About Us

The Enthusiast is an Australian online magazine of culture and the popular arts, launched in January 2009. It is the first project of Infinite Ape Media, a partnership established in April 2008. Infinite Ape Media is Mel Campbell, Andrew Tijs and Daniel Zugna, three Melbourne journalists.

We publish news, opinion, features and reviews across the categories of Music, Television, Film, Books, Advertising, The Stage, The Media and Ephemera (which is everything else). Irregular columns include The Tough Question, The Stupid Question, The Bargain Bin, Death Of The Week, The Best Stuff On TV This Week, Schmooze Reviews and the much-loved, much-debated Biscuiteer. The Enthusiast is also the home of the Crikey!-endorsed Subeditorial Antics Appreciation Society.

Wondering what’s with all the shitty pictures? They’re sweded! We got this idea from the Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind. We take a thing we like, and mix it with some other things we like, and make a new thing using whatever we can get our hands on. It’s putting Enthusiasm into the things we like!

Our particular brand of Enthusiasm has been spruiked in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, heard on Triple R, seen on The 7PM Project, and digitally distributed on BuzzFeed, BoingBoing, Crikey!, Defamer, Zagat, BrandDNA and more. The lovely folks at Triple R gave us summer show from 2009-11, which we’ve turned into podcasts.

Scout around, enjoy and get Enthused!

If you’re an adventurous advertiser who’s up for marketing your stuff to an audience of Enthusiasts, ask us how!

If you’d like to receive a weekly email featuring the best of The Enthusiast, pop your email address in that Stay In Touch box in the upper-right corner. We also deliver the goods on Facebook and provide juicy tidbits on Twitter.

If you’re interested in getting in touch with your local Enthusiast, head over to our Contact Us page.

Meet Your Enthusiastic Co-Editors

Andrew Tijs has been dishing out unsolicited opinions about music, film and the arts since before the internet was invented. Thankfully, editors have seen fit to publish these on paper for over a decade.

He has supplied profiles, columns, features and reviews for Beat magazine, TheVine.com.au, ZOO Weekly, FHM, Blunt Magazine, The Chaser, Precinct and Mess + Noise Magazine. His ugly mug appeared on screen while reporting for Undercover.com.au and his dulcet tones have featured on Melbourne radio stations 3RRR and PBS. He was also permitted to gush about some of the world’s greatest records in Quartet Publishing’s brick-sized coffee table tome 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Evan Dando of The Lemonheads has, perhaps understandably, tried to kick him.

Mel Campbell delights in the underrated banalities of everyday life. She trained as an advertising copywriter and then as a cultural studies academic; her scholarly publications include Saying The Unsayable: The Non-Verbal Vocalisations of Michael Jackson and ‘Go White Girl!’: Hip Hop Booty Dancing and the White Female Body. Her Master of Arts thesis Bogan: Exploring Images of Australian Cultural Marginalisation has made her a sought-after talkback radio guest.

A co-founder and editor of quixotic poster-magazine Is Not Magazine and former deputy editor of triple j’s magazine, jmag, she is currently film editor at ThreeThousand.com.au. She has freelanced for YEN, Meanjin, The Big Issue, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and her essay on homosexuality in football was anthologised in The Best Australian Sports Writing 2004.

Mel is really into the sound of a cougar roaring and the colour yellow.

Daniel Zugna is used to appearing at the bottom of such lists. The only time this was ever of practical use was during Mr Delaney’s short-lived penchant for alphabetical homework checking in Year 9.

Since graduating from Year 9, his work for Beat magazine has appeared in video stores and souvlaki eateries across inner Melbourne. In addition to playing Starsky to Andrew’s Hutch at Undercover.com.au, his freelance work has appeared in electronic form (Crikey!), glossy print form (jmag), and even in bound book form (1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die).

When he grows up, he wants to be a silver fox just like Tony Jones (the ABC one).