How we love the Daily Mail. Today’s shock news is that the must-have high-street frock that the Duchess of Cambridge wore this week to meet that nice American couple Mr and Mrs Obama was made “in a Romanian ‘sweatshop’ by women on just 99p an hour.” That’s terrible! The royals are exploiting the poorest of […]
Rock star contrarian historian Niall Ferguson took his Civilisation: The West and The Rest world tour to the genteel folk of Bath this evening at the excellent Topping & Company book shop. The small but enthusiastic audience of largely white, largely middle aged and relentlessly middle class Bath folk seemed strangely unperturbed by his grim predictions […]
Could the iPad be the saviour of journalism? Maybe – but only if we are able to swallow some unpalatable truths. Nielsen’s been doing some interesting research on digital tablet users (iPads and the like). Apparently they are more valuable than users on other devices, including smartphones and PCs. They like (or tolerate) advertising more, […]
If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a slightly disturbing TED Talk by liberal US political activist Eli Pariser. He’s worried about how the big online players are automatically filtering the content we see according to what they think are our preferences – without our knowledge or consent. Most telling are the examples that show how […]
Spotted on the Telegraph web site – an increasingly desperate attempt to get users to click on more pages. Is there any particular reason to turn a simple statistics-backed list items – “Top 10 jobs graduates want” – into a picture story? especially a picture story that requires you to click 10 times to get to […]
It’s funny how the idea that all publicity is good publicity sometimes doesn’t filter through to the people you’re writing about in business features. My latest thrilling trade press feature is about the tobacco industry. Yes, I know – I’m evil for even taking that brief. Hey, my dog has to eat. So what sort of […]
“Americans are hungry for news” – apparently. So some people think the US government should subsidise it to the tune of $30 billion a year. Here’s a fascinating documentary from PBS (sort of the US BBC) that talks with po-faced solemnity about the importance of the fourth estate…
Following the recent debate over bribes for bloggers, I offer a recent and unmediated arrival in my inbox from the lovely Gemma at Fido PR: I have attached information about a new exhibition about journalism in war zones that I thought would be of interest for your blog. Imperial War Museum North in Manchester is […]
Via Get Satisfaction comes this nice graphic of the relentless decline of print media. Well, when was the last time you bought a newspaper?
Apparently Twitter users are cross because Twitter-friendly image upload service Twitpic has changed its terms to allow it to sell on users’ uploaded images for a profit. Yes – it’s annoying. And yes, it flies in the face of what copyright law intends. But, you know, that’s what happens when we get used to the […]