Star responds to my enquiry about her media recession with an interesting viewpoint from the US. She says: I am seeing the profession of writing–and I do consider it a profession–being downgraded by digitization and outsourcing. I’d disagree, in as much as I consider writing for the media or marketing (which is what we’re largely […]
I asked recently how your media recession is going (and please do take part in the poll on the right, by the way). In response, Knowledge Workers blogger Bill Bennett writes in to sketch out an alarming scenario from New Zealand. You think we’ve got it bad in the UK? Be afraid… The media has […]
In response to the news that Google is throwing its hat into the online content micropayment ring, Mindy McAdams counters with a suggestion for a small daily fee for website access, as opposed to, say, a small fee for individual article access. She imagines: a kind of token ID, sort of like a gift certificate code. […]
What a difference a grinding advertising recession makes. Only six months ago, culture secretary Andy Burnham said that a three-month consultation between the government and advertisers had “failed to produce a convincing case for product placement”. As ever, of course, the usual government terror of bad things happening to people because of the economy has […]
In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, and because such things may be of interest to new and student bloggers (and hopeless WordPress geeks), here’s the first installment of what should become a regular series of half-yearly posts on the statistics behind Freelance Unbound. First off – Freelance Unbound is not a hugely visited […]
To mark today’s news that the recession has ended, I’m running a poll here at Freelance Unbound to see if my fellow toilers in the antheap of media feel the same way. The poll will be posted up on the right for a while – please do click to vote (though it would help if […]
An interesting piece from Fast Company examines the idea that media owners such as the New York Times and AOL can tap into a “local-advertising pot of gold” by turning over their content infrastructure to hyper-local content producers. The New York Times launched a hyperlocal community offering – called The Local – in March. Its […]
When someone comes under attack for something or other, many journalists pull out the old anti-aircraft metaphor to describe it. But here, sadly, their ignorance starts to show. “Flak” comes from a German acronym for anti aircraft fire – Fl(ieger)a(bwehr)k(anone). A “flack” is a slightly derogatory North American term for a publicity agent. So ditch […]
I snarked a bit recently about the recent redesign of the Online Journalism Blog – I thought it made the site less usable and seem less full. It seems my campaign has been vindicated – the OJB has reverted to its former design (or at least something like it), which, while not perfect (and what […]
You have to love newspapers’ obsession with social media. Whether it’s the Twittering of Stephen Fry et al or the latest security breach involving Facebook, the news media are all over it – irrespective of whether their readers know the difference between a Tweet and a twat. This latest example from the Metro pushes a […]