It seems the gutter is just the place to be to divert a load of bottom-feeding traffic from Google’s door to your high-minded publication. Here are six of the top ten search strings to find Freelance Unbound yesterday: andrew marr affair andrew marr affair with who did andrew marr have an affair with who did […]
Sky seems to be desperate to run anything about the Royal Wedding at the moment – hence this slightly ungracious pop at the economics of the couple’s big day: Extra Bank Holiday to cost Britain billions. As many retailers benefit from a Royal Wedding consumer spending spree, it is claimed the extra bank holiday will cost […]
Discovered while idly Googling the latest tabloid media exposé – a Daily Mail profile of Dame Helen Mirren from a couple of years ago. Not only does it feature the Mail’s trademark obsession with mature female celebrities in swimsuits, it also has an ironic Andrew Marr super-injunction connection: Despite being happily married, the veteran of […]
Paul Bradshaw has a timely post here on the legal position of bloggers who accept payment or other incentives to post content on behalf of brands or other interests. It’s a warning to the sponsors of this as much as anyone – Bradshaw points out that a PR firm offering entry into a prize draw […]
Here’s a fantastic argument against the privacy super-injunction by journalism professor Tim Luckhurst in today’s Sun. Essentially it boils down to this: Without stories about sex and celebs to attract readers, this country will lose popular papers that for over a century have made it a genuine people’s democracy. So – the key reason it […]
How many more adjectives can be used to describe the policing style for the Royal Wedding? So far we have “robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate”. Robust and flexible? Decisive and proportionate? Hard and soft? Focused and diffuse? Please just decide what one policing style you will use and then stick to it. It’ll make your […]
Regular readers may be aware that Freelance Unbound is a hotbed of scientific endeavour, as I am doing an OU science degree in my spare time. Posting has been even lighter than usual recently, and readers may be interested in the reason: Question 8.4 The spectrum of light from a distant galaxy contains absorption lines […]
Cisco has pulled the plug on its Flip video product, perhaps signalling the end of the cheap, simple standalone video camera. It’s a shame, not least for journalism departments, which have moved in on the product as a good way of giving all students access to half-way decent video technology. The Guardian report makes the […]
Here’s a fascinating piece about the over-priced and over-blown higher education market in the US. Killer quote by very successful hedge fund manager Peter Thiel: It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage. You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed […]
This morning’s report on the Today programme that “one-in-10 of all cancers in men and one-in-33 of all cancers in women are caused by past or current alcohol intake” must have come as a bit of a shock (source: BMJ). After all, it was only a month or so ago that we were told that […]