Norgdom

I’m off to Sydney and Melbourne next week and would love to have a drink with local peeps to celebrate the launch of Sydney and Melbourne norgs. Spread the word - everyone is welcome. Here are the details:

Sydney Meetup
Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Time: 6.00pm onwards
Location: Opera Bar
Where’s that? Lower Concourse Level of the Sydney Opera House

Melbourne Meetup
Date: Friday, November 30, 2007
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Riverland Bar
Where’s that? Federation Wharf
You can RSVP on facebook or just pitch up. Everyone is invited

Thanks to Cameron Reilly, John Johnston and Ajay Ranipeta for organising the events. I owe you guys a beer

Hopefully I’ll make it to Brisbane next time.

Also keep an eye out for me at the Walkley’s which are on Wednesday night - it’s televised live and I plan on spreading the new media message. Any ideas on how I can do that which does not involved being kicked out of the event?

If you are on Twitter you can now subscribe to our feeds by following SydneyNorg, MelbourneNorg, BrisbaneNorg or PerthNorg.

For those who are new to the Norg, the guy in the Twitter feed pic was on a house ad we had on the site for ages and now he’s been immortalised as the face of our Twitter feeds. I call him Norgman

As you all would have noticed - and for the few who may not have - PerthNorg is not a lonely Norg anymore and has grown to include Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as well as our special Election07 Norg.

All Cit Js have access to all the sites, so we are a connected community. Norg.com.au now hosts the feeds from all sites.

We’re working on a cross posting function that means you can push a story out to all sites if it’s not just a story with local interest. Let me know how you want this all to work, as our motto here is “what the community wants”.

We have a lot of work to do, but I trust that our other communities will come to love and contribute to the Norg as we have here in Perth.
Thanks to Myles for all his great work.

Go forth and norg it

Cit J Matt Didicoe has created a nifty little plugin that shows the top stories from the norg to be displayed on your blog. He’s created it so it can be customised to pull news in from any of our sites, as we’ll be moving into other cities soon.

It looks like this:

I asked Matt to send me some info on on the plugin - so here it is direct from him:

About

The Norg Media plugin offers the ability to select how many items you want to show and which city to take a feed from. This last part is somewhat pointless at the moment as there is only PerthNorg, but I’m hoping that eventually the Norg will spread to other cities.

Getting

Download the file here: http://sandbox.didcoe.id.au/norg.zip

Installing

After downloading, unzip the file and upload to the /wp-content/plugins directory
In the plugins menu of your WordPress install, active the Norg Media plugin
Go to the options tab and look for the sub-tab of ‘Setup your norg feed’
Change the number of items you want to show
In your template file, where you want to display it, add . This will produce a header with the appropriate city information and the list of the latest articles (you can see it working at http://didcoe.id.au in the sidebar on the right)
Support

If you need a hand getting it working, head over to here and post a comment.

Top stuff Matt.

This caught my eye on the weekend in The West Australian and if it’s true it is totally outrageous.

Under the headline “Fairfax hires Labor lobbyists” it read (the story does not appear to be online):

“Eastern States media group Fairfax has hired Labor strategists Hawker Britton to help in its negotiations with the State Government as part of its plans to set up a news website in Perth.

The West Australian also understands Hawker Britton has employed former premier Geoff Gallop’s chief-of-staff Sean Walsh, who ran Dr Gallop’s office for five years.

Hawker Britton’s Perth office is run by John Whitelaw, the former chief-of-staff to Police Minister John Kobelke. Former Labor MP Megan Anwyl was a director of the lobby group before leaving the position last week.

Mr Walsh could not be contacted yesterday, while Mr Whitelaw did not respond to requests for comment and Mr Anwyl refused to comment.

The West Australian revealed yesterday that the WA Government and its senior public servants were meeting senior Fairfax executives to discuss plans for their online service.

Paul Giles, acting manager of strategic communication in the Government Media Office, said in a letter to the public servants that the meeting was a chance to “discuss news format, editorial stance and media mix along with advertising opportunities, promotional activity and any other matters of interest.”

There have been rumours of Fairfax coming to Perth for some time, I blogged about it in March. So the move into the West Australian market is not so surprising, but what are they talking to the Government about? Since when do news corporations talk to the government about editorial stance?

There is no need for Fairfax to talk to the Government about launching an online news service for any legal reasons - online news remains out of the scope of media ownership laws.

The West Australian has a somewhat strained relationship with the current Labor Government - Health Minister Jim McGinty called for editor Paul Armstrong to be sacked over a health story that eventually made its way to the Press Council and which The West subsequently lost. So the doors are open for another news organisation to court favour with the Government - after all they are one of the biggest spenders of advertising dollars.

I don’t think replacing one media bias with another is a positive thing. And mainstream media wonders why we are so cynical? They make it too easy.