn’t an option, the annual storage fee was an added financial strain, and disposing of them unimaginable.” The mother now carries “seven embryos in her heart-shaped pendant worn close to her heart, always.” She underlined Continue reading

2017/04/10

Australian Rapper Allegedly Tried to Dine and Dash on $621 Bill by Running into the Ocean

Maybe you’ve been there. You’re out to dinner and the bill comes and it’s way, way higher than you thought it would be. Your options are limited, and they include robbing a bank, skipping out on the check entirely, or just sucking it up and eating at home the rest of the week. Recently, Terry Peck, an Australian rapper who goes by the name “2-Pec,” was allegedly faced with this exact dilemma and he handled it in pretty much the most epic way possible. According to Australia’s ABC News, Peck dined at Main Beach’s Omeros Bros Restaurant, on Australia’s Gold Coast and ordered ” two lobsters, 17 oyster shooters, a baby octopus, and several beers.” When it came time to pay the bill ($621 Australian dollars, approximately $465 U.S. dollars), Peck allegedly ran onto the beach and into the water, and wouldn’t come back to shore. He Continue reading

2017/04/05

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Cancels Australian Tour After Backlash and Accusations of ‘White Supremacy’

Somali-born activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancelled her speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand this week in the wake of wild accusations that she’s promoting “white supremacy.” Days before her tour was scheduled to begin, a group of Muslim women calling themselves “Persons of Interest” released a Facebook video that slammed Ali for her supposed intolerance: “This is the language of patriarchy and misogyny. This is the language of white supremacy. This is the language used to justify war and genocide.” The activist returned fire at her critics in a Tuesday interview with Australian television outlet Channel Seven, saying, “These are people who are far more interested in defending Sharia law, that’s Islamic law, and the doctrine of radical Islam, over human rights.” She later ripped the “horrible alliance between the far left and the Islamists… using the modern media tool to shut people like Continue reading

2017/03/21

Get ready to binge-listen to Serial’s new spinoff S-Town: All 7 episodes will drop at once next week

To decode that: The term “scripted programming” is kind of a carry-over from established linear media industries. We’re basically looking at Panoply acting on its ambition to punch harder in the audio fiction genre. It’s a move that’s potentially very lucrative, given the podcast ecosystem’s growing value to other more developed adjacent creative industries, be it film, television, or books. (I’ve written about this a bunch before, start here and here.) In hiring Dryden, Panoply gains an award-winning producer with a substantial body of work. Based on his talent agency’s website, Dryden’s rap sheet includes: The Seventh Test, a 10-part audio thriller broadcasted on BBC Radio 4 that’s based on a book by Vikas Swarup, whose debut novel, Q&A, was adapted into the film Slumdog Millionaire; A Kidnapping, a three-part radio drama, also first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, that’s being adapted into a film; and Tumanbay,