CAITLIN FITZSIMMONS

I have a story in the news pages of The Australian today about electric car network Better Place and how it plans to use Australia as a test case for the US.

14 July 2010 | Australia the test bed for electric car push into US.

I attended the International Society for Stem Cell Research annual meeting in San Francisco and wrote a feature on new ethical issues for weekly health section of The Australian.

26 June 2010 | Deeper into uncharted waters: embryo research.

I had a story published in The Australian’s travel section on the weekend. This was a revised and shortened version of the San Francisco streetcar story I did for the LA Times last month. The hook for Australians is that the fleet contains two Melbourne trams.

12 June 2012 | Last stop San Francisco

I have been writing a bit about Facebook for The Australian recently.

I have an article in the Monday media section of The Australian about Facebook’s rocky relationship with the Australian Federal Police, based on an exclusive interview with Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan.

This follows my story in the news pages last week, which gave an Australian angle to the widely reported privacy update. I was at the press conference with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and put to him the comments by Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy that the site had shown “complete disregard for users’ privacy”.

Back in March I wrote about Facebook’s response to defacement of tribute pages for murdered Australian schoolchildren. I mentioned this previously but it seems worth sharing the link again in this context.

This week I have another feature for The Australian‘s Media section, this time on 3D television. If you have a spare few thousand dollars and you’re prepared to sit around the living room wearing silly glasses, you can have the 3D cinema experience at home. Sports and video games are likely to be the big drivers to convince people to take up the technology, though the HDTV revolution is too recent for 3D to become mainstream just yet.

15 March 2010 | Home invasion of 3D’s visual power

I have a feature in The Australian‘s Media section today about Facebook and the issues with the defacement of tribute pages for dead children in Australia. I met with the face of Facebook Debbie Frost in San Francisco on Friday for a lengthy one-on-one interview and the feature is running in tomorrow’s paper. Of course, it’s already the future in Australia, so here’s the link:
The Australian, Media, 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors

My profile of Rebekah Brooks, nee Wade, is in The Australian today. The editor of British tabloid The Sun, the biggest selling newspaper in UK, is set to take the helm at News International, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper division.

I interviewed some of Wade’s current and former colleagues at News International, including her former editor at the News of the World, Phil Hall.

The full story is in The Australian‘s Media section today and online.

My profile of BBC One controller Jay Hunt is in the media section of The Australian today.

The story is largely based on an one-on-one interview I did with Hunt – one of only two she gave in the months after taking the job last year (the other was to Britain’s Daily Telegraph).

Hunt is arguably the second most powerful woman in British television – after Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision. She is also an Australian by birth.

Read the Jay Hunt profile here.

Mondays are a busy day in media. Not only is it the publication day for the Media Guardian and the Independent’s Media Weekly, but The Australian has now shifted the publication date of its Media section from Thursday to Monday.

Today, I have an article on global business newspapers and the Wall Street Journal in The Australian, and a feature on how traditional media are adapting to the new media world in the Media Guardian’s Changing Advertising supplement.

I have a feature in the media section of The Australian today about Macquarie Bank’s growing media empire in the UK. The Australian investment bank has been investing heavily in the UK media, mostly on the infrastructure and services side through Arqiva and Red Bee Media. In Australia, it owns a string of radio stations as well as media infrastructure, but it has not gone down this route in the UK and recently ditched plans for a radio station in Plymouth in Cornwall and Devon.