With ers Without You

“Have ABC or the Courier-Mail run it yet?"

That was the standing order when I worked the CMS at 4BC radio.

No matter how solid the tip or tweet, nothing went live until a “bigger” outlet blessed it first. The policy didn’t just throttle scoops; it taught an entire shift of producers to become professional copy-pasters.

“Become a source for news lots of people want, and can’t find anywhere else.”
— Katie Drummond, Wired

Drummond’s line is a manifesto for a business model that most publishers have abandoned. Original digging is costly, slow, legally risky and—crucially—doesn’t scale with CPM ads. The result is churnalism: Google “DOGE agency” or “Siri delay” and you’ll find dozens of articles that quote one another, not the underlying documents.

Exhibit A — John Gruber’s Apple Intelligence mea culpa

“In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story …”
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Every Apple Intelligence feature demoed at WWDC 2025 shipped; the ambitious, un-demoed “personalised Siri” suite didn’t. Gruber’s 6,000-word post—“Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” (12 Mar 2025)—was a public flogging of his own blind spot. Why did the wider tech press whiff too? Because they were busy quoting one another’s ecstatic AI takes instead of checking developer seeds or asking engineers whether the code existed.

Exhibit B — Patrick McGee’s Apple in China

Financial Times veteran Patrick McGee handed in his manuscript in September 2024. Over the next eight months Apple’s China exposure collided with a fresh round of Trump tariffs, yet tech desks were glued to OpenAI press releases. When Apple in China finally dropped (13 May 2025), reviewers called it “prophetic”, but the reporting had been finished for almost a year. The scoop potential was there; the ad-driven incentive was not.

Exhibit C — Wired’s 62,000-subscriber spike

When Elon Musk took charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January, Wired went all-in—“several stories a day, seven days a week,” as Drummond puts it.

“After a week, I looked around and said, ‘Where is everyone else? Why aren’t other news organisations covering this?’” Business Insider

The vacuum was so obvious, Wired signed 62,500 paying subscribers in two weeks. Readers literally paid to reward reporting nobody else bothered to do.

Why This Keeps Happening?

Cost pressure: Shrinking head-counts, wages not meeting inflation, senior staff not staying on the beat, freelance rates that don’t cover FOI fees | No budget for research or visits.

Ad-first metrics: Speed beats depth; SEO beats shoe-leather. Hot takes out-rank deep stories.

Litigation risk: Australia’s defamation law / US SLAPP threats chill stories. Editors spike anything without a spare legal war-chest.

Platform algorithms: Virality skews towards the same “shiny object” (right now: AI). Homogenised front pages.

I’m sure there’s other factors not even on my radar today including audience care-factor.

The Fallout

• Unsexy beats (local councils, supply chains) wither.
• Corporations spin unchecked because no reporter wants to be the lone sceptic.
• News ‘breaks’ via Police social media or emergency service press release.
• Audiences see identical copy across 12 sites and decide the press is “lazy”.

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

“If everyone’s writing the same story, there’s a story missing.” — David Carr

Let’s go find the missing ones.

How I create a ceremony

I was asking for a Mac app recommendation from Claude but now I’m a Mac developer.

An ounce of originality is worth a pound of imitation.

– Orson Welles

There is only one thing worse than being imitated, and that is not being imitated.

– Coco Chanel

I sat next to a young honeymooning couple from Guatemala on my flight home to Tassie tonight.

They booked their entire Australia holiday based on ChatGPT planning their itinerary.

I added some local understanding to a few of the routes in Tassie they wanted, but it was a pretty good trip. Hamilton Island, Sydney, Tasmania, covering all their wants in the holiday.

If you haven’t figured out how AI is going to change your business or employment like it’s changing travel then you’re behind the eight ball.

I’d also love to have that conversation with you, particularly if you don’t know how ChatGPT figures out who and how to recommend what it recommends.

New blog post on my wedding celebrant website: The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers

The way we’re going here we’ll be on ICQ soon and I am here for it: Friendster is back.

My favourite Charles Bukowski quote is “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.” Mainly because when you share it, some people are too confident it’s about them.

Today’s another one of those weird days in the best and most beautiful, yet also so strange, wedding industry. Sometime in a few years over a beer remind me to tell you the story about the Tasmanian Wedding Directory

My only experiences with electric vehicles are in renting them, and I rent quite a few as I travel.

The out-of-home charging infrastructure is bad.

Three stories from today:

1. I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s home in suburban Gold Coast and the nearest public charging infrastructure is a 15 minute drive away. It’s got two charging bays, each time I visit there’s a queue.
2. I had a long drive today and needed to charge in Brisbane before the drive. I get fee Chargefox charging with my Sixt rental but the best located charging station was at a BP. The app - BP Pulse - is yet another horrible corporate app that forgets logins, doesn’t work well, and the third BP app I have on my phone. The working charger didn’t work, and the second was pre-identified as not working. So once the “working charger” had not charged the charging cable was locked and would not come out of the car. The BYD Atto’s manual is electronic and requires the car have internet access. There are three methods to manually unlock, it took me to the third method.
3. Charging station locations on Apple Maps and Google Maps sucks. Tonight I wanted to charge at a certain charger and I started the journey in a no-service area so I used BYD in-built maps which don’t know about an exit that had changed so I missed the exit and almost ran out of battery because I couldn’t charge at the BP charger earlier. Further to that I’m now charging at a charger in Brisbane city that’s not on any mapping application but is in the Chargefox app, however in the app it’s across the road and a few hundred metres away and apparently in a construction yard.

It’s a weird time to be a travelling EV driver.

Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamoured with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.

– Jeremy Tate

On the same day Fuji announced invest a new camera (which I would love to own!) I discover an app that shoots in one of the Fuji’s built-in aspect ratios, made famous by Hasselblad: 65x24.

The thing that breaks my mind about crops like this is that you’re leaving good pixels on the table.

Which activates a traumatised part of my brain. But also reminds mee of the power of a good editor. That the best editors know what to remove, not what to add.

picked up a new cool domain name for my non-personal and non-wedding blogging: thesmh.com.au

The human spirit is a beautiful cacophony of stupidity and kindness.

If that beautiful mixture of stupidity and kindness is out of balance, well, that’s why we have journalism and social media.

Our Goldie is four

I hearby proclaim that from today the opposite of a wanker is a Sam Kerr and all Australians shall now use it as a proclamation of encouragement.

Suggested use: “You’re such a Sam Kerr!”