This year at UCA Farnham, we are using Posterous as our first-year multiplatform journalism unit blogging tool. Halfway into the semester, how is it working out?Not badly, actually. Here are the pros and cons. Cons first. Cons That Posterous redesign that happened in September. Oh, how that sucked. There’s a pretty good account here of […]
Spotted – very briefly – on the BBC news site on Sunday: a rib-tickling double-entendre headline that bored sub-editors probably enjoyed writing a bit too much. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, wiser heads prevailed and the head was quickly changed. I don’t know why, but the second headline just doesn’t seem mucky – even though it uses […]
The death of two-year-old Isobel Dobson in a van fire last Friday is now being treated as “suspicious” by police, who have arrested a 37-year-old man in connection with the incident. Could this be the same 37-year-old man who tried to save her on Friday? Her stepfather, in fact? BBC online sub-editors seem to think […]
Which is exactly what life should be like…
The lovely Eleanor Riches at Acorn Independent Press writes: “I was wondering if you might be interested to see the new edition of Good Times Bad Times by Harold Evans. A pioneer of investigative journalism, Harold worked his way through the ranks of student journalism, through regional papers, before becoming editor of The Times. A proper […]
*[Not, clearly, on Monday or Tuesday. Too many undergraduates to deal with. Wednesday, probably] It’s time to clear the tumbleweed from the streets of Freelance Unbound, so we’ll be back next week with some real content to celebrate the start of the university teaching term. Look forward to a long, rambling essay on the lessons […]
Unlike those organised folk at FleetStreetBlues, who actually bother to give their readers notice that they will be doing other things than blogging for a few weeks, I just stop posting anything and let people drift away in boredom and confusion. (Or is that what happens when I do post? Hmm.) Anyway – the doldrums […]
Here’s a video from a talk by social media editor Chris Street to journalism students at UCA Farnham about the skills and role of a social media editor, and why traditional media need to develop social engagement. Broadcast is over If you think of yourselves as broadcasters, you’ve lost the battle – the broadcast days […]
If you saw the fascinating Stanford University data visualisation of US newspaper expansion and contraction over 300 years or so, and thought “hey, I’d really like to see an animation of that,” this video is for you. The original visualisation took the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress and plotted […]