Since August 2010, Australian media blog The Failed Estate has housed caustic and often slashingly well-written commentaries on contemporary journalism from a writer known only as “Mr Denmore”. The blog has grown in popularity, built a stable of loyal readers and this year was listed as a finalist for the Sydney Writers’ Centre’s Best Australian Blogs awards.

This week Denmore outed himself as Jim Parker, a “former financial journalist and now corporate communications flak” who hung up his cape as a journo in 2006 after spending six years with The Australian Financial Review and 26 years in journalism in total. “I’m neither a public servant nor an academic, so those loyal foot soldiers of Rupert can’t pin those particular hate crimes on me,” wrote Parker on Wednesday.

He says he operated under a pseudonym “not because I was evading scrutiny but because I needed to keep (and still do) my blogging persona separate from my professional persona”.

The sharp-toothed blogger, no stranger to an anti-MSM diatribe, revealed himself ahead of a seminar next week in which he will speak alongside Finkelstein inquiry assistant Professor Matt Ricketson and digital media expert Craig Thomler.