THE NORMAL RULES DO NOT APPLY

Jeremy Sear describes his role at Pure Poison:

I’m not a journalist. I do not receive a salary as a journalist. I’ll get a cut of the advertising revenue from this site, but for my commentary, not my digging out of stories. I do not have the resources to go hunting down leads etc. And we never pretended we would - this is a secondary resource. The primary resource is supposed to be the actual journalists who go and do the footwork to report the facts on the ground.

That’s not my job.

The "I am not a journalist" line is yet another Sear attempt to write rules favouring him. He is in fact a journalist, albeit one – in the Crikey context – aiming to produce nothing original, relying instead solely on the output of others for inspiration. In this parasitical relationship the primary sources would do well to ignore the attention-seeking sniping from the secondary sources.

Update: Sear characterises a Joe Hildebrand article as a "smear". Nope, this is a smear.