Freelance Unbound

Sky seems to be desperate to run anything about the Royal Wedding at the moment – hence this slightly ungracious pop at the economics of the couple’s big day: Extra Bank Holiday to cost Britain billions.

As many retailers benefit from a Royal Wedding consumer spending spree, it is claimed the extra bank holiday will cost the wider UK economy billions of pounds.

Gosh. Who has done this piece of rapid, top-flight economic analysis? Ah, it seems to be the CBI. Oh wait, from four years ago.

Obviously that’s why Sky couldn’t use the SEO-dynamite headline they probably wanted: “Royal Wedding to cost economy £6billion” – even they knew they couldn’t spin a press release from four years ago about public holidays in general into a CBI story about the Royal Wedding in particular.

So glad we are maintaining professional journalistic standards.

[Spotted by Soilman]

Discovered while idly Googling the latest tabloid media exposé – a Daily Mail profile of Dame Helen Mirren from a couple of years ago.

Not only does it feature the Mail’s trademark obsession with mature female celebrities in swimsuits, it also has an ironic Andrew Marr  super-injunction connection:

Despite being happily married, the veteran of stage and screen has admitted a liking for BBC presenter Andrew Marr.

Documentary maker and author, Marr can now add the title of unlikely ladies’ man after attracting  the lustful admiration of the spirited Mirren.

Asked with which man she would like to have a night of passion, Dame Helen named Andy.

She told Glamour magazine: ‘Aren’t those ears great?

‘I just wanted to grab them… He’s like some fabulous animal. And so incredibly smart.’

Mrs Marr, alias journalist Jackie Ashley, may have something to say about that, Helen.

Well, she might have given it the thumbs up, in the light of subsequent revelations.

I know the whole affair ended before the Mail story was published, or it would have been nice to speculate that Andrew Marr read this article and got some ideas.

Of course, you can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was known to the Mail writer by then anyway…

With luck, Freelance Unbound may have lifted itself out of the gutter by the time of the next post…

Paul Bradshaw has a timely post here on the legal position of bloggers who accept payment or other incentives to post content on behalf of brands or other interests.

It’s a warning to the sponsors of this as much as anyone – Bradshaw points out that a PR firm offering entry into a prize draw as an incentive to review a product needs to be aware that this comes under the jurisdiction of the Gambling Commission. And bloggers who accept payment for creating content may fall foul of the Office of Fair Trading.

But the key point is that bloggers shouldn’t sully their hands with this kind of thing. All we have online is our reputation, and this kind of activity tarnishes a blogger’s integrity quicker than you can say “backhander”.

I’d love to be offered a freebie to blog about something, as the offer itself would give me something to blog about. But like him I wouldn’t touch the actual offer with a barge pole.

It’s an interesting debate though. The implication is that PR firms and brands are devaluing web content wholesale, with the knock-on effect that readers will switch off if it isn’t nipped in the bud.

Allotment blogger Soilman comments (well, rants) about it here, saying it’s blogging’s “dirty little not-so secret”.

Every secret paid-for post, link or review erodes trust in ALL bloggers, ALL writers. Every opinion, every ‘recommendation’, every ‘fact’, every SEO-optimised headline, every URL itself becomes suspect.

But how different is this really from the good old days, before the internet, when the only outlet for PR activity was the mainstream media?

I’m not talking about the hard news, fourth estate model of journalism that is held up by journalists as the paradigm of good journalistic practice. Rather, this is about the vast swathes of niche, magazine-type journalism that you could make a reasonable living in up to about five years ago.

Magazines such as Manufacturing Engineer – an engineering institution journal that survived for years with a staff of about two and a half – which I joined as I entered this noble profession.

I remember being taken on a glamorous working trip in a private aircraft to see a sandpaper factory in France, for example, and being given a goodie bag at the end full of brandy and foie gras. The implicit deal was “we give you treats, you write a bit about us in your rag”. Was this ethical? Did we declare it to any authority? No chance.

