Crikey

Fairfax staff vote for strike action on pay. Fairfax staff on The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are mulling whether to hit the barricades after a Fair Work Australia ballot on Friday showed a resounding 96% of union voters supported taking industrial action over stalled enterprise bargaining negotiations.

For a strike to be legal under Fair Work rules, 50% of union members must respond to the call to arms, and of those, 50% must vote yes. Fairfax Members comfortably satisfied both hurdles with 64% — or 632 — union members voting out of 969 on the roll. Of those, an overwhelming 96% backed strike action, with 604 for and just 23 against. Under the legislation, strikes may last for 72 hours and members can also decide to impose ‘work-to-rule’ restrictions.

“The union is back negotiating with the company this week, and I guess we’ll go from there,” one Fairfax staffer in the thick of it said this morning. The newsrooms of both metro dailies have become increasingly bolshy in recent months, with Age and SMH foot soldiers arcing up over CEO Greg Hywood’s decision to sack most of the papers’ sub-editors. The current EBA expired on July 1, and serious sticking points remain over pay rates, coverage and training. —  Andrew Crook

Front page of the day. The death of Amy Winehouse at 27 proved irresistible for today’s New York Post:

Letters cast doubt on NotW claim it co-operated

“Legal letters sent by the News of the World to detectives have cast doubt on News International’s repeated claims that the company co-operated fully with the police inquiry into phone hacking.” — The Guardian

Trust us: we’re the press

“The media has been exempted from many provisions of the Privacy Act for good reason. Despite its many failings, the media plays an important role in keeping public life honest and transparent — criminals and lesser wrongdoers are frequently brought to justice through investigative journalism, and democracy would be the poorer without it.” — The Australian

Media cries terrorism on Norway attack

“Media organisations and their journalists were in a position throughout to make careful and considered judgements about how they approached the story when access to verifiable information was still patchy. Instead, too many of them chose to engage in an irresponsible game of assumptions and presumptions.” — Media Spy

Can Murdoch defy the hands of time?

“Though it’s wise not to bet against Rupert Murdoch, his stubborn loyalty to his British newspaper lieutenants has invited questions about his fitness to run a company with $32 billion in annual revenues.” — Washington Post

Google’s market cap closes in on $200 billion

“Of course, days later Google unveiled Google+, the company’s most ambitious social product yet. In the week following the launch of Google+, investors added $20 billion to Google’s market cap. That combined with the general strength of the market and health of Google as a company propelled the stock upwards into July.” — TechCrunch