gatewatching

You didn’t miss anything with respect to my post - it was probably more conciliatory than DS deserved. Not the least of Possum’s many virtues is his finely honed killer instinct.

I think your response was more than good enough, William, although you’re right that Possum’s was quite, um… engaged.

The interesting thing is that Shanahan is revisiting this at a point when the sound and fury of the campaign has died down. It suggests a couple of things to me.

First, that he’s aware that you guys are still pulling an audience that the Oz needs to present itself as authoritative to. The Oz is still niche media in important ways, and it needs to maintain the idea that it’s a sure guide to politics, that the opinion writers are insiders and they’re across all political developments. Shana is picking the fight cos he needs to re-establish his mastery, and the psephosphere is diminishing his authority as a poll interpreter (Possum’s post implies an inkling that some of Dennis’s peers are openly deriding him).

Second, though, once again he’s paying you all a funny sort of backhander by continuing the conversation. The really strategic thing to do would be to never mention any of you again. Either he just can’t bring himself to let it go, or he realises this is something he needs to address.

Of margins of errors and poll wars (and Dr 7%)…

I wrote recently about Dennis Shanahan’s attempt to revive the poll wars. Possum both answers back, and gives Dennis some incidental love by taking notice of the Newspoll.
The Nightwatchman has stormed to a new low of 7% as preferred PM, a moveme…

it needs to maintain the idea that it’s a sure guide to politics,

hahahhahahahahahah. Unintentional hilarity. The Australian? Credible?

Theory 2: provoking the blogosphere is a surefire method of attracting eyeballs.

It’s a dull explanation but more likely than the re-establishing authority one. It must be clear even to Dennis that he’s been thoroughly outgunned. I’m thinking here about the nature of the Oz/blogosphere relationship more generally than Dennis and polls particularly.

Lyn - you may be right, but drawing eyeballs to one’s mistakes doesn’t seem strategically sound either. The way to settle this would be to have a really good idea about the overlaps between the Oz’s and the psephosphere’s audiences, and what the corridor talk is around the gallery, among staffers etc. about all this. I’m sure that there’s some prestige anxiety in there somewhere.

True, prestige anxiety would account for some of it, but recall what happened around poll wars round 1. Comments were closed and opinion columnist blogs slowed to a trickle. If that. They retreated behind the old one way media model.

Planet Janet chose to respond to Keating’s letter with one of her own, comments all round. Dennis exposes himself to ridicule a blind person could have seen coming in blog format. A commenter is a commenter - no point being somewhere you can’t comment.

No idea about the corridor talk, but read through the comments on blog entries on Dennis. Plenty of them talk about the comments being made on Dennis’ blog. The same commenters turn up all over the place, wherever the action is.

[...] - the days of the newspaper as the premier space for news analysis are numbered, as (for example) the 2007 poll wars and their recent rekindling have shown -, but the positioning (or indeed, posturing) of any one news Website as the [...]