Entries from October 2009

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Metro's big online strategy mistake

As a regular commuter (god help me), I often pick up the Metro at the station to get a sense of the current news agenda. And because sometimes it’s hard to motivate yourself  to crack open that book about PHP scripting at 8am. Like most newspapers, the Metro has tried to develop an online strategy. […]

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Who's behind the BNP babes?

The BNP seems to be engaged in some clever, if off-the-wall, underground marketing campaigning at the moment. My students at yesterday morning’s online journalism seminar flagged up an odd post on the Vice Magazine site (which is, as you might guess, essentially sleazoid trash. Not that there’s anything wrong with that). The post – Babes […]

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The changing face of journalism jobs

It’s always interesting to observe the changing requirements of media employers. But sometimes you have to wonder what’s going on at these companies. Eager young journalism graduates wanting to make their mark in the world of showbiz reporting might well be tempted to apply for this recent ad from entertainment news agency Bang Media International […]

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

The retro view on climate change

I love this old Time Magazine story on climate change from 1974. As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. Yes, well. It just goes to […]

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Social media is key for traffic referral

Some interesting new stats from online market analyst Hitwise on visitor behaviour on the web show that web users visit social media sites more than any other kind of content. (I had trouble downloading the actual data, though, so this is not backed up with first-hand research). [UPDATE: the nice people at Hitwise sent me […]

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

More on internships

My post on internship experience of UCA journalism graduate Adam Leveridge attracted some interesting comments, including one from another UCA Farnham graduate, Matt Burton, whose work I also liked at the UCA graduate show. I’d like to flag it up here because Matt’s experience is so directly relevant to the whole debate about whether there’s a […]

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Is free the right price for the Evening Standard?

Much excitement and pontification has greeted the surprise news that the London Evening Standard is going to become a freesheet and double its print run in 10 days’ time. So what the hell, why not add to it… One thing that has surprised me is that there hasn’t been an immediate announcement that the London […]

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Online advertising: there's good news and bad news

So – spending on online advertising has just outstripped spending on TV advertising in the UK. Figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers (one of the most irritating company names in consultancy, by the way), show online advertising now makes up 23.5% of UK ad spend, as opposed to TV’s 21.9%. TV has been top dog for half a […]

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

So, how was our media recession?

Bit mixed really, it seems, if our poll results are to be believed. In the end the votes were split pretty evenly among my slightly unscientific poll questions. Here they are: How’s your media recession? Fine, thanks. I have plenty of work (21%) It was a bit rough 9 months ago, but things have picked […]