Andrew Landeryou

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Andrew Landeryou bigraphy, stories - Journalists

Andrew Landeryou : biography

1969 –

Andrew John Clyde Landeryou (born c1969-1970) is an Australian political blogger, and online business consultant. He edits the blogs "The Other Cheek" and VEXNEWS, which he began in July 2007 and August 2008 respectively.

VEXNEWS

Landeryou launched VEXNEWS in August 2008. Landeryou is helped by pseudonymous contributors. Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun refers to Landeryou as "always entertaining" and "often compelling," while The Age newspaper described his site as "dirt-dishing".

VEXNEWS broke a story revealing AFL footballer Brendan Fevola’s attack on a Melbourne journalist. Landeryou also broke a story drawing on Liberal party sources when he revealed that the authors of an anti-Ted Baillieu website were employees of Baillieu’s own party.

Other front-page stories prompted by Landeryou include a Fairfax story about Australian politicians sanitising their Wikipedia articles and a story about a Christian Family First candidate who had exposed himself in photographs. Landeryou declared him ‘Australia’s smallest loser’, an epithet repeated by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann when he covered the story for US cable news.

Background

Landeryou is the son of Bill Landeryou, a former Leader of the Opposition and then the Government in the Victorian Legislative Council and a minister in the Australian Labor Party Victorian state government of John Cain. Andrew Landeryou has been active in the past in the Labor Party, and particularly the Labor Right faction. He was elected as President of Melbourne University Student Union, taking office in January 1991. A referendum of union members removed him after five months when he proposed commercialising the union’s services. He then became managing director of IQ Corporation, a sports statistics company, which was invested in by Solomon Lew until it went into liquidation in 2003. He was also a co-owner of Marbain, a company with a contract with MUSU. After he failed to answer a court summons in December 2004, Landeryou spent five months in Costa Rica. In May 2005, he was arrested on his return to Australia and required to attend at a liquidator’s examination of the affairs of MUSU. Landeryou was declared bankrupt by the Federal Magistrates Court in May 2006.

Blogging

In 2005, Landeryou established a weblog commenting on Australian party politics called The Other Cheek – Andrew Landeryou’s Blog of Freedom. He also publishes VEXNEWS. Lucy Saunders, a political activist linked to the Socialist Left who had been criticised by Landeryou, wrote on ABC News Online that "The overwhelming majority of what Landeryou prints is vague rumour, personal vendettas and outright fiction. Very occasionally, though, some actual facts sneak through."

He clashed with another political blogger, Stephen Mayne, in 2006 when they accused each other of being spivs.

Landeryou’s blog has been archived by the National Library of Australia.