03.30.05
Posted in Career, London at 7.22 am by niltiac
Sometimes my job is unbeatable. On Monday I got a call from The Australian’s London correspondent wanting to know if I was in town and free to go to the Finn brothers concert at the Royal Albert Hall that evening. Sadly, former Crowded House and Split Enz drummer Paul Hester had committed suicide on Friday night and the Finns were expected to give tribute at their concert. Since the London correspondent was ill, he asked if I could go instead. “I’m sure it will be very arduous,” he said.
It was an amazing evening. Nick Seymour flew in from Dublin and the Finns and Seymour played a special Crowded House tribute set – starting with Don’t Dream It’s Over – with an empty snare drum kit sitting on the front of the stage. The Finns then played songs from their new album but Seymour returned to the stage for the encore. They played for more than two hours straight, including encore, and really poured their hearts out.
Tim Finn, Neil Finn and Nick Seymour … and the empty drum kit reserved for Paul Hester 
I have never seen the Finn brothers perform as the Finn brothers before but I saw Crowded House’s farewell concert on the steps of the Opera House in Sydney in December 1996. That was an amazing gig! Crowded House (and perhaps the Finns too although I’m less familiar with their stuff) are one of those bands that are much better live. There’s nothing wrong with their recorded stuff but you hear it on the radio all the time and it always feels a little middle of the road because it’s too popular. But they really come into their own at live gigs. The songs are never played the same way twice and you can tell that they really enjoy performing.
At Monday’s gig, Tim Finn in particular was getting very physical and jumping around on stage, headbanging and I could see that he’d really worked up a sweat. They changed their guitars almost every song but also played the grand piano, the harmonica and even whistled. Some of the Crowded House songs they played were Four Seasons in One Day, Always Take the Weather, Throw Your Arms Around Me and Better Be Home Soon.
Unfortunately, the Finns revoked all photographer passes so the only camera we had inside was my little compact digital. I moved forward at interval but I was still really too far away and the photos are all quite blurry. The photographer waited outside all evening but missed them going in and they slipped out another exit.
Neil and Tim
Tim Finn
Neil Finn
Nick Seymour in encore set
Neil and Nick hug after Throw Your Arms Around Me in encore set
I really enjoyed this. It was fun to see the concert and it was also fun to be writing news again. The icing on the cake is that I was paid to do it.
Perhaps I should become an entertainment writer full time …
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03.17.05
Posted in Career, Writing at 11.15 pm by niltiac
I have been doing some freelance work for The Australian on the side. Among a number of projects, I have been writing expat profiles on Australians doing great things in London.
So far I have interviewed Lord Robert May (president of the Royal Society), Robert Thomson (editor of The Times) and Fiona McIntosh (editor-in-chief of Emap Elan and women’s magazine Grazia).
I was particularly pleased that the interview with Thomson ran on 7 March 2005 – a week before The Independent’s “exclusive” intereview in its Media section. Okay, so it’s 12,000 miles away and a different market, but I’m still claiming it as a scoop!
The articles have all previously appeared in The Australian and I am now republishing them on my blog.
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Posted in Career, Writing at 11.10 pm by niltiac
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
Robert Thomson is the first editor of The Times to have played Aussie Rules for St Kilda under-19s.
Then a cadet at the now-defunct Melbourne Herald, Thomson made the list pre-season and played practice games with the team before journalism intervened.
“Frankly I was never going to be good enough to make it at the highest level,” Thomson says. “There were so many more talented and committed individuals and I was trying to balance being a cadet journalist with as much training as I could do and it was never going to work.”
The boy from Christian Brothers College in St Kilda could not have foreseen quite how far he would go but the decision to concentrate on journalism has certainly paid off.
Robert Thomson (pic supplied by The Times)
Foreign correspondent at 24. Foreign news editor for the Financial Times at 33 and editor-in-chief of that paper’s US operations at 37. Editor of The Times at 40.
But Thomson is unhappy at the prospect that his curriculum-vitae might engender a sense of inadequacy in others.
