Seamus Byrne to head Gizmodo Australia

Seamus Byrne - freelance journalist, columnist, nominee for this year's Best Consumer Technology Journalist at the Lizzie Awards, blogger and Hydrapinion member - was revealed over the weekend as the new editor of Gizmodo Australia, a localised version of the popular gadget blog announced last month by Allure Media (and blogged about by me).

At the moment the local domain redirects back to the US parent, but according to an interview Seamus gave to industry site ITJourno he is working on a model of 25% local content produced by him alone, and the rest shoveled from the parent feed.

While most would believe that not being based at the heart of the action in the US is a crippling disadvantage, Byrne has spun this into an advantage and believes that the time difference provides him with an advantage over their American counterpart.

“I’ll get up and have most of the overnight content [from Gizmodo US] ready for the mornings, when Aussies are hitting their desks. There’ll also be a breakfast wrap on the best content from overnight.”

“We’ll be talking to the guys over there and getting content that [the readers] don’t see first. We’ll see stuff overnight that they might not have seen.”

Pretty standard business model for a licensed Australian technology publication... it's just that instead of an IDG dead-tree magazine it's one of those new-fangled blog thingies. Seamus will be working under Allure's managing director Chris Jansz, in a structure which sounds distinctly like it's under the News Corporation thumb. The fact that netus chose an established journalist with solid credentials indicates to me that they're not taking too many chances. Is this the first time that an Aussie IT lizard has been hired to be a full (or near-full) time blogger? My guess is yes. Not that it's a bad thing not to have hired some fresh-faced kid off the street, by any means.

By the by, Seamus said he'd be giving up his spot at Hydrapinion, amongst other freelance commitments at HYPER and Desktop magazines. Does this mean that Hydrapinion will be renamed to Quadrapinion? :D