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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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…
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 […]
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.) […]
…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 […]
…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…
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 […]
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 […]