“Clearly, institutionally speaking the editor of The Times has overwhelming prestige but you would like to think that the little Australian in you keeps reminding you of the fact that firstly you’re fortunate and secondly that it’s an abuse if you don’t take advantage of that opportunity and use it to attempt either journalistically or socially to do some good,” Thomson says. “Young journalists shouldn’t imagine that the only measure of success is hierarchical.”
If nothing else, Thomson will be remembered as the editor who took The Times of London, one of the oldest and most influential broadsheets in the world, tabloid.
The decision to launch a compact edition – the term preferred by quality newspapers – in November 2003 came only after rival newspaper The Independent paved the way.
“In the years before I arrived there were two dummies prepared,” Thomson says. “It was always going to be difficult for us to go first, there was always going to be the risk of damage and that risk was far greater if The Times was the first broadsheet to turn tabloid in Britain.”
Circulation of The Times, which had been in steady decline, has leapt from 622,102 in November 2003 to 686,327 in January this year.
Thomson says this success is partly because of reader convenience – especially with the heavy commuter base in London – but also because a compact newspaper projects a less intimidating image.
“Each market has unique characteristics but there are clearly broader lessons for newspapers beyond the borders of Britain in the experience of The Times,” Thomson says.
None of this would have been possible without the support of the proprietor of The Times, Rupert Murdoch.
Thomson first met Murdoch when working for the FT in New York in the late 1990s. At the time of his appointment as editor of The Times in 2002, press reports noted that the two men have quite a bit in common; as well as being Australian, they have the same birthday and both men have Chinese wives and young children.
But Thomson is uncomfortable talking about his personal relationship with Murdoch.
“It’s a very profesional one [relationship],” Thomson says. “He’s extremely supportive of The Times … and that’s not just spoken support but that’s genuine financial support. Serious journalism is a very expensive business.”
The editorship of The Times could not have come at a better time for Thomson – he had recently missed out on becoming editor of the FT where he had worked for 17 years, despite being credited with revitalising the weekend edition and the success of the paper’s US venture.
Thomson says he harbours no hard feelings against his former employer, which is “just one of the papers against which we compete”. He adds mischievously, “the FT has many good journalists and we’ll eventually hire them.”
Thomson first moved abroad at the age of 24 when the Sydney Morning Herald sent him to Beijing to work in the bureau it then shared with the FT.
Since then he has lived in Tokyo, New York and Japan but has never returned to Australia to live.
Thomson says this is just the way things have worked out and he is open to the possibility of returning to Australia one day.
“I’ve kept my Australian passport and my children travel on an Australian passport so whether it’s an artificial connection or not, to me it emotionally feels real,” Thomson says.
An edited version of this article was first published in The Australian on 7 March 2005, in Worldwide. Copyright is held by Caitlin Fitzsimmons.
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Posted in Career, Writing at 11.05 pm by niltiac
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
When Fiona McIntosh returns to Melbourne every year for Christmas, it’s not just for the family reunion.
For the editor-in-chief of Emap Elan, the women’s lifestyle division of one of Britain’s largest publishers, the trips home to Australia provide an invaluable opportunity for professional research.
“I think the Australian weekly magazine market is just fantastic,” says McIntosh. “I’m always coming back from Australia at Christmas slipping Woman’s Day etc in my luggage to show people here. I think it’s because Australia doesn’t have a tabloid newspaper market, it’s developed through magazines instead.”
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Fiona McIntosh
But the inspiration for Emap’s latest launch, a weekly fashion magazine titled Grazia, came not from Australia but Italy.
Grazia officially arrived on British news-stands on 15 February although 600,000 copies of a free sampler were handed out the previous week in a promotion.
Emap, publisher of more than 150 magazines including FHM and New Woman, is backing the launch with a £16 million marketing budget.
McIntosh explains that Grazia is a stylish fashion magazine more akin to a glossy monthly than a mass-circulation weekly and says the publisher has “modest” circulation hopes for the title of 150,000-200,000 per issue.
