Busting myths we take for granted

Investors can now do their own research and get a reasonably accurate home valuation from a variety of sources. Some of it's freely available on the web, including suburb and street profiles and median house prices. Some comes at a small cost – between $30 and $300 depending on the level of valuation information you're after – from players such as RPData, Australian Property Monitors and onthehouse.com.au.

Many people have also learnt that marketing your home isn't really that hard. Hundreds of thousands of properties are listed for sale or lease through the portals www.realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and some consumers are using Facebook and Twitter to sell their homes.

It's easy to buy a domain name such unleyhouse.com.au, set up a WordPress blog, make YouTube videos and put up photos telling potential buyers everything they needed to know about your home. Remember, you can give the buyer something an agent can't: a vivid account of what it's like to live in the property and neighbourhood. So goodbye LJ Hooker, Ray White and Elders.

As real estate agents are always jovial about the prospects of selling your home, I'll leave this section with a joke.

Why was the real estate agent so excited when he completed a jigsaw puzzle in only 9 weeks? Because on the box it said 8-12 Years.

Recruiting agencies are indispensible

Australian employers are following their US and UK counterparts and giving recruitment agencies the boot. Recruitment agencies have been making anywhere from 10-30 per cent of a candidate's annual salary. What for? For checking out a couple of databases, placing a $400 advert on Seek and short-listing candidates. The industry is wracked with over charging, incompetency and devious practices. One of the most devious practices is the automation of the selection process where scanners and algorithms exclude candidates on preset criteria.

Private recruiters are the bottom feeders of organizational life but with the rise of Linkedin and other social media networks, you can now get in touch with hirers directly within an organisation.

In the good old days, the biggest perceived asset of recruiters was their 'little black books' - their network of contacts. As technology evolved, the black books were replaced by large candidate databases. A big database could not be replicated easily by a client. It was a big factor in justifying crazy-high fees.

Every new LinkedIn user, every new connection you make and every company you follow, all erodes the traditional value of external recruiters. LinkedIn's primary objective is to connect talent with opportunity at massive scale. That was recruiter's job. Welcome them to Newstart.

The media is still in the news business

Anyone who has worked as a reporter over the last 30 years knows that newspapers and TV reporting has changed completely from the 1970s. Today newsrooms are the straight men for the entertainment industry. The values of the news are the values of vaudeville. If you're trying to find out what's going on in the world, then the news isn't the first place to look. Look online.

Journalism is a craft; a set of trade skills. It's the daily search and compilation of varied aspects of a subject arranged and presented – not to the reporter's own judgment of right or wrong - but for the consideration of others. I was trained and worked as a reporter and it has served me very well. Yet journalism today hardly merits the range of privileges we accord the fourth estate. Much of it today is just plain rubbish.

Two kinds of journalism look certain to endure. The debased populism of the tabloids, which feed readers on a patronising diet of calculated political fabrication, fear mongering and pap. It's an abusive relationship based on the daily betrayal of trust.

The other 'journalism' has limited commercial worth but enormous political purpose. This the type espoused by Fox News, which has created a parallel universe that determines its own agenda, facts and logic according to its own bellicose political mission.