Signal man

Wickr is so last year if you’re the tech savvy minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull. Our spy operatives say Turnbull recently downloaded an encryption app called Signal. Earlier this month Turnbull was revealed to be using a secure messaging app called Wickr. The suggestion was that Turnbull and some of his colleagues were using the app to exchange encrypted and self-destructing messages during the Liberals’ leadership crisis.

But now the minister has moved on to Signal, which according to security website the Intercept is even more effective in keeping his messages secretive. “Unlike other text messaging products, Signal’s code is open source, meaning it can be inspected by experts, and the app also supports forward secrecy, so if an attacker steals your encryption key, they cannot go back and decrypt messages they may have collected in the past,” the Intercept reported. What is he plotting now?

Hoopla’s hoops

When Wendy Harmer announced she was closing the independent women’s opinion site the Hoopla after four years, she blamed the crowded market and publishing rivals with deep pockets like Mia Freedman and Fairfax’s Daily Life. It’s true, there are a lot of women’s opinion sites; one even launched the very day the Hoopla folded, the unfortunately named RendezView. (Benjamin Law suggested on Twitter it sounded like something Kath and Kim invented.)



It’s also true there is no love lost between the rival outlets with some barbed comments flying between them this week.

Sarrah Le Marquand, editor of News Corp Australia’s RendezView insisted her site would be intelligent, sophisticated and accessible: “I say that as someone who has worked on a tabloid, and in mainstream media, I don’t come from the lofty little corner of the media where I’m good at pontificating at the great unwashed,” she told Mumbrella. “When you work in the mainstream media at a mass title like the Daily Telegraph you have to connect to the broader readership. I really think an intelligent but accessible tone is something that is unique to us.” As opposed to intelligent but inaccessible at Fairfax or the Hoopla?

Mia Freedman - mourned the end of the Hoopla. Photograph: Anna Kucera/The Guardian

Then there was this from Hoopla publisher Jane Waterhouse: “We knew there were plenty of ‘mummy sites’ in the market but were determined to talk to women as women first. If our readers were mothers, that was secondary – it did not define them.” Take that mummy blogger Mia Freedman.

Waterhouse also said “Jason Lavigne [Freedman’s husband] and Mia Freedman, with Debrief Daily, are aggressive local competitors with deep pockets.” Harmer has made no secret she is not a fan of Freedman’s business model, which relies on little or no payment to writers and unpaid interns. But that didn’t stop Freedman tweeting that it was a sad day that the Hoopla had closed.

One of the unfortunate outcomes of the RendezView venture is that Le Marquand has left her position as Daily Telegraph opinion editor, a key role on the paper, for a somewhat off-Broadway “women’s pages” role. She has been replaced by Joe Hildebrand, who was the opinion editor before he joined Ten as a panelist on Studio 10.

Don’t look back in anger

At least Harmer got to announce her own demise. As did the Australian Financial Review’s Joe Aston who announced in his Rear Window column on Wednesday that Channel Nine and Fairfax had dumped the joint venture Sunday morning business show Financial Review Sunday, in which Aston featured.

Essentially the show ran on sponsorship dollars and there weren’t enough to keep it afloat. Tongue firmly in cheek, Aston cited “defamation costs associated with the Rear Window segment” as one of the reasons.

Netflix’s office party

Streaming giant Netflix formally launched at Sydney’s MCA on Tuesday night with rooms themed to represent the company’s biggest brands such as House of Cards – and plenty of Netflix stars to mingle with media including Daryl Hannah (Sense8), Ellie Kemper (The Office), Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline), Remy Hii (Marco Polo) and Jennette McCurdy (Between).

Netflix execs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos paid homage to Australian creatives and said they hoped to commission local content. “Australia is one of the great creative beds in the world for great films, television and documentaries,” Sarandos said.

House of Cards: Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as Frank and Claire Underwood. Photograph: David Giesbrecht/Netflix

Favoured shirt

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has cleared the ABC for its infamous Putin sketch last November which got 7.30 and its host Leigh Sales into a spot of bother. Unimpressed by the sketch from The Checkout’s Kirsten Drysdale about Tony Abbott’s promise to “shirtfront” the Russian president, Sales had tweeted that it wasn’t her decision to air it.

But it turns out, the sketch was OK by broadcasting authorities after all so we can all just calm down. “Although 7.30 is generally a ‘news and information’ program for the purposes of the [TV] code, the ACMA notes that the segment was comedic, light-hearted and highly satirical in tone,” ACMA’s report said, concluding the segment was not a breach of the code.



“It accepts the ABC’s submissions that the segment was clearly labelled as a light-hearted satire focussed on the ‘shirtfront’ comment; such satire will often incorporate some elements of actuality or fact so that audiences can understand the context for the satirical treatment; and audiences will not rely on satirical content in the same way as content based on fact and presented to inform.

“Further, in this case the audience was alerted to the transition from information to satire and the material was distinctively different to the serious current affairs content that preceded it.”

Vladimir Putin: it’s OK to mock him on the ABC, says ACMA. Photograph: Reuters

Mistaken identity

Finally, a snippet from the ongoing war between the Australian and the ABC. On Wednesday the Australian published a piece from Darren Davidson about how the ABC allegedly failed adequately to cover the death of former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

“No doubt they will try to catch up and make up for their lapse but the initial failing was instructive and can’t beglossed over,” the Oz thundered in a separate editorial. “It speaks to a culture that misjudges what is important and the central role of the ABC. It suggests a social media-driven penchant for populism that ignores the weighty guidelines of the ABC charter.”



In Davidson’s article he referred to ABC News media manager Sally Jackson as “a spokesman”, despite having shared an office with the former Oz journo as recently as last year. The ABC responded to the Oz with a statement including links to all the stories it had published on the death of the dictator.

“The assertions made by the Australian today in this editorial, opinion column by Chris Kenny and opinion article by Darren Davidson are unjustified and hysterical,” corporate affairs said. But there was a cheeky last line, of a nature not usually seen in ABC statements: “Further, according to Davidson ABC News media manager Sally Jackson is a ‘spokesman’. That is also incorrect. She is a woman.”