“It’s a faster fresher glossy – it’s a glossy that you can buy every week,” she says. “Our whole proposition is ‘why wait four weeks for something when you can get it every week?’.”
Grazia – issue 2
While Grazia will feature the traditional monthly fare of fashion, lifestyle and travel, it will also have a strong emphasis on news and McIntosh has poached Carole Watson from News of the World to drive this.
“The crucial thing is that it’s not bought as a monthly, that would mean it’s failed,” McIntosh says. “We spent a lot of time developing its whole ‘weekliness’ and our research suggests people will buy it two or three times a month.”
The British Grazia is quite different to the Italian version, particularly because of its emphasis on celebrity, an obsession that McIntosh says Australia and Britain share.
But she is quick to point out that Grazia features A-List celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston and Kate Moss, rather than the reality television stars and glamour models favoured by other weekly titles.
“We have to be careful not to drive it too downmarket because then we would lose advertisers like Versace,” McIntosh says.
A former editor of both Elle and Company, McIntosh is a veteran of the British magazine industry.
But her early career was in newspapers and she found herself frustrated by the six-week lead time in monthly magazines.
McIntosh started as a cadet at The Herald in Melbourne in the 1980s and recalls sitting in shorthand classes with Robert Thomson, now editor of The Times, and John Lyons, a former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
She left Australia at age 22 to “do the whole backpacker thing” and wound up at the Daily Mirror, where she eventually became woman’s editor and deputy features editor before her move into magazines.
After leaving Elle in 2002, McIntosh edited the Evening Standard’s weekly magazine ES and became hooked by the immediacy of a weekly format.
When Emap came knocking on her door about producing a British version of Grazia under licence from Italian publisher Mondadori, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
McIntosh, who is married with two children under the age of five, says working on the secret plans for Grazia fitted in well with her personal life.
“I get terrible moments of guilt, every working mother does, but if it’s interesting and exciting enough I find it incredibly hard to say no,” she says. “When working on the pre-launch it was great because we would do a demo and then go off and research. It was really enjoyable because I could dip in and out.”
She believes the Australian and British markets are very similar and while she could see a title like Grazia thriving in Australia, she stresses that Emap has “no plans”.
Originally she planned to stay just six months, but London is now home for McIntosh.
Yet she has retained a strong connection with Australia and returns every year to see her family and watch her daughters to run around on the beach at Torquay, near Melbourne.
An edited version of this article was published in The Australian on 17 March 2005, in the Media section. Copyright is held by Caitlin Fitzsimmons.
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Posted in Career, Writing at 11.00 pm by niltiac
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
For Lord Robert May, a man at the very pinnacle of a scientific career, life has been a “series of happy accidents”.
As a student at Sydney Boys High in the 1950s he “didn’t have the faintest idea” what he wanted to do but, as he was good at debating, was consistently advised to study law.
Fortunately, May stumbled into science instead and started a long and varied career that has included a PhD in physics, a professorship in ecology at Princeton and a stint as the chief scientist to the UK government.
Now, like Isaac Newton before him, May is president of the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation.
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Robert May
He was knighted in 1996 and awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1998, both for services to science, then in 2001 appointed one of Britain’s first Life Peers, following the removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers.
But, while he might be Lord May of Oxford to the world, the man himself has no time for airs and graces. When this reporter met him at the London offices of the Royal Society, he was warm and friendly with a distinct Australian accent and introduced himself simply as “Bob May”.
May lives in Oxford with his wife of 42 years, Judith, and spends half the week in London.
He was born in Australia in 1938 but has spent more than two-thirds of his professional life abroad, first in the United States, then in Britain.
Yet May has never really considered himself an “expat” because of the internationalism of the scientific world and the fact that his wife was born in Manhattan.
It was mostly chance that he left Australia, not something he felt was necessary to reach the top.
“I regard my life as a series of happy accidents,” May says. “If I’d stayed in Australia, who knows if … I’d had the good fortune to have a different set of accidents befall me?”
