Freelance Unbound has spent the past few weeks moving house – a hellish experience that I will never, ever go through again. You’ll have to take me out of here in a box (I have loads, so that’s OK). The compensation is the new view from my online editor’s office – welcome to the sunny […]
Freelance Unbound has finally arrived on the global media scene, it seems. Today I received an email from Andy Wang of Newz-China.org – “a leading internet solutions organization in Asia” – who warns me that another company is trying to register itself as Freelance Unbound . Dear CEO – We have something urgent to confirm with you. Yesterday […]
Warning: intense WordPress geekery ahead . WordPress has gone all version 3.0 recently, and plug-in authors have been busily updating their software. This has been fine so far, but yesterday I updated the fine Query Posts plug-in by high-profile WordPress author Justin Tadlock. And it has screwed up. Query Posts is a super useful and […]
Goodness, Freelance Unbound is suddenly all over the interweb thanks to yesterday’s get-your-own-back-on-tiresome-PR-departments post about Clinique. It was picked up by Jim Romenesko of journalism university the Poynter Institute, who wrote a news brief about the story. Cue a tsunami of traffic (by Freelance Unbound’s modest standards) and a wealth of comments. There are a […]
Regular readers will know something of the trials of the freelance trade press journalist. Here’s another instalment, which gives an interesting insight into how some brands see the idea of “communication”. The past couple of weeks of my scintillating media life have been taken up with writing a business-to-business (b2b) feature on male grooming for […]
Just found out that Harvey Pekar – arguably the father of autobiographical comics – has died aged 70. He wrote about his brush with lymphatic cancer in the award-winning graphic novel Our Cancer Year in 1994 and chronicled his everyday life in Cleveland from the 1980s onward in American Splendour. Inexplicably, given its un-Hollywood nature, […]
Tameside Council has declined to provide “Twitter accreditation” to bloggers and other citizens – thus supposedly preventing them from reporting via social media from council meetings. It seems the council is much more comfortable with the idea of “professional journalists” covering its activities. Could this be that they are less of a threat? The Daily Telegraph […]
Lots of meejah chat about the passing of Jonathan Ross from the BBC airwaves this week. Some decry him as “a tacky agent of unthinking self-harm” (Quentin Letts, unsurprisingly); others celebrate a “fresh, irreverent TV natural” (Mark Lawson). But all overlook the collateral damage from his fall. No, I’m not talking about Russell Brand (he […]
If this job ad is to be believed, the “World’s first iPad-only magazine” is set to hit early-adopter screens in September. Katachi claims to be “an international selection of Design, People and Business” and is recruiting for freelance journalists with “a minimum of two years’ experience or genius equivalent.” It’s an intriguing idea. Does this point to […]
Normally, the Radio Times is the most rigorously proofread magazine on the newsstand, so it’s a shame that this bit of sloppiness slipped into print. From Stuart Maconie’s “Maconie’s People” column of 3-9 July 2010 comes this: Forget what they say about James Brown. Damon Albarn is surely the hardest working man in showbiz? Whether […]