Friday, November 29, 2002

Fire Up the Wayback Machine!
Through the magic of Google, I came across the original article in the The Northern Rivers Echo (Northern New South Wales, Oz) that welcomed Margo Kingston to its pages: Margo Kingston joins The Echo. (If you aren't familiar with Margo, she's rather like Michael Moore, only better looking and Australian. Her latest flap was a slanging match with the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, about her column blaming the victims for the Bali bombing. )



The Echo seems to be a free rural weekly with a circulation of 20,700. Let's see what they had to say about Margo:
Acclaimed political journalist Margo Kingston has been appointed to write on Federal politics for The Northern Rivers Echo.

Ms Kingston, who is currently the online political commentator for The Sydney Morning Herald, spent more than a decade in Canberra press gallery before recently returning to Sydney, where she keeps a weather eye on the National stage.

The Echo's editor, Simon Thomsen, said he was thrilled to have a commentator of Margo Kingston's calibre join The Echo's writing team.
...
Her weekly column, Political Corrections, will discuss major political issues facing the community and seek reader feedback. Her first column, on May 17, will discuss dairy deregulation.
Dairy deregulation! I guess that explains the shirt, but I wonder how long it took the locals in Wollongbar and Lismore to discover that she doesn't know one end of a cow from the other.

All of which brings to mind the question of what sort of gnawing hunger drove the powers-that-be at The Echo to insert an intergalactic thinker like Margo into a little local paper?