Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Friday, September 28th, 2012

Hounded by tabloid journalists? Deleting your online presence doesn’t always work…

Tabloid sleaze ahead – turn aside now. Let’s say you were a tabloid journalist covering the Megan Stammers Lost in France case. Let’s say you wanted to hunt down the other victim in the case and get some material on Jeremy Forrest’s betrayed wife. Doing a Google search gets you a whole lot of blocked content […]

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

No, sports journalists – Team GB has not won its “biggest medal haul in the modern Olympic era”

Heard and seen everywhere today, some variant on “Team GB has won its biggest medal haul in the modern Olympic era”. Including – oh, dear, oh dear – on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme news bulletin at 8.30 this morning. Here it is on the Sky News website, too. Here’s a test for sports journalists (and editors). […]

Monday, August 6th, 2012

Tales from the trade press: so you thought it was a media agency’s job to talk to the media?

[UPDATE: Premier Foods is clearly a great British food company, a fine brand, and full of lovely, helpful people. I thought my speculative email to the generic marketing department address would be ignored or dismissed, but no! I had a nice prompt and informative reply. Thank you, Premier Foods. It does still seem a bit weird […]

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

How UCA is responding to the forces changing journalism education

Paul Bradshaw has been analysing the way in which journalism education has been and needs to be transformed to meet the needs of a dramatically changing industry. In the first part of his three-part post, he looks at the skills gap between journalism education (and staff) and what the industry needs. Bradshaw cites a number of […]

Sunday, July 29th, 2012

Apple forgets to add a “download here” button to its Safari software page

Running an earlier version of Safari and realise you need to download the latest version to make sure you are as web-compatible as possible? No problem – just head off to Apple’s dedicated Safari web pages on its site and download it. Uh – where’s the download button? Surely the masters of usable technology design haven’t forgotten to […]

Monday, July 9th, 2012

Heather Brooke at #BathLitFest – restore Enlightenment values to protect freedom

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Months late, here’s Heather Brooke – author of The Silent State and The Revolution will be Digitised speaking at this year’s Bath Literary Festival on March 8. It’s posted so late because I had hoped to clean up the audio file better. As it is, it’s a bit echoey, there’s some crude sound cleanup that […]

Friday, July 6th, 2012

From the archives: The four pillars of successful freelancing

How do you make it as a freelancer? Here are four key approaches that should see you building a solid foundation for success. Originally published on the late-lamented FleetStreetBlues as a four part series, the Four Pillars vanished when FleetStreetBlues managed to libel a PR firm (allegedly), and the blog was pulled. This underlines the vulnerability and […]

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

Friday infographic: Inside the mind of a freelancer

Most “infographics” I see are barely worth the name – pointless drivel dressed up with irrelevant visuals. But this is better, and also achingly relevant to this blog. Via the ever lovely Mashable comes “Inside the mind of a freelancer” – a graphic tart-up of some 2012 salary survey results. Of note: freelancers are happier than wage slaves […]

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

Hyperlocal case study: @WeLoveBath

Bath is a thriving multi-meejah city, full of festivals like Bath Digital Festival and events like the recent D:Bate on the future of print vs. digital media. It’s also got lots of interesting hyperlocal (or hyperlocal-ish) stuff happening. One is Twitter-based WeLoveBath. Launched a couple of years ago, it’s won its creator, web designer Felix Renicks, a couple of runner-up placings in […]

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

Weird site of the day #2: Stopabductions.com

Second in a series too sporadic to merit the title: via @newkingarts comes this fascinating technological breakthrough – the anti-alien abduction helmet. “Used successfully by former abductees for thirteen years,” the helmet is simple to make and takes just four hours to create. You will need: a hat or helmet made from leather, vinyl, rubber or similar, plus […]