Saving our way of life and our newspaper (or, I be pimpin')

I'm going to start this by saying I have friends who work for News Ltd. so I'm biased. So, that's out of the way. To put it bluntly, I'm pimpin' this cause because I've been asked AND because it's important to me. So, two-fold biased-ness.

Todays post is about our beloved (or loathed) Mercury newspaper. There is shit going down there and none of it is pretty. I have two things I want to draw your  attention to the first is a Tasmania Times Piece that ran a few days ago and the second is a blog that is part of the recently launched social media campaign.

Now, bloggers and journalists often don't see eye to eye but lets face it, we're all trying to achieve the same thing. We write down information for other people to access it, we hope the content, language and overall composition will attract a target audience and allow us to make some semblance of a difference. Journalists, however, work in a regulated industry and have time constraints, managers, supervisors, legislative regulations, as well as large HECS debts to pay and families to support. In other words, they stake their entire livelihood on writing. For bloggers, though, this is rarely the case. We often have other sources of income, we work outside the media industry and, as such, are in a much stronger poisition to  speak up without fear of losing our livelihoods. So, let's do this. Let's speak up on behalf of all who work at The Mercury.

As is outlined in the Tas Times piece and on the Save our Mercury blog they want to shift editing to Melbourne. This means that people who have little or no local knowledge of Tasmania will be editing the articles we read every day and while this might not seem like a big deal, it really can be. I was given an example by a friend of a headline that was once set back from Melbourne. The article was about a new part of UTAS, the headline made it read like we were getting a new university. Apparently staff in Melbourne didn't realise there was a university in Tasmania. This is just one example.

I could write more on this situation, but I'd really prefer if you read the Tas Times piece, read the blog and supported the cause on Twitter and/or Facebook 

The Mercury proclaims that it is "The Voice of Tasmania". Let's keep it that way.

Love,

Iggy x