Where does The Australian Financial Review get its stellar front page story ideas?

Compare Saturday’s paper…

…with this story that appeared in Fairfax stablemate The Age way back on 29 August:

Eerie isn’t it. For the record, Marcus Padley, the author of The Age piece, told Crikey that Fin journalists had contacted him about Saturday’s feature. He gladly provided an accompanying table listing his hot stocks. — Andrew Crook

Newsreaders with sex appeal (and by “sex apeal”, we mean “breasts”). Another stand-out online photo gallery from the Courier Mail today: Newsreaders with sex appeal. 26 photos, and not a sausage amongst them. On behalf of Anton Enus, we strongly object.

Angry people in local newspapers. A charming blog dedicated entirely to documenting and celebrating the “hugely skilled and poorly paid” local news journos who are “sent out to photograph miserable people pointing at dog turds.” — Angry People in Local Newspapers

King Kyle welcomes back his loyal subjects. 2DayFM listeners look to have forgiven shock-jock Kyle Sandilands, who was pulled from the air twice in two months, with ratings for the Sydney breakfast show managing a lift of 1.2 percentage points in an overall flat market. The uplift for the controversial breakfast duo, which now commands 11% of total breakfast audiences behind 2GB’s Alan Jones (16.6%), has seen it recover some of its lost listeners during the previous survey. — B&T

Newsday columnist quits over pay-wall. After 13 years of writing “Gray Matters” for Newsday and the McClatchy Trib service, and more than 50 years in newspaper journalism, (for Knight-Ridder and Newsday), I have severed relations with Newsday …The main reason: The new owners of Newsday, Cablevision, have shut off access to its web site, even to me. — Poynter Online

E-Readers: not the Messiah, just a very geeky toy. Publishers hoping to halt a slide in sales with new electronic reading devices will struggle to get consumers to embrace them until the technology improves, experts say … Joe Wikert of O’Reilly Media, a publishing company and media consultant firm, said e-readers are mostly “one-trick ponies,” an extra device with only one function, in contrast to multifaceted products such as Apple’s iPhone. — Wired

Can newfangled web ads save journalism? Instead of going apoplectic at the sight of a push-down ad temporarily displacing your precious Maureen Dowd column, grin and bear it — it may be journalism’s last best hope. — Vanity Fair

Business magazines face a harsh reality. After losing a third of their ad pages so far this year, two of the big three business magazines that have survived and thrived for decades spent the month either cutting staff or issues. The third, BusinessWeek, got sold to a new owner with plans of its own. — AdAge

If the future of media is worth having, it won’t be free. Free has been fun, for a while. But when both Mr Murdoch and Tom Curley, of Associated Press, accuse Google of being “content kleptomaniacs” as they did at the World Media Summit, they are not unreasonable. When the music and movie industries get tough on pirates, they are not selfish fat cats: they are defending a human value. — Libby Purves, The Times

Devine, Albrechtsen, Deveny: rise of the “trollumnist”. It used to be that to get your own column in a broadsheet, you needed to add some value … As the newspaper business model heads south, though, we’ve been subjected to the rise of what we might christen the “trollumnist” — the writer who simply “trolls” in a multichannel, multimedia environment. — Jason Wilson, New Matilda

Spread some Christmas crazy with the Scientology Holiday Catalog. A million thank yous to the reader who mailed me the Dianetics & Scientology Holiday catalog! With so much crazytown inside, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

— Jezebel