Crikey has always been in the business of tip-offs, from salacious snippets to serious snipes. Ever since the publication’s founder Stephen Mayne started Crikey out of his bedroom more than two decades ago, we’ve been a home to important leaks, whether from a serving politician or something overheard down the pub by one of our readers.
I’ve long been of the view that the role of Tips and Murmurs editor, which I took up mid-2020, might just be the best gig at Crikey.
It is a place for small things that point to bigger things, from covering the figures and motivations behind the scenes of big stories or political moves, to providing a corrective to lazy political rhetoric, illustrating hypocrisy or falsehoods from the people who control the conversation in Australia, or just good old fashioned gossip.
The column format allows me access to the planet-sized knowledge of not only my wonderful colleagues but also our readership. This allows Tips at its best to be a concentrated version of my favourite parts of Crikey — our willingness to point out what others won’t, our long memories, and our preference for acerbic humour over solemn earnestness.
As Cam Wilson wrote when detailing our decision to ban AI slop, “From our inception, we have been so very Crikey. There are a lot of things that make up Crikeyness, but central is its humanness.” A key part of that humanness has always been our readers, the rigour and scepticism they demand of us, and what they use their insights and first-hand knowledge to direct our attention to.
In my time writing for Tips and Murmurs, readers have alerted us to some of my favourite things we’ve covered, including:
- David Marr, the ABC’s new host of Late Night Live, calling Bundjalung woman and renowned author Melissa Lucashenko “f**king rude” backstage at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event
- Plumbers at Holt St messing with Daily Telegraph editor in chief Col Allan, who had been pissing in his office sink
- The Australian’s Gerard Henderson offering Crikey a very lengthy response to one of our questions that we deemed it fine enough to eat off of
- The documents revealing the early meetings between then PM Scott Morrison and then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo;
- The incredible amount of “woke” money that was helping fund the campaign against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament;
- The strange case of the bag of weed someone tried to send Scott Morrison shortly after he lost the election;
- The early poetry of Andrew Bolt;
- Then energy minister Angus Taylor barricading himself in the ironically named “media room” to avoid questions after his first speech in that portfolio;
- The most cringe-inducingly awful International Women’s Day events, a tradition we’ve returned to several times, along with the general trend of corporations’ tone-deaf attempts to profit from social justice movements;
- The fact that trucking billionaire Lindsay Fox, who had just thrown a men-only birthday bash, was hiring a diversity officer;
- The multi-volume “spiv-tionary“, where readers helped us decode the euphemist language of “high-level dodginess“;
- The extremely bipartisan tendency of government departments to advertise government policy;
And so much more.
Put in proper context, these items, whether what they reveal is funny or absurd or infuriating, tell us something about how power is exercised in Australian politics, business and media. Crikey is always aiming to do that, and Tips is where we get to have the most fun doing it (after all, in what other role would I be allowed to describe an elected official as “a man who calls to mind a kind of Freaky Friday body switch between a small town mayor and a Year 12 student who wears a blazer on free dress days”?)
We love this stuff, and we want more of it.
Crikey’s readers are our greatest resource — you’re literally why we get up in the morning, why we do what we do, how we do it. All publications are ultimately animated by their readership, and your bullshit- detectors, irreverence and interest in context have sculpted us over the years as surely as a river shapes a stone.
So if you’ve noticed something — something dodgy-seeming, something hilarious or deeply ironic, something which you suspect someone in power would rather not be pointed out — please, let us know, either via boss@crikey.com.au or via our anonymous Tips inbox. We can’t wait to hear from you.
Please note, when contacting us, we recommend that you:
- Use a secure computer to communicate with us — one that is not managed by your employer and does not have any malware that might be used to record your activities;
- Make sure the computer you use is not in front of any public surveillance cameras;
- When using a computer, use an operating system and browser that helps preserve your privacy and anonymity;
- Delete trails of communication that you store on your computer, such as copies of messages;
- Run any files you send to us through a metadata-scrubbing tool to minimise the risk of unintentionally sending us information embedded in the documents, such as an author’s name.
Got a tip? Crikey’s readers are our greatest resource. If you know something, you can contact us anonymously and securely by clicking here.
