En Passant

Dear Readers, sometimes your post might get held up for moderation. This might be because it comes from a source often identified with spam, or contains words that are often used in spam.  And to avoid late spam I have cut down the time for comments to be made to a week from publication. Because I [...]

Readership of my blog has dropped by about 60 percent in the last week. When the choice for those who have been slaving for the boss for the last year is between Saturnalia, sloth and family or reading revolutionary political blogs, not surprisingly Saturnalia wins. Still, I’m pleasantly surprised more than a thousand people visited my site over Christmas. Small bickies [...]

My readership numbers are dropping faster than Malcolm  Turnbull’s popularity. I don’t have utegate to blame.  I am not a millionaire. And I have never been a merchant banker.  Where am I going wrong?

The last month saw a big spike in readers, especially from the US.  That increase has now dropped back so that the readership is leveling out at around its pre-spike levels.  The blog was ephemerally attractive to a wider audience.   Maybe the shock of the new wore off.  How to recapture the magic?

While I wait for my employer’s decision on outside employment/activity, I have decided to ask two people I know and trust politically to run the site for me, including writing their own articles.  My thanks to Bill Nile and Leonie Bronstein, who already lead busy lives, for agreeing to help out over the next month or so.

I am seeking my new employer’s agreement to continue any paid activities like this blog.  While ‘paid’ is stretching it, it is nevertheless outside activity which could theoretically impact on my responsibility to work for my employer, (but won’t).  There could (although I doubt it) be conflict of interest issues that need clarifying. For that reason, from [...]

I have just accepted a part time job offer working on environmental law.  I am pretty excited by the prospect of learning about a whole new area of policy and law.  For the blog it means my posts might be slightly less frequent (although I love doing this so much I might just end up [...]

Well, not quite masked.  But the photos in my banner above have evidently been causing some conjecture among staff in a major Pubic service agency.  They’ve figured out I am the one with the red and white St George football scarf, and know the identity of 3 of the other four.  But who is the [...]

Oh dear!  Just as I start to think that maybe my ramblings are getting a wider audience, (and I mention that on this site), along come the most recent readership figures. Maybe karma does exist after all. What can I say? Read, read, read?  Or maybe ‘bag me out’.

Jack Waterford is the editor in chief of the Canberra Times and a fine writer. In an article in Saturday’s Canberra Times (“Newspapers still click with the web’s instant news users” B2 CT Forum Saturday December 27) he says that the thing that newspapers can do better than other mediums is analyse, explain, put in [...]