murray river life

Below are some links to handful of blogs on this topic, which has been around since Adam was a boy, but seems to be gaining momentum as newspaper companies around the world fight against decreasing readership.

Newspaper killer confesses

The future of newspapers - the editors’ perspective

What comes next?

And a story from the Economist about The New York Times

Later

Some info on internet marketing and internet useage.

Communicating with customers, shareholders and other stakeholders has taken on a whole new level thanks to the internet.

Being able to directly identify and communicate with a target audience, via blogs, social networking sites and other web-based sources, gives businesses, and their stakeholders, so much more power.

Public relations expert and theorist James E. Grunig devised that there are four models of public relations which, put simply, are propoganda, public information, one way asymmetrical and two way symmetrical.

Basically, an organisation can listen to or ignore its stakeholders. It can communicate with them or talk to them.

Clearly two-way symmetrical communication - in which an organisation evolves as a result of stakeholder influence and impact - is the fairest and most desirable role. And it has now become easier than ever to achieve such communication.

Utilising the internet and the web to directly connect with stakeholders opens a world of opportunities for companies and organisations - if they are willing to take the chance and delve into the world inside their computers. Many generation X or Baby Boomer managers are still perplexed by the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace - there is a lack of understanding why people would want to put their lives on show for anyone to read, why they don’t just pick up the phone to communicate with their friends.

But once you delve into the world of the internet - the millions of blogs, websites and networks - it can be quite overwhelming. There is a whole world in there that individuals can feel lost in. Joining Facebook or setting up a MySpace page is a way of staking out a claim in that world - like building a home. It’s a visable sign of your presence. And once one house is built others join them, until your own little community is visable and recognisable amid the chaos.

Globalisation continues to erode our physical boundaries - communities are not what they once were. Consequently, people continue to turn to the internet to cement relationships and find their place in what is both a smaller yet more complicated web-widened world.

Reports that newspaper readership throughout the world continues to drop seem to have been widespread in recent weeks.

This morning I read a blog that discussed that very topic and referenced an article from the New Yorker, that I had also read recently, which highlights a prediction that newspapers as we know them will be dead by 2043.

This morning’s blog argued that while blogs are subjective and opinionated by definition, they still provide readers with a better world view than newspapers, which often struggle to be subjective and fair, despite journalists’ protests otherwise.

Tim and I have discussed this extensively during our media/PR/newspaper/coffee chats in the JMS office and, while we both agree we love reading a real newspaper, we realised we do get the majority of our news information during the day from the net.

As a member of Generation Y, I also realised during this dicussion just how impatient I become when news websites are not updated immediately with information I have heard elsewhere (which links to my comments yesterday about not being able to readily find information about encephalitis on the Department of Health website).

Reading the Weekend Australian, for example, becomes a weekend luxury that is stretched over Saturday and Sunday, and even into the following week.

But having just written all that, I received an email from the editor of The Bunyip newspaper in Gawler, who mentioned that their next edition had gone up to 90 pages. From a weekly paper that was averaging about 64 pages per edition when I started there in 2003, it has grown at a fast rate of knots in the last few years (as has Gawler).

For a small country newspaper this has various ramifications, with one summed up nicely by said editor:

(Journalist 1) has chanced upon the wonderful idea for journalists to receive commissions, as do the ad reps, directly aligned to the number of stories they do each week - we can dream!

There is a passage in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini that I would love to quote right now but the book has disappeared from my bedside table (I’m looking squarely in the direction of my two toddlers with a level of suspicion bordering on accusation, or I would be if they weren’t in bed/watching Spot).

To paraphrase it - “Leave two Afghanis alone in a room together, come back in six minutes and they would have worked out how they are related”.

This phrase came to mind this evening as I was doing a bit of work on the Renmark Hotel’s new Facebook page (how’s that for cross promotion).

This morning I was chatting to a person on Facebook, who I had come across on a Facebook group and invited to be part of the Renmark Hotel group. Afterwards I had a better look at her profile and knew she looked familiar but couldn’t quite place her.

So I sent a message asking if she happened to work at Maccas in Renmark - and she replied she did and asked if I was the “large vanilla chai with skim milk girl”.

Chai - bringing the world together once again.

There are reports this morning that Murray Valley encephalitis virus has been detected in birds in the Riverland.

Local ABC radio interviewed a spokesperson from the SA department of health this morning, and mentioned information on their website but the old DOH hasn’t made the information easy to find. I’ll keep looking but in the meantime here is the link to some federal government information on the virus.

Unfortunately, that info is all a bit clincial, so here is today’s report from the Advertiser as well.

Globalisation brings us some truly great developments - like being able to pick up a chai latte from Renmark Maccas early on a Thursday morning.

I visited India for three months in 2002 - my husband lived there for 18 months and the rest of his family were there for up to 10 years - and still remember the cries of hawkers on the trains: CHHAAAAAIIII, CHAAAAIIII, OMALET, OMALET (sic). At that time I had never come across chai - now it is everywhere.

It’s a bit like dukkah, which is a bit like George’s pesto rant in The Busboy episode of Seinfeld:

(Jerry, George, and Elaine are all eating at an Italian restaurant. George hasn’t eaten anything)

ELAINE: Do you want some of mine?

JERRY: Take some of mine.

GEORGE: Why do I get pesto? Why do I think I’ll like it? I keep trying to like it, like I have to like it.

JERRY: Who said you have to like it?

GEORGE: Everybody likes pesto. You walk into a restaurant, that’s all you hear - pesto, pesto, pesto.

JERRY: I don’t like pesto.

GEORGE: Where was pesto 10 years ago?

I know where chai was 10 years ago - in the thermos of thousands of Indians yelling CHAAIIII, CHAIIII as they travelled around the sub-continent. But I’m sure glad it’s here now - even if it passes only the most minimal of resemblances to its authentic spicy cousin.

I read a letter to the editor in the Weekend Australian Magazine last night (my life seems to be perpetually running about three days late) that I thought was relevant to this week’s local media coverage of Berri’s Big Orange.

For those not in the know about Berri life - the Murray River town is home to an 85 tonne orange that closed earlier this year due to lack of support. This week it was reported that the owner of the orange has been approached about selling the giant replica and it being removed from the area.

Here is the letter…

As someone who lives a stone’s throw from the proposed site of the Stonehenge replica in Margaret River (Susan Maushart, April 19-20), why wouldn’t I applaud WA brewer Ross Smith’s bold initiative of bringing this 2500-tonne attraction to our part of the world? Margaret River doesn’t even have any massive replica prawns, pineapples or apples. All we have is stunning beaches, forests, the Cape Naturaliste to Cape Leeuwin Track, more than 200 wine operations, terrific cafés and restaurants, and a fabulous mediterranean climate. Of course it’s vital we have a Stonehenge replica, too.
Ian Parmenter
Margaret River, WA

Welcome to murray river life - a collection of local news and events, sometimes localised to the Riverland region of SA, and sometimes not. We may also touch on PR industry related news and often might just talk about nothing at all.

The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy. Malcolm Forbes.