When asked what achievements he is most proud of, May deflects the question saying “it’s not something I spent a lot of time thinking about”, but over the course of the interview certain highlights do stand out.
When May was at Princeton, he and another scientist were the first to publish an estimate on the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa – a pessimistic view that sadly turned out to be more accurate than predictions by the World Health Organisation.
May moved to Britain in the late 1980s and later became chief scientific adviser to the UK government and head of the Office of Science & Technology for five years – the only time in his adult life spent outside universities and fascinating for its insight into “a completely and utterly different culture”.
May is a strong believer in the benefits of science but says people are right to be cautious.
While science has improved life for the majority of the world’s people over the past 50 years, it’s “got a lot worse for the other species that live on the planet”, and May says the three biggest challenges facing the world today are population growth, climate change and protecting biodiversity;
May’s term as president of the Royal Society ends next year and, while he doesn’t rule out an eventual return to Australia, he does plan to spend “more conscientious time” reviewing legislation in the House of Lords.
But after all these years, and despite finally taking a British passport in the 1990s, May’s identity as an Australian remains fundamental.
“I very much identify with being Australian, which is both a fact and being Australian also has certain advantages in Britain where there is still residual elements of the class system,” May says. “Being Australian puts you outside that.”
May has been back to Australia almost every year for the past 25 years and settled for being Lord May of Oxford only when he was refused permission to become Lord May of Woollahra.
“It was too silly an issue to make a fuss of. Others told me to look on the bright side – at least I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life spelling it,” he jokes.
An edited version of this article was first published in The Australian on 16 August 2004, in Worldwide. Copyright is held by Caitlin Fitzsimmons.
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03.14.05
Posted in Media & Internet, Writing at 5.25 pm by niltiac
The Light of the Word is the blog of a fellow BookCrosser Rosalind Mitchell dedicated to her fiction writing and photography.
I’m sure she would appreciate visitors and feedback on her work.
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03.13.05
Posted in Media & Internet, Theatre at 11.09 pm by niltiac
The Witches
Wyndham Theatre
9 March 2005
The Witches was jolly good fun! It is probably my favourite ever Roald Dahl book – although I do have a soft spot for Danny the Champion of the World (the only of his fiction novels without magic and yet it’s just as magical as the others!). The Witches worked brilliantly as a play, especially with the comic value of the witches themselves and Ruby Wax as the Grand High Witch.
The play was more faithful to the book than the film, so Boy was called Boy and not Luke and he does not get turned back from a mouse into a human at the end. The staging and costuming was simple but effective – particularly the ‘bald’ heads of the witches, complete with wig rash and protruding veins! I also really liked the scenes where the mouse characters – Boy and Bruno – were lifesize and trying to climb up an enormous set of stairs.
The play – and the witches – were completely over the top. As my friend Cam puts it, it was “like high-camp panto”.
Rating: ***
PS Roald Dahl has possibly the most amazing website I have ever seen! See: http://www.roalddahl.com/
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03.10.05
Posted in Environment at 11.37 am by niltiac
This New York Times article (free registration required) is about a core group of influential evangelical leaders in the United States swining their not-inconsiderable weight behind the fight against global warming. They argue that global warming is an urgent threat, a cause of poverty and a Christian cause because the Bible mandates humanity’s stewardship of God’s creation.
Fantastic! I am not an evangelical, nor indeed a Christian, but I welcome them as my allies in this deeply important cause. I truly believe that global warming is the single biggest problem facing the world today. It seriously has the the potential to change life as we know it forever. Even in a best-case scenario (and we all know that’s unlikely), we’re still looking at the rise of malaria, drought and unpredictable weather patterns and the loss of beautiful things such as polar bears, coral reefs and daffodils.
Protecting the environment – and particularly reversing global warming – should not be about traditional left vs right politics. The problem is that it’s perceived as a left-wing issue and you wind up with one side not interested in the problem and the other side not interested in the solutions. If evangelical Christians – who are incredibly influential in the US – get behind the cause, we might just stand a chance.
