Category Archives: Entertainment

SYN celebrates 10 years of young people on air

By RMIT | Published: 15/05/2013
SYN Media is a not-for-profit media organisation run by a community of young people, providing training and broadcast opportunities to those aged 12-25. Based on RMIT’s City Campus, the station itself has just celebrated ten years of radio broadcasting. Tahlia Azaria, General Manager and RMIT Alumnus (Bachelor of Communication (Journalism)), spoke to RMIT University about [...]
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Celebrating Oz TV

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 28/02/2013
Cultural commentator Peter Craven wrote recently in The Age: “It’s absurd that our best books are not made into films.” But successful cinema it is not about a poorly remembered literary past: is about a cultural now. If the classics of Australian literature are not part of the popular cultural discourse, they have little chance [...]
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Location, location, location

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 30/01/2013
The ABC’s decision to close production in Hobart raises some issues about localism in Australian production for television as well as cinema. Location has ebbed and flowed as an issue in cinema. Mid-Pacific (or mid-Atlantic) was a term applied to productions that stripped away any vestige of identity of the production location, in a hope [...]
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Online GST push places an unfair burden on pop culture lovers

By John Lenarcic | Published: 28/09/2012
Will the long tail of the internet be docked by the fastidious imposition of GST to online purchases? Australian retailers have been lobbying the federal government to up the ante on online GST by lowering the tax-free limit so that it would apply to transactions under $1000 AUD. Some have argued that the so-called low [...]
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Are TV’s games of chance safe? Don’t bet on it

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 22/05/2012
Here is a thought: If you need a gambling licence to make a TV game show based on chance not skill, what licence will you need for a murder mystery? The first part of the question is one that is exercising the minds of British television producers and the UK Gambling Commission. It led the [...]
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Do we need a cultured approach to sport?

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 23/04/2012
As great minds in Canberra turn their thoughts to evaluating the recommendations of the Convergence Review and, in particular, the architecture of the regulatory edifice, a small but interesting bump on the road to revised anti-syphoning laws for sporting coverage on free-to-air television was noticed. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has decided to lodge objections [...]
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The Hunger Games: media hype and social marketing

By Evelyn Tsitas | Published: 05/04/2012
It is perhaps ironic that the media has set itself up as the arbiter of what is appropriate for young people to consume when it comes to fiction, given that the contentious movie of the moment holds the media up to the spotlight.
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TV ratings: now for a reality check

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 16/12/2011
The comprehensive victory by the Seven Network in the 2011 television ratings wars has had a tendency to cause amnesia among the pundits about ratings. First up, ratings are not a measure of excellence, but a measure of preference among program offerings. It is a competition between the sometimes incomparable, a measure of bulk taste [...]
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Pregnancy sucks: Twilight’s high-risk journey

By Evelyn Tsitas | Published: 21/11/2011
When it comes to The Twilight Saga’s latest instalment, Breaking Dawn, author Stephenie Meyer pulls no punches. Pregnancy sucks, literally. After a series of successful movies in her unstoppable vampire franchise, which is notorious for its lack of blood and violence as well as abstinence, fans are subjected to Bella’s high-risk pregnancy from hell. The second-last [...]
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Layers come out on top at Convergence Review

By Vincent ODonnell | Published: 07/10/2011
The Convergence Review Panel has released five detailed discussion papers that reflect the breadth of issues raised in the public and private consultations of the past five months. They are titled (with bureaucratic sobriety) Layering, Licensing and Regulation; Australian and Local Content; Spectrum Allocation and Management; Media Diversity; Competition and Market Structures; and Community Standards. [...]
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