Entries from August 2011

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

Where is Freelance Unbound? On hiatus – belated notice

Unlike those organised folk at FleetStreetBlues, who actually bother to give their readers notice that they will be doing other things than blogging for a few weeks, I just stop posting anything and let people drift away in boredom and confusion. (Or is that what happens when I do post? Hmm.) Anyway – the doldrums […]

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Why Apple sucks (almost) as much as Microsoft now

Freelance media life is always a bit precarious – not least because we have to keep up with technology out of our own pockets, not relying on a friendly employer to provide all our hardware and software. So, any freelancer looking to replace their creaking MacBook in the past few weeks will have realised, with […]

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Video: Why journalism must engage with social media

Here’s a video from a talk by social media editor Chris Street to journalism students at UCA Farnham about the skills and role of a social media editor, and why traditional media need to develop social engagement. Broadcast is over If you think of yourselves as broadcasters, you’ve lost the battle – the broadcast days […]

Monday, August 8th, 2011

The animated rise and fall of US newspapers: 1690-2011

If you saw the fascinating Stanford University data visualisation of US newspaper expansion and contraction over 300 years or so, and thought “hey, I’d really like to see an animation of that,” this video is for you.  The original visualisation took the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress and plotted […]

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

Bribery and corruption? Sadly, I think you have the wrong blog…

In the spirit of full disclosure – here’s an irresistible offer just received by the Freelance Unbound bribery and corruption department. Hello! I was wondering if you took paid guest posts on Feelance Unbound? Not a traditional “guest post” but one you’d be compensated for and have complete editorial control over. Wow – fantastic. This […]

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Modern media is rubbish #7: “We forgot to authenticate that single mum’s amnesia story last week”

A bit late, but here’s a few problems with that really great human interest amnesia story from last week: when 34-year-old Naomi Jacobs (or 35-year-old, depending which version you read) woke up in 2008 convinced she was 15. Naomi Jacobs, of Manchester, recalled nothing after 1992, did not know she had a son and thought […]

Monday, August 1st, 2011

10 things I hate about Facebook pages

Journalists need to get to grips with social media – and especially the world’s inexplicably most-popular site, Facebook. But Facebook sucks. It’s not just its hateful approach to individual privacy. It’s the fact that it’s such a complete pig to use – if you want to have some control over what you are doing and achieve […]