Having watched as shovelfuls of public money has been heaped on bankers and, lately in the US, should-be bankrupt car makers, a production editor friend and I joked that it would be nice to see the government bail out the ailing publishing industry. Unbelievably, it seems that this is actually being talked about in La-La […]
Yes – a spectacular air crash in a north London suburb (Mill Hill, where I grew up) killed 28 people and demolished a local house. It should be all over the internet, right? It’s not. I wondered why. The story: a friend of mine asked me to research an air crash in London in the […]
Everyone in journalism knows about greenwash – where companies or governments talk big about their environmental credentials, but actually fail to deliver. Weirdly, I’ve just been experiencing the exact opposite (what’s that even called?). In my real freelance life – where I write stuff for people that I’ll actually get paid for, unlike here – […]
Just finished my first teaching session at Solent University – giving first year journalism students an introduction to web audio. It all went fine – certainly I had no trouble from the IT, unlike other teaching experiences I’ve had [*cough* UCA], and the students were, in the way of all the journalism students I’ve taught […]
Legendary (or mouthy, depending on your stance) film critic Mark (”The Exorcist is the best film ever made”) Kermode had another life in the late 1980s in which he made this demo of anti-war folk song The Recruiting Sergeant. I was on bass, which is why I can post this with impunity. Of course, the […]
Curses: I’ve just discovered the 7,000-plus Dilbert strip archive on Scott Adams’ web site. This is a productivity disaster, of course, especially as I’m going to press. But I thought this strip about the recent spate of government bailouts was pretty much on the money. Now – if I can just navigate away before my […]
As the news hits that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes web-only, one of its columnists blames bad management rather than, say, revolutionary social and technological change for the looming death of the American newspaper. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its […]
Amusingly, thanks to Paul Bradshaw, I’ve just found out that my links to the Daily Mail in a couple of posts were against the paper’s terms and conditions. Apparently the papers have realised just how stupid (and unenforceable) that was and have recanted. Well done (though will it save them? Maybe not). But apparently many […]
In this magisterial post, web guru Clay Shirky (who once kindly responded to my interview request for a long-dead print magazine called, ironically, Internet Business), says it all: Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To […]
Or, why the web can sometimes seem so very meta I noted recently that “people don’t care half as much about news as people in old media think they do. What they care about is entertainment and connectivity”. Though it’s the sort of thing that has old-style news journalists weeping and tearing their hair out (well, […]