Entries from August 2009

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Why newspapers are failing

Via the indispensable Mark Potts, Bill Wyman has offered up a hefty slice of on-the-money analysis about why the newspaper industry is going belly up in Splice Today.  Crucially, it answers a lot of the holier-than-thou criticism of internet content and punditry by purist journalists and academics. I like it when Wyman hits out at […]

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

How 10 years has changed my freelance work week

How has the past decade of technological and business change in print publishing changed freelance patterns of work? A lot, as it turns out. Here, for the sake of example, is a comparison between a representative week’s work for me as a freelance sub/writer in around 1999 and the work I have been doing this […]

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Call yourself a writer? Meme response

It’s meme day on Freelance Unbound – mainly because it’s August and I think we all deserve to enjoy the Silly Season. (Though in the era of 24-hour rolling news, does that even exist any more?) Here’s an interesting meme started by Linda Jones. (Well, she hopes it will become a meme, and I’m calling it […]

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Why newspapers still need sub-editors #3

Spotted in today’s Metro – a travel piece on what looks like a delightful part of Sardinia. But I think the “gut-busting” lunch enjoyed by the writer has affected her English. …courses of muscles and clams, fat prawns and melt-in-the-mouth hoops of calamari… And I thought the Metro was supposed to be a subs’ paper…

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Journalists: how not to win contacts

There’s an impassioned rant on the Soilman blog about the general rudeness and disorganisation of journalists who send cold emails to try to get input for their copy, and then totally ignore any positive response they are given by the potential contact.  It’s worth reading – both by newbie or student journalists and by those who […]

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Vampires, iPhones and online news media

In a rare free afternoon hour, I am goofing off and watching Moonlight, a kind-of crappy new vampire private eye series on Virgin1. I normally like this kind of thing, sadly, though this series seems to suck more than the average vampire show should. (Which is why it seems it may already have been cancelled.) […]

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The newspaper online pay-wall debate rages on…

…largely in the comments section to my post a couple of days ago, oddly enough. Soilman points me to an interesting article in the Telegraph about Swedish peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay and the general unwillingness of consumers to pay for content these days. Here’s what the Telegraph thinks: Why won’t consumers pay for content? The […]

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Health scares and the media…

…in a nutshell.  This goes some way to explaining why I was reading headlines like this about swine flu a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m reading headlines like this about swine flu medication…

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

More arguments against the newspaper online pay wall

Here’s a nice piece from Scooping The News that outlines clearly why they think charging for online news content is a bit of a non-starter. It covers the main bases: The supply of web content is now vast Charging hasn’t worked for anyone else yet. Newspapers don’t have compelling enough content to compete There will […]

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Boston Globe to set up web pay wall

Even casual readers of Freelance Unbound will know I’m pretty sceptical that the news media will find it easy to make a go of charging for online access to plain old news. But, you know, I could be wrong. A case in point is the Boston Globe, which has announced it will definitely, absolutely, start doing […]