In the wake of the shock news (if you’re a web geek) that social bookmarking site Delicious is being earmarked for closure by Yahoo, a grieving Paul Bradshaw calls for suggestions for a service to take its place. He says: Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. […]
In the current climate, some hard-pressed journalists may be thinking they’d like to get out of underpaid, overworked hackery and into the cozy, cushy world of corporate writing. But freelancers who fancy dipping their toe into the water need to be aware of some cultural differences between corporate communications and journalism that can derail them. […]
Via Bill Bennett: The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. Stella Gibbons,Cold Comfort Farm So very, very true.
Cathy Relf’s excellent Rantings of a Sub-Editor blog offers a tough challenge to journalists and sub-editors – to turn a piece of drivelling nonsense submitted by a car reviewer into elegant and accurate copy. Here’s the original: The car is fairly pedestrian-friendly as there aren’t any hard surfaces directly beneath the bonnet Her straight-down-the-line edit […]
The price of a murder in South Africa is 5,000 rand (“about £460”), according to early reports, including the BBC. Oh no, it’s 15,000 rand (“about £1,400”). Again, according to the BBC, which quickly updated its story. It’ll be interesting to see if the 5,000 rand figure spreads through the internet, as aggregation does its […]
Here’s a great post on FleetStreetBlues about a Guardian story on the lack of ethnic minority representation at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Alongside the reported difficulty of black and minority ethnic students to gain admission to Oxford and Cambridge, the Guardian reported: “The FOI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab […]
Here’s a fascinating example of animated infographics. It’s a powerful visual representation in a few minutes of a complex and controversial story – the idea that, contrary to much of the media’s narrative about life in the modern world, things have gone quite well, all in all. Uncovering, understanding and representing data such as this […]
Spotted everywhere, and now on the BBC, people going “err” when they want to indicate a certain uncertainty. This is odd – there’s a perfectly legitimate word for this, but it only has one “r”. Adding more because you think it makes it sound more hesitant has a certain logic, but is just plain wrong. […]
As pointed out by Soilman in the comment threads, a High Court judgement on Friday rules that web links to online sources are copyright. Which means news aggregation-type web sites need a licence to use them in their content. What are the implications for bloggers? After all, we link to external content all the time. […]
It’s actually obvious from the reporting, but somehow last week’s coverage of “The world’s most boring news day” misses the point. As part of the publicity campaign for search engine True Knowledge, “experts” used a computer search of world events to pinpoint 11 April 1954 as the most boring day of the 20th century. Yet […]