The departure of David Kirk from Fairfax Media has brought the end, for the time being, of involvement in the Australian Business & Community Network’s ‘partners in learning’ project. The programme – which pairs chief executives with school principals to share experiences, solve problems and explore leadership challenges together – was featured on the ABC’s 7.30 Report in December. The former All Blacks rugby captain (and former Fairfax chief executive) worked with Dorothy Hoddinott, principal of Holroyd High in Sydney’s Greystanes. “I thought it was an interesting arrangement, which gave us both insights into our very different organisations, both similarities and differences,” she tells me. “There was more in common than you might think, despite the differences in size, scale, budget, nature and operation of the organisations, and our salaries!” Mrs Hoddinott, who is 65, was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia last year for her commitment to social justice and humanitarian issues, ESL teaching and her contribution to leadership and professional teachers’ associations. Notably, she set up a trust fund, putting in $9000 to help a student who was an asylum seeker from Iran, go on to university. She says she enjoyed her relationship with Kirk and Fairfax, but it is not certain whether the arrangement will be continued with his successor. Hard to avoid reading about the Murdoch family at the moment, what with Dame Elisabeth’s 100th birthday, MichaelWolff’s authorised biography, and a more local volume, Denis Cryle’s ‘Murdoch’s flagship: Twenty-five years of the Australian newspaper’ launched in Sydney in December. As we go to press, I’m still working through Wolff’s somewhat unsatisfactory book. He writes about what he knows, which is the US ... and seems to know (or perhaps care) relatively little about the Australian newspaper market, despite having the help of Leela de Kretser (daughter of the Herald-Sun’s Chris de Kretser) on the project. There’s a huge amount of detail in the book – not all of it accurate – and a further tendency for opinion and hypothesis to be confused with fact. Wolff makes much throughout of Murdoch’s age and failing powers: My question would be what was Rupert thinking? If (and I doubt this) the volume is the outcome he expected, what’s the agenda? Criticisms apart, the book is a mass of detail on a range of related topics ... from the existence of the “loss-making” ‘Australian’ to satisfy Dame Elisabeth, to Lachlan’s speculation that if his grandmother had hung onto the more serious ‘Courier-Mail’ in stead of the Adelaide ‘News’, Rupert’s personal development might have taken a much less tabloid course. Somehow, I doubt it. Encouraging news that print media advertisers frequently get more than they pay for came in the form of a quarter-page ad that ran for just one day in January. I’m talking about the cheeky ‘Goodbye Bush’ ad which ran in News Limited’s Sydney and Melbourne tabloids on the day of Obama’s inaugiuration. Not much to do with farewelling Dubya, of course, the depilatory promotion took on a lifde of its own and was emailed around the world. Tony Hale’s ‘TheNewspaperWorks’ website reports that Googling the two keywords yielded more than 76,400 results (that’s 112,000 now, as GXpress goes to print) and popped up on twitter, digg, flickr and elsewhere. The ad created by Euro RSCG also got a showing in newspapers in New Zealand and Canada, and has been named December/January winner of the industry’s Could Be a Caxton competition. “It’s a great example of a one-off topical newspaper ad that can evolve virally across a global audience,” says Hale. TNW suggests anyone looking to create their own topical ad masterpiece, should look up the key dates of 2009. And we’ll throw in a bonus additional ad in GXpress for anyone in this industry sector who can do the same. Among delegates – and as we go to press, likely speakers – at this year’s SWUG conference in Albury will be Gaby van Deventer, a quiet-talking, non-drinking production manager at pioneering Goss FPS site Hoekstra Boom in the Netherlands. Having seen our story about the site last issue, Gaby was in touch to ask about job prospects in Australia and New Zealand, to which he plans to emigrate. He joined the company ten years ago initially in prepress, and has Quark, PDF and Agfa Arkitex skills as well as Ifra colour management training. The last five years have seen him working in various project management roles – including ISO 12647-3 certificatation, and as a member of the team commissioning the Goss Universal 70 and FPS presses – and in production management. Having also talked at Ifra and Goss events, he should make an interesting speaker. And that’s just on the technical side. Over a lemonade, he might also tell you how his kickboxing skills – used in the defence of a Dutch barmaid – led to him being picked on by a local gang and seriously injured. But that’s another story. One already shared with James Haisman, managing director of QI Press Controls Australasia, whose technology is installed on the Hoekstra Boom presses, and with whom he is staying prior to SWUG. James, in turn will be able to retell his experiences living “like a Guy Fawkes doll” on the top of a potential bonfire. He returned from QI’s head office a couple of days after Victoria’s Black Saturday to find his home atop Mt Dandenong safe ... only to have his family evacuated the following weekend. Although “better equipped than the CFA”, he’s painfully aware of his precarious position. Our thoughts are also of course, with those others who have fared less well: The fires touched the GXpress office through the loss of a cousin, while a client of our sister publication Sportslink died tragically at Kinglake, along with his wife and young family of three.