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03.09.05
Posted in BookCrossing, Books at 12.33 pm by niltiac
Last week at the Guardian World Book Day Forum, Caroline Michel, publisher of HarperPress, compared BookCrossing with Napster.
“And book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing: books passed from reader to reader and tracked and organised on bookcrossing.com.”
This is so wrong! The only similarity between Napster and BookCrossing is the fact that they are both online. Napster is about ripping one physical copy of a song and transferring it to thousands of users simultaneously. BookCrossing is about sharing a single, physical copy of a book. It replicates what people do anyway in passing on books to friends and family when they’re finished. We’re not digitising the books, we’re not copying the books, we’re simply tracking where they go.
BookCrossers love books and they make very good customers to bookstores and publishers. Some BookCrossers buy their books in charity stores, but you could argue there is a greater good being served there because the money goes to charity. But most BookCrossers buy an awful lot of new books. The whole BookCrossing ethos is to share books and it doesn’t work if you’re freeloading and only receiving books. Therefore, most BookCrossers buy more books than ever before. I haven’t calculated it but I believe it to be true of myself, however another BookCrosser did calculate it and she found that she bought 11 new books in 2003 prior to BookCrossing and 45 in 2004 after joining BookCrossing.
BookCrossing is not like Napster – it’s an extension of the secondhand book trade. No one can tell me that I’m not permitted to give my books to my friends and family when I’ve finished with them. (The only problem is, these people are powerful and they probably can!)
To be fair, Caroline Michel also lays into the secondhand book market:
“Online booksellers have generally been good news for the publishing industry. Amazon is now the third largest bookseller in the country and growing at a much faster rate than its competitors. But there may even be a sting in that tail: Amazon and other online retailers are developing the second-hand book market to the point where it too may soon become a threat. The second-hand market also affects current bestsellers: the retail price is of The Da Vinci Code £6.99, but buyers can find second-hand copies for £4.14 on abebooks or for as little as £3.50 on ebay. If they can’t find the book they want online, they will probably find it at Oxfam, now the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe with estimated sales of £15m a year. Oxfam’s second-hand book sales have quadrupled since 1997, with an annual growth of 10%. Growth in sales of new books is at an annual rate of about 7% in volume terms, 6% in value.
Needless to say, neither author nor publisher earns a penny from second-hand transactions. And when we, as an industry, confront these various problems, progress is not always as smooth as we expect.”
Publishing is a business and it’s only natural that they don’t like the secondhand book trade. It doesn’t mean that they should have the power to stop it – or to demand the government compensates them for it. Especially since, against all the predictions, the book industry is doing quite nicely, thank you very much!
If I buy a secondhand jacket from a charity shop, the designer doesn’t get compensated as if that were a ‘lost sale’. If I buy a secondhand car, the car manufacturer doesn’t get compensated. Why should books be any different?
As far as I understand it, the copyright exists in the physical copy of the book, and therefore the owner of that physical copy of the book is entitled to dispose of it how they will. But copyright law can be changed and the trend of copyright reform is increasingly swinging the balance away from consumer rights and the notion of “fair use” in favour of the copyright owners. For example, the term of copyright – before it expires and the work becomes part of the public domain – is extended every time Disney looks like losing exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse. Or another example is the fact that biotech companies are permitted to patent (not copyright but another form of intellectual property law) DNA, the genetic code to life. I am a writer and I am in favour of copyright to reward people for their creative efforts (this blog is copyright by the way) but I do believe in consumer rights, fair use and the importance of the public domain as well. There needs to be a balance.
However, it seems the book industry is already quite far along in its efforts to change copyright law in their favour. Perhaps, we the people will be able to resist it – after all, books are an emotive subject and charities and libraries hold a special place in people’s hearts. Or perhaps in the future books (or e-books) will come with an end-user licence agreement? Scary stuff!
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03.01.05
Posted in Media & Internet at 5.23 pm by niltiac
Please visit this site.
It’s juvenile but kinda funny!
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