Remember Fairfax’s plans for a totally gnarly website (codenamed Kwerky) aimed at “free-spending hedonists desperate to have their say”? Well it’s here and it’s even worse than I thought.

What those groundbreaking and envelope-pushing folk at Fairfax have done with The Vine is simply take the website template used for The Age and the SMH, change the background image, remove the political stories and replace them with more advertising masquerading as content.

“How is this going to attract those hedonists?” I hear you ask. Well, the uberfunky writers at The Vine say crazy and zany things like “Adelaide: so much more than murder and churches.” Oooooh, dark satire, mang!

And what’s a mainstream media outlet’s attempt at Web2.0 without a Web1.3 outcome? The Vine’s interactive interface starts and ends with a chance for readers to comment and some news stories presented as “blogs” (even though they’re clearly not blogs.)

Basically the whole site stinks of try-hard and pathetic. It’s a poorly built and conceived attempt to attract younger people to existing Fairfax advertising using pissweak graphic design and by paying lip service to social networking. It will decompose faster than a turd in the hot summer sun.

(Thanks to Damian for discovering the rebranded Kwerky that I’d spent weeks looking for.)

Andrew Jaspan and The Age salivated over it then, and Melbourne’s leading gutter-tabloid broadsheet is still salivating over it now.

The way that this supposedly respectable newspaper shamelessly uses sex to try and attract readers is pathetic. Andrew Jaspan has a lot to answer for.

(Also, I bet that poor woman had no idea that she’d end up being used as soft-core erotica and reader bait for the rest of The Age’s existence.)

UPDATE (12.55pm): Someone at The Age obviously thought the same as me.

What an age we live in. Today people aren’t content with merely reading the news, they also have a weird urge to crawl up out of the ground and soil the news with idiodic comments. Consider this comment about the 2020 Summit from The Age’s website:

In my view the most pressing issue of our time in terms of Australia’s identity is stopping the downward socialist spiral we are on, and preventing Chairman Rudd’s attempts at making Australia the 34th province of China.

His socialist bent is disturbing at the very least, most recently his universal childcare program that is obviously intended to imprint his socialist doctine (sic) on children straight out of the womb.

All hail Bolt!

I found this delicious line in The Age just now:

The scariest interview subject is in Saudi Arabia. An imam who has just led a prayer calling for the destruction of America gives Spurlock the crazy eyes.

Crazy eyes? Just who is responsible for that crap?

Looking up I see it’s Roger Moore.

Sorry, Roger. Love your work.

Here’s Melbourne’s “quality” broadsheet delivering the kind of quality investigative journalism that we’ve sadly come to expect from it.

Seriously, Melburnians should just read MX. At least it’s free.

Melbourne’s tabloid-broadband lifestyle supplement Fairfax “newspaper”, The Age, recently added a tagline to its masthead that reads: Australia’s Independent Newspaper

Fair to say that I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read that. “Independent from what?” I thought. Certainly not from corporate editorial control; nor from celebrity news. Perhaps what they mean is independence from significant right-wing balance or from any sense of ethical conflict when advertising dictates the selection and composition of stories.

Don’t get me wrong — I think the Herald Sun is much more worthy of lining my cat’s litter tray than The Age but at least the Hun doesn’t arrogantly tout itself as “independent”.

What else is the Age independent from, GrodsReaders?

The Age’s pretentious blog-hating blogger, Jim Schembri, has written a fawning piece about the Australian-born, Hollywood actress Radha Mitchell. Jim’s hard-hitting and critical journalism skillz have produced an article of such alarming vapidity and so lacking in substance that it’s difficult to cut-and-paste into this post. Normally I wouldn’t even bother reading this kind of article (despite The Age deeming celebrity rubbish worthy of page six) but Radha decides to give us a sanctimonious lecture on politics from a proud position of stunning ignorance.

SHE may be a citizen of the world, but Melbourne-born, Hollywood-bred, LA-based actress Radha Mitchell will have her say come election time. Provided she can work out where to send her vote.

