Bill Bennett’s Knowledge Workers blog is running an ongoing series of posts on better writing. Today’s offering suggests why short sentences are only best up to a point, and why you need variation in your writing to help it develop an engaging rhythm. It follows others that cover journalistic staples such as the inverted pyramid, […]
Shocking though it is to say, as I’m not a huge Guardian fan, The Guardian‘s comment on the unmasking of a police blogger by The Times is spot on. Crucially, Guardian digital content director Emily Bell recognised The Times‘s move was: No surprise given that old publishing models benefit from restriction rather than spread of […]
There’s an interesting comment from Soilman on my post on whether a donation model can fund web content. It’s worth a closer look. He argues that the three things users may pay for are: Data Services Software/apps If you’re a business mag/website, you create a software programme that helps professionals in your industry do their […]
Ever since I got an email from social bookmark site StumbleUpon I’ve been trying to figure out how on earth the site works and where to find myself on it. Just for the hell of it, I tried emailing StumbleUpon’s technical support. I was pretty terse initially, as I was fairly ticked off with what […]
I didn’t manage to get this cutting into the blog until today, but this item from the June 17 edition of London financial free paper City A.M. is a stark warning about the perils of doing without a sub-editor. I like City A.M. – for a freebie it’s a well-put-together paper for the financial/business world […]
In the course of my series on how to survive the media recession, I talked about investigating membership professional organisations in order to boost your profile. I also mentioned that I had written a free piece for the member magazine of Communicators in Business, the organisation for corporate communications writers and editors. The idea was to try […]
From the Twitter feed: do journ educators misunderstand level of students’ web skills?advanced online journalism module set up at Sunderland-only 4 signed up From my observations – yes, I think we do. As I’ve noted before, journalism (and other) students live their lives on Facebook, but when it comes to actually using the web more, […]
Media owners and publishers are, to say the least, anxious about the financial viability of journalism, given the web’s capacity for undermining the usual business model for content (buying stuff) by, basically, giving it away free. The UK government is even thinking about annexing part of the BBC licence fee to support regional news on […]
I’ve just come across this simple start-up tutorial to cascading style sheets (CSS), which is ideal for the absolute beginner. Much like style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS is at the heart of the look-and-feel of content management systems (CMS). But unlike style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS code looks like, well, code. […]
Regular, geeky readers of Freelance Unbound will know that I am striving hard to become literate in the ways of CMS – that is in actually constructing a CMS-based site, not just using one. This stuff is pretty hard to get to grips with for a non-techie journalist, so I’ve been trawling the web for […]