Entries from February 2009

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Unmitigated blogging tags

It’s all-too easy to take this blogging nonsense too seriously – you know: try to burnish each post so that it flies off the Google listing straight into readers’ browsers and pushes you to the pinnacle of the Technorati rankings. Which is why I always smile when I visit my pal Peter Ashley’s Unmitigated England […]

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Puppeteers and CG animation

Before I got so tired that I had to go to sleep in the cinema at last weekend’s Animated Exeter, I ended up at a presentation of the techniques behind What’s Your News – a new combined CG animation/live action kids’ TV show from Nick Jr. Despite the irritating theme music, the show is actually […]

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Teaching web audio and video

Just got my first sessional lecturing gig at Southampton Solent – teaching first-year journalism students about web audio and video. I’m pretty pleased about this, as it was the result of a spec email I sent to the course leader. Which goes to show it’s always worth punting for work – you never know who’ll […]

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

I survive my first animation workshop

Things I learned at Animated Exeter: When small boys create animation, they invariably make things explode. Don’t know why – it’s a DNA thing. Much evidence for this at the Animarathon workshop, where I acted as camera operator and assistant animator for a series of boys aged around 8-10 who opted for the “inventions that […]

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Build a better profile online

Just discovered this post about how a journalist reworked her Google ranking to make her online presence better reflect her work. Very interesting. The blogger – Susan Mernit – has done a good job filling her post with useful links and actually giving a clearer precis of what the journalist – Julia Angwin – actually […]

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Media economic illiteracy: the Daily Mail doesn’t understand eBay

Of the blogs I read, I enjoy one from a blogger called Coyote in Arizona who periodically fisks journalists for being innumerate, with a very poor understanding of economics. One of his posts from last year took the local media to task for not questioning the dubious economic benefits of a publicly funded new sports […]

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Why Journalism shouldn't be taught as a BA

I posted here about Paul Bradshaw’s interesting video touching on the inflexibility of journalism education. I was surprised about this – until I started having more to do with journalism colleges. You’d think colleges and universities would be falling over themselves to offer what employers wanted. But it’s not quite so. Why should this be? […]

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Frontline animation volunteer

Just back from Animated Exeter, where I spent the weekend helping kids do cut-out animation in the Animarathon workshop and generally stood around in a fetching light blue T-shirt being “young and animated” as they put it, wandered around with a clipboard and helped out with ushering and taking tickets. Of the two, the workshop […]

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Death of the sub-editor redux

Just been sent a link to Roy Greenslade’s blog in today’s Grauniad [sorry – knee-jerk old sub’s joke on the notoriously badly typeset 1980s style Guardian. Just the sort of SEO unfriendly copy we must now stamp out]. He is part justifying the decimation of the subbing function in many publications – possibly to be […]

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Journalism skills gap

Saw this on the excellent Online Journalism Blog – a video taken at the Society of Editors 08 conference about the skills seen as desirable by media employers and by training and education providers. There’s a very interesting statistic at about 3m:30s in the video, which is the willingness of the different groups to compromise […]