Kevin Rudd
(Image: AAP/Dan Peled)

Is there an Echo in here? One of the unexpected complications of being a media magnate is when you lose track of just how many publications you own. Byron Shire Echo general manager Simon Haslam got in contact to tell us of “a strange call from a newsagent yesterday asking whether we had started a glossy lifestyle magazine”.

Haslam was confused until someone sent him an Australian Community Media (ACM) press release concerning today’s roll out of the Northern Rivers Review which describes ACM as “the publishers of Newcastle Herald, Canberra Times and Byron Shire Echo“.

“I imagine that [ACM boss] Antony Catalano was sitting there at Raes [the luxury hotel he owns in Byron] and just became a little confused about whether he owned the Byron Shire Echo or was just reading it. I think the same thing happens to Rupert Murdoch when he meets politicians, he probably just assumes he owns them until someone tells him otherwise,” Haslam said.

For the record, the Byron Shire Echo is owned by the Shand family and six other “low net-worth individuals”, all of whom live in the Byron Shire.

UPDATE: ACM have told Crikey they did not produce the media release. For more on the story, go here.

The day the clown cried Bless the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), determined to not let a global pandemic get in the way of some Halloween fun. Led by doctors Claire Poche and Shimi Sharief, the OHA put out a video earlier this month updating Oregonians on celebrating the holiday safely. It’s a nice and useful idea, but the execution is… strange.

Yep, that’s Poche, reporting on the state’s three overnight deaths while dressed as a clown. Appropriately for Halloween, it’s very haunting.

Ruddy hell So there is something that could prompt News Corp to write about former prime minister Kevin Rudd again. After steadfastly ignoring Rudd’s petition calling for a royal commission into Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — signed by nearly 400, 000 people and endorsed by former PM Malcolm Turnbull and ’90s dreamboat Hugh Grant — Rudd has once again made the Oz’s front page.

The International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank chaired by Rudd, received $650,000 from “alleged but only because he died before trial” paedophile Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2019. Rudd claims to have had no knowledge of the payments and says he never received any remuneration from the IPI. We shall see whether this is the knock-out blow News has been trying to land on Rudd since it accidentally humanised him by telling us he went to a strip club.

Ad it to the bill It’s always good to be kept up to date with how our money is being spent. As a tipster puts it, after famously receiving hundreds of millions in government largesse in 2018, “our beloved Barrier Reef Foundation seem to have decided a lovely taxpayer-funded ad campaign will save the reef“.

Hate to say I told you so Yesterday, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard continued the slow trudge towards openly accepting that the COVIDSafe contact tracing app was, among its many flaws, not all that effective.

After tweeting in April that the app was “critical” to keeping the community safe, he’s now conceded that it has “not worked as well as we had hoped”.

So where are the commentators who glugged down the government’s argument that the app would act as some kind of sunscreen against the virus? Peter FitzSimons compared people refusing to download the app to terrorists. Chris Kenny argued they were like anti-vaxxers. Chip Le Grand called them “Twitter cranks and contrarians”.

We’re still waiting on the columns directing similar levels of ire at the app and its designers.