Howes’ Fin switch. Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes has quit as a columnist at the nation’s highest-selling newspaper to write columns for The Australian Financial Review. The move will see Howes’ readership plummet from an estimated 1.3 million at The Sunday Telegraph to 234,000 at the Fin.

The outspoken powerbroker says it was his decision to leave the Tele, where he has written for the past four years. Howes told Crikey: “It was great writing for the Tele but I thought, I can’t keep writing a piece a week. I wanted a change … The problem with the Tele is you have to write every week and keep it to 700 words.” Howes says he chose the Fin because he can write longer, in-depth pieces (such as his Friday debut backing the privatisation of government assets), it has national reach, and is read by opinion leaders. Howes plans to write a piece a month.

The move means he will be a stablemate of long-time adversary Mark Latham. “I have a lot more in common with Mark than most people who appear on the Fin‘s opinion page,” Howes said. — Matthew Knott

Life as a female editor on a men’s mag. “Smith Journal was really conceived as a place to kind of pull out stories that get lost between the internet and other print media or don’t get the attention they deserve, so it could be an old dude building boats or it could be a robot worker, or something like that. But it’s really our goal to be able to showcase these stories in a way that resonates not just for a week or a month but for a long time, so you could pick up Smith in five years time and the story could still speak to you.”

To describe Smith Journal as a men’s magazine conjures entirely the wrong image. The Frankie Press quarterly — “aimed at men and read by interested folk” — is a men’s title where I use not a hint of irony to say its readership buys it for the articles — an eclectic mix of writing and interviews on everything from typography, history and science to design and photography. Its editor is Nadia Saccardo — a female editor, just another way in which the title sets itself apart from the men’s mag category. (Though when I question Saccardo on this aspect she says: “Yeah I need to think up a better answer to this. To be honest, I don’t think about it that much, and I probably should, I get asked that question all the time, but I am just interested in stuff that Smith is interested in as a publication.”)

Saccardo had an unusual path to her current position. Though her first major editorial role was for Right Angle Studio who publish The Thousands, her publishing career started much further afield, in Thailand. “I went over there after uni and got a job at the Bangkok Post newspaper which is one of two English speaking newspapers in Thailand. My aunt was living there at the time and I also felt like publishing in Australia was so competitive and I didn’t really have anything to offer that would make me stand out.” — Bethanie Blanchard (read the full story at Liticism)

Front page of the day. Winner …