In a media landscape divided into ‘old’ (read: irrelevant) and ‘new’ (read: half-baked) media,  MANIC TIMES is sure to make a splash – especially with the Chaser’s CHARLES FIRTH at the helm. CHAD PARKHILL investigates.

Anyone with a passing interest in media – which would include anyone motivated enough to pick up this paper and read this article – will know about the much-touted divide between ‘old media’ and ‘new media’. Amongst the commentariat, there’s a sense that old media (by which I mean traditional media forms such as newspapers, radio, and television) are becoming an irrelevancy, especially for younger people. At the same time, new media aren’t all that much chop – nobody’s going to tune into YouTube or Facebook for their nightly news, are they?

Enter Manic Times, a newly-launched media venture that aims to keep the best aspects of both new and old media, headed by none other than Chaser head honcho Charles Firth. Manic Times aims to be both a website filled with top-quality user-generated content and a weekly, tabloid-style newspaper.

“I think it’s an audacious statement of intent,” Firth says of Manic Times’ hybrid model. “I hate how fleeting the internet is – I think one of the reasons why The Chaser ended up being a really good writing team was because, when we first started, we actually had a newspaper, and everyone fought over the limited amount of real estate in the newspaper. So, from a purely editorial perspective, I think it’ll improve the quality of our website if our newsroom is fighting over getting stuff into the limited amount of space we have.”

Firth is also an unashamed old media consumer: “It’s something tangible,” he says. “Print lasts. Print actually gets into weird places. I talk to people from all over Australia about the first time they had an interaction with The Chaser, and, inevitably, it was with the Chaser newspaper. Nobody ever realises that we produced 90 editions, but they did see a few, because it creeps into people’s consciousness in a way that the web doesn’t. The web’s still very intangible.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Manic Times aims to take old media ideas and utilise them in new media forms: “The way any newspaper or magazine has traditionally created a community is to actually guide readers and audiences, through craft, to interact and become active in that community while still imposing some real top-down editorial decisions that give it a voice,” Firth says. “The problem with YouTube is not that it doesn’t have great stuff, it’s that there’s no voice that speaks through that content, that has an opinion of what’s good and what’s not. We live in manic times. This is about letting people make sense of these manic times, and the way to do that is to edit out the things that don’t make sense.”

There’s another reason for the name, too: the editorial team all have extensive experience in their fields, and remain active in them. Aside from Firth, Pinky Beecroft (of Machine Gun Fellatio fame) acts as chief website reporter, the Bulldogs’ Hazem El Masri writes a sports column, and inveterate foreign correspondent and celebrity author Andrew Mueller acts as a columnist. Although the newspaper itself won’t make it up to Queensland until next year at the earliest, the website is now live.

You can check out MANIC TIMES at www.manictimes.com.au.

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