“I’ve asked somebody to help me out with that, just to get the thing to the ballot or whatever,” the hugely talented 34-year old says with a rich Californian accent.

“Hugely talented“! It’s hard to type with one hand under the desk isn’t it, Jim?

…Mitchell spoke frankly of her voting intentions.

“Just get that guy [John Howard] out, you know?” she says, laughing. “Get rid of him. Move on. It’s not just the economy that drives the next evolution of where society should be going.”

Having lived in Los Angeles for almost a decade, Mitchell says she doesn’t read Australian newspapers to keep up with local events, relying instead on more informal sources such as TV and “my mum on the phone. ‘What’s going on? Oh, there’s a drought?”‘ She laughs again.

Hugely talented, yet celebrating the fact that she has absolutely no idea about the world outside Los Angeles.

“I don’t have a very provincial Australian point of view,” she says.

You don’t have any kind of view, Radha.

“I have more of a global point of view. I do feel like the environment is a big issue.

“And obviously we need to pay attention to the sense of impotence about global poverty, which is a little pathetic.”

You’d know all about pathetic wouldn’t you, Mitchell?

Though she is self-conscious about sounding like “I’m standing on a soapbox”, Mitchell is eager to back her words with action.

“It’s almost like we’ve reached a point where we can redesign our concept of culture, like we don’t have to just accept things the way they are.”

To that end, she’d like to set up a local office for Global Green, the environmental organisation founded and chaired by former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I might help do that, but I’m no politician. I would just help (by being) somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody.”

Please, Radha, don’t stress yourself. You must be flat out.

“It’s an amazing profession and it’s a privilege to be able to act in movies.”

She checks herself. “God, this is so honest. You better be careful how you present me.”

Not a problem. Mitchell no longer reads her own press.

Is that the smell of burning humility? Or is it Schembri’s burning lubricant?

I’m Radha Mitchell and I’m here to help (aren’t I beautiful?)

I’m not known for Internet fads. Everyday I recieve many emails along the lines of “Kevin Rudd has added you to his Facebook. Would you like to join?”

The answer is, of course, shit no. I would barely even have heard of FaceBook if it wasn’t for The Age - a quick Google search of their domain reveals 525 hits for “FaceBook”.

Are these Age journalists really that enthralled by a fairly popular social networking site that they deem it news 525 times? It is of no surprise to find that not one of these news stories was even of the slightest importance. No “Osama found in Facebook offices”, no “Facebook spills oil along Alaskan coast”, not even a “Facebook deems itself President For Life”.

So why the interest?

Any theories?

At risk of looking like an Age hater, I couldn’t help but giggle at this graphic of Rudd from their main page:

Amatuerish or what?

We’re all used to newspaper journalists blowing their load every time a politician posts a video on YouTube or somebody edits Wikipedia (thus proving beyond doubt its untrustworthiness). And we’re also used to dead-tree “journalists” shamelessly republishing blog content as original news, in the process demonstrating their stubborn ignorance about how blogs work.

So Peter Garrett writes a silly little blog on Kevin07 about singing songs in the shower in order to time them. Quaint. The Age dutifully runs an entire article on Garrett’s blog post, complete with quotes from his commenters calling them “bloggers”.

Blogger Matt Burke suggested Josh Pyke’s Middle of the Road at 2 minutes 24 seconds, because “Kevin Rudd has repeatedly said that ‘there’s this huge mountain to climb to win this election’.”

But fellow blogger Nico had a better idea for a water-saving music tip: “Load up the stereo with music you can’t stand,” she wrote on the blog.

“Put the stereo beyond arm’s reach in the bathroom and hit play at full volume. Hop in the shower. You’ll be making that shower as short as you can, so you can get out and turn off the damn music!”

GrodsCorp has been continually scathing over time about The Age’s rush to the bottom of the sensationalist and lazy journaliasm pit, but if you are left in any doubt you simply must read Adam 1.0’s review of yesterday’s The Age website frontpage.

