It must be tough being a “senior writer” currently focusing on New Guinea when the puff pieces that you post to the Fairfax press are about as interesting as watching paint dry. Who cares about what the PNG social elites say on twitter? Or what some activist thinks about “women’s issues” ? PNG is a very sad example of the folly of expecting a stone age people with no notion of nation to be able to run a functional democracy, In a country where almost every family speaks a different language and the national lingua franca is a pathetic mish mash call pigen that no one else in the world speaks. None the less Jo Chandler has had a minor win today with one of her “Fuzzy wuzzy” pieces getting her name onto the front page of the Age, not as the main story mind you, just as an adjunct to the headline piece
Sadly its not really anything more than another puff piece with a rather over wrought title”:
Gunboat diplomacy stirs hornet’s nest under blogs
Jo Chandler, Analysis
March 16, 2012
Ah well at least this storm in a tea cup saves us, for a short time, from considering the more pressing issues for this country, like the utterly incompetent Labor administration here that is only just a tiny step above the woefully dysfunctional government in PNG. and for that I thank you Jo Chandler.
Cheers Comrades
Iain Hall's SANDPIT 
What does it say when you get shunted off to the junior’s role of covering the political & social goings on in PNG, the world’s most stone age country? The place the world forgot. A gig that is as far down the scale of importance (and status) as you could get … right down to reporting on what is written on PNG blogs. You’d take the hint, wouldn’t you?
Maybe the gig is Chandler’s choice Ray after all it gives her the chance to show how caring and PC she is when incompetence sinks an overloaded and under maintained ferry sinks taking more than 200 souls to a watery grave…
No, Iain, she’s gone from getting big gigs like covering the behind-the-scenes goings on with Bob Katter (while the 2010 election was being sorted out) to the backwoods of PNG. No one (or noone, as she incorrectly spells it) would volunteer for that gig. Maybe it was her familiarity with blogs that prompted the boss to say, “Hey Jo, get up there and cover what those Fuzzy Wuzzies are blogging about”.
I wonder how the books are selling though Ray, to be honest I’ve not seen a single copy of either in the bookshops up here.
If you go down to the next Dayboro flea market, Iain, you might find one of the vendors has got a stack of unsold ones on the table … for about 50 cents each. And still no one (or is that noone?) is buying them. It’s not a ‘Fair Cop’ is it?
I don’t think that the sales department of MUP are “feeling the heat’ much either Ray