Exciting times in the media, folks, but our favourite moment of the last few months was People’s Spokesman and Champion of Everything That Is Right And Good, AFL chief Andrew Demetriou saying on TV: ‘that bloke from Clubs Australia, I don’t even know his name… Just. Shut. Up.’

In their grand tradition of let’s-not-let-the-facts-stand-in-the-way-of-making-sweeping-pronouncements, Clubs Australia had claimed that the AFL was joining them and the NRL in a ‘war’ on Andrew Wilkie’s pokie reforms. The howler monkeys who write headlines and timetable the evening news had all they needed, be damned if it was true or not. WAR makes good linkbait if you’ve already filled your Boobs quota.

It wouldn’t have been hard to check, or to even speak to a few of the people they were quoting at third and fourth hand, but no. The incessant rush to be first with the loudest yell took over, as it always does and the loser, as it always is, was truth.

Speaking of truth, or at least whatever truth fits your agenda of the day, everyone’s favourite oppressed princess, Andrew Bolt, was found guilty of offences under the Racial Discrimination Act. You may have heard?

His response, naturally, was wailing on the front page of Australia’s most read newspaper, his radio spot, his million-hits-per-day blog and his own TV show about how his freedom of speech was being stifled. The poor little lambkin. The pain and misery kept piling up so high you could barely see his tiara, when The Monthly published Ann Summers’ piece on him that concluded, not surprisingly, that he’s a jerk. She had, in a triumph for objective journalism, reached this conclusion by starting from the premise “Andrew Bolt is a jerk” and then gathering evidence to prove her point. To be fair though, we’ve never seen any evidence that he isn’t a jerk.

This, along with the fart on Dancing With The Stars (US) and The Carbon Tax is Coming To Eat Your Babies, is news. Apparently.

Lest we continue to give this oxygen, let’s move on.

News Limited came up with a dynamic new going forward paradigmic adjustment of their goal-orientation through a systemic upscaling and migration of brand structures. That is to say, they’re designing a few new logos and paying consultants millions of dollars to decide which is the best one and then prove it with powerpoint presentations and some bullshit PR-speak.

This tsunami-like shift in the media landscape was leaked to Crikey within a week of its conception and the only significant wave it made was a particularly good First Dog On The Moon cartoon that day.

Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC a few years back, as if we were all suddenly going to forget that the red and white buckets contained fried chicken and not, damn our gullibility, something else. Deep-fried, battery-grown, frozen-for-a-lifetime chicken by any other name, still tastes like shit.

Likewise, do they think changing News Ltd to News Australia and having a cute new logo is going to have people double-taking as they pick up the Oz or the Tele or the Herald-Sun? Oh look, they have a new logo, it looks like quality journalism now!

We, here at The Tribune, also have a new logo, it’s quite cute isn’t it? It’s a tribute to the whippets who rule the lounge room where The Tribune is published. Our name hasn’t changed, it’s still what it was when we started as the newsletter for the little wine bar in Elwood four years ago, but the magazine itself is actually new. And, having thrown ourselves into the wider media pool with a small yet stylish splash, we’re still going. Just.

Getting a new magazine off the ground is a long way from easy, folks. Having random strangers accost us in the street to tell us they have a friend who works in magazines and therefore they know for a fact that we will fail utterly is not nearly as helpful as it sounds. Despite this, we remain firmly of the belief that people want to read magazines, that they recognise good writing and that they want more diversity in the media they consume

Too much of the media publishes for the echo chamber; pick up a News Ltd or Fairfax paper, or peruse certain online news and opinion sites and, before you read it, you know what angle they’ll have, whatever the topic.

You know what you’re going to get when you pick up the King’s Tribune, too: diversity of opinion, quality writing and a healthy dose of lulz amongst the smarts.

As we’ve said before though, this shit don’t come for nothing (except on the ABC, damn their little not-for-profit souls) hence we have to have a cover price and a paywall. Until someone is willing to hand over a million bucks so we can spend the next few years giving you this for nothing, there’s not much else we can do. However, as someone said to us recently, if i have to pay for a magazine, why should I have to put up with advertising as well?

We get that; it’s like paying for cable TV and still having all your shows interrupted by ads every five minutes. No-one wants to buy a magazine and have to flip through fifteen pages of ads for fast food and cars you don’t want before you get to content written solely for the purposes of not offending the advertisers. And as editors we don’t want to have to spend our time counting how many times someone said ‘fuck’ in the magazine because won’t someone think of the children’s lobby groups.

So it comes down to this: if the magazine is good enough, interesting enough and worth your time and money you will continue to buy it, or better yet, take out a subscription. If you don’t think it’s worth it then you’re probably right and we shouldn’t keep going anyway.

We love what we do, but that’s not a good enough reason for you to fund it; Australia desperately needs more independent media, but it has to use that independence to say something worthwhile. Good writers need more forums for their craft and should be paid for what they do, but they have to be good enough for you to think they’re worth paying for. That’s what we want to do with the Tribune. We hope you want to come along for the ride.

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Coming up in future King’s Tribunes: Malcolm Farnsworth, Dee Madigan, Sue Ann Post, Robert Candelori, Dominic Knight, Bronwyn Hinz, Ben Pobjie and more from all our fabulous regulars. Enjoy!

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