Recently, the media has been working itself into a frenzy over the revelations that John Howard’s office has been editing Wikipedia articles to show him in a more positive light. I seriously doubt Howard knew about this (as technical matters are beyond him), but what would happen if you used WikiScanner (the site that busted them) to look up the IP addresses of other people?

For instance, what would happen if I looked up the IP address of (and this is a completely random example) Age journalist Chris Johnston, who has an alarming habit of leaving anonymous comments both here and on Random Brainwave, as well as googling himself to see if he the darling of the Australian blogosphere (he isn’t)?

Clearly bored with self-googling, he has now moved on to editing (and occasionally vandalising) Wikipedia.

His many, many, many edits include Airbourne, the tragic 1998 Grand Final (in which he sagely notes that “Many believe North Melbourne’s defeat was due to the presence of a bloke called Mario”), Age editor Andrew Jaspen (he created the page), the Bra Boys, Henry Kissinger, Big Brother contestant Simon Deering/HotDogs (in which he enthused that HotDogs posed naked “with a strategicly [sic] placed hampsster [sic] covering his genitals” and that “He lists his favourite food as Kinder Suprise [sic] - “It’s a delicous [sic] snack and a toy, bonus!”), Wayne Carey (he removed a link to the Herald Sun), the talk page of The West Australian (in which he defends his employers honour - “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black: how can you mount an attack on a paper’s journalistic style with a one-sided rant such as this, packed with unsourced [sic]and unsubstantiated claims?”), and puzzlingly, Sunrise host David Koch (where he states “*Koch rates turkey slapping, co host Mel, as funniest incident of 06.”)

His ongoing contributions can been seen here, and we applaud his excellent work.

Update: The good people at Girlfriend Magazine have also been hard at work.

The Editor updates (29 Aug): Chris has popped in to deny that he is responsible for these edits. Even so, they’re still hilarious edits for Fairfax staff to have made.

Update (30 Aug): Telstra go nus on Wikipedia. Very entertaining.

Last week GrodsCorp had a go at The Age’s pathetic reader polls. But yesterday’s poll, as published today with results, rocks:

Should State Parliament proceedings be available via internet streaming?
Yes: 81%
No: 19%
Total: 21 votes

21 votes. 21! This Print 2.0 thing is really working out for Fairfax, ain’t it?

Yesterday’s The Age readers’ poll, as published today with results:

Is John Howard a hit on YouTube?
Yes: 10%
No: 90%
Total: 1334 votes

Today’s GrodsCorp reader poll: Is The Age poll’s shiteness just another sign of that paper’s steady slide towards sensationalist populism with sub-zero journalistic integrity?

Votes in comments.

The Melbourne International Film Festival kicked off last night and my first film of 13 is tonight. As in previous years GrodsCorp will review each film viewed while providing crucial updates on Bicycle Pump Man sightings (I might even see if I can get a photo this year.)

Recent convert to blogging, Jim Schembri, on the other hand, is too lazy to blog about his MIFF experiences so he is asking his reader(s) to do the work:

CineTopia would like to hear your comments about anything you see - and we mean anything. The strength of any film festival such as MIFF is that it allows you to see things you might not see otherwise, or may ever see again.

So while comments on films that will get a commercial release are welcome, CineTopia is particularly interested in those hidden gems residing in the distant corners of the program that most people never get to hear about. Certain films that warrant special attention will get a separate page.

If you wish to submit a review to CineTopia, there are just a few basic grounds rules to observe:

(1) Please put the film’s name in caps;

(2) Keep your pieces to a max of around 200 words;

(3) Don’t be backwards about coming forward - but, please, no blurting. Sentences, punctuation and grammar are still very much in favour, even on the ethernet.

First he trashes blogging, then he starts blogging, then he gets other people to do his blogging for him. Does Schembri have no shame?