Australian politics, society & culture

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Margaret Simons

Margaret Simons is a journalist and director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of numerous essays and articles and ten books, including The Content Makers.

@MargaretSimons

Articles by this author

A trip to the Philippines reveals the human cost of the war on drugs
Duterte’s dirty war
It is a quarter to midnight on 4 October. The air is warm like souring milk and it’s raining. The press pack is standing on the steps of the police station in Tondo, Manila, near...
 
Image of Michelle Guthrie
The new managing director’s vision isn’t clear
Is Michelle Guthrie tuned in to the ABC?
In the early weeks of her tenure as managing director of the ABC, Michelle Guthrie took her executive team “off site”, away from the public broadcasting palace in Sydney’s Ultimo...
 
What did an award-winning story on the children of Australian sex tourists achieve?
After the story
You can find Hadrian’s Extension on Google Earth. Search for Balibago, Angeles City, and you will see the locality. Find Hadrian Street. Then, at the northern end, look for where...
 
© Dave Tacon
The children left behind by Australian sex tourists in the Philippines
Fallen angels
The sky bruises at the same time each day in Angeles City. Then the rain comes. The weather is so similar – steamy heat, then rain and evening relief – that it can seem as though...
 
Talking about the narcissistic national daily only encourages it
The decline of the ‘Australian’
This year the Australian newspaper celebrates its 50th anniversary. Rupert Murdoch will be in town to attend the party on 15 July. Thousands of words of self-congratulation have...
 
B1 and B2 with Mark Scott at Parliament House, 2009. © Mark Graham. Image courtesy of the ABC.
Mark Scott embarks on another five-year term
Second life
There is an island in Second Life called ABC. If you go there and wander the shores, you may find a deckchair on which sits the avatar of Mark Scott, managing director of the...
 
Michael Ebeid, the new managing director of SBS. Courtesy of SBS.
SBS
Sex before soccer
There is possibility and burden in a name. When, more than 30 years ago, the Fraser government created the Special Broadcasting Service as the first multicultural public...
 
Then Fairfax CEO Brian McCarthy speaking at the company's head office in Sydney, 27 August 2010. © Lee Besford / AAP Image
The future of Fairfax
Crises of faith
It was Jay Rosen, the New York University academic and new media pioneer, who declared some years ago that journalism was a kind of religion, and the average newsroom a nest of...
 
Studenst gather at the Meridian International Hotel School in Melbourne, closed without warning on 6 November 2009. © Julian Smith / AAP Image
The international student sector
Exodus
Most of our big export industries do their business out of sight of city dwellers. Mines are dug and ore extracted without stirring the dust on suburban streets. There is one such...
 
Duty of care
In the last three months, dozens of women throughout our country and region have been told their life story has taken, without their knowledge, a dreadful twist. The locus of the...
 
The Melbourne model
Dangerous precedent
Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, has on his shelves a copy of Microcosmographia Academica, the classic university satire, written by the University of...
 
Comment
The Hyatt is an historic hotel, or what passes for one in this young city, and the front of the building is heritage-listed so the doormen have to fit in. The uniforms are a...
 
Fear & Loathing at the ABC
Modern ABC buildings show their bones. Their innards seem exposed to the light. The architecture is a thing of soaring, light-filled atriums, the foyers like stripped down...
 
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