[Disclaimer – I did write about the sandpaper factory; I gave the foie gras and brandy away as I was, and am, a vegetarian and I didn’t ever like brandy.]

No, you didn’t have to write about your visit. But between the company that paid for it, and your editor or publisher wanting you to justify your time out of the office, there was very little chance no copy at all would come out of the trip.

Yes, in comparison, the internet today seems rife with sponsored rubbish, not least from companies such as pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap publishing company Demand Media.

But in some ways, all this graft and corruption in the media may be better exposed now we are all digital. If Bradshaw is correct that the Office of Fair Trading requires blogging sites to declare any payment for content, then maybe things will be more transparent now.

In any event, what’s required of the reader now is what was required before – to get to know and trust your media sources before you believe unquestioningly what they say. There never was such a thing as a trustworthy media…

Here’s a fantastic argument against the privacy super-injunction by journalism professor Tim Luckhurst in today’s Sun.
Essentially it boils down to this:

Without stories about sex and celebs to attract readers, this country will lose popular papers that for over a century have made it a genuine people’s democracy.

So – the key reason it is in the public interest to rake through celebrities’ muck-filled private lives is that it gives newspapers the funds to do real journalism. Sort of takes the place of classified advertising.
Watch out for The Sun justifying doing some low-key drug dealing or car theft to fund the millions that it spends “covering politics, world affairs and the environment”. On page 2.
 

How many more adjectives can be used to describe the policing style for the Royal Wedding? So far we have “robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate”.

Robust and flexible? Decisive and proportionate? Hard and soft? Focused and diffuse? Please just decide what one policing style you will use and then stick to it. It’ll make your communications strategy more effective and ensure that anti-monarchist troublemakers don’t come to London expecting a nice soft and flexible reception from the boys and girls in blue…

Regular readers may be aware that Freelance Unbound is a hotbed of scientific endeavour, as I am doing an OU science degree in my spare time.
Posting has been even lighter than usual recently, and readers may be interested in the reason:

Question 8.4
The spectrum of light from a distant galaxy contains absorption lines that are identified as being due to hydrogen atoms. A particular line is observed at a wavelength of 500.7 nm, compared with the wavelength of 486.1 nm that would be produced by a source at rest in the laboratory.
(a) Is the galaxy receding from or approaching the Earth?
(b) What is the value of the redshift or blueshift for the galaxy?
(c) What is the apparent speed of the galaxy with respect to the Earth? (You may assume the speed of light is 3.0 x 10⁵ km s^-1.)

Yes – unit S104 Exploring Science has become a bit more challenging than the basic rain gauge experiment that I made a hash of only a few short months ago. We’re into the Hubble constant, Z bosons and quantised energy – and still only year 1.
This is actually great stuff. Undergraduates – don’t waste £9000 a year going to some former polytechnic to take your degree, get real VFM from the OU!
It’s not a soft option – this is challenging material. The only drawback with distance learning is the temptation not to learn stuff by heart, but to refer to the books too much when you’re writing your assignments. The lack of exam-condition testing does mean you need more self-discipline.
Answers
Obviously the galaxy is receding from the Earth (galaxies generally are), so it is redshifted. The value of the redshift is 0.0300 (to three significant figures), and the galaxy’s apparent speed is 9.0 x 10³ km s^-1 (2SF).
Astonishingly, I even got this right. Roll on year 2…

Cisco has pulled the plug on its Flip video product, perhaps signalling the end of the cheap, simple standalone video camera.

It’s a shame, not least for journalism departments, which have moved in on the product as a good way of giving all students access to half-way decent video technology.

The Guardian report makes the key point:

The stand-alone movie camera business is effectively dead, killed off by smartphones capable of shooting high-definition video which have seen explosive sales in the past 18 months – precisely the period since Cisco bought Flip.

The news doesn’t bode well for the other cheap video camera used by journalism departments – the Kodak Zi8.

The problem, of course, if that what drives consumers away from video cameras to smartphones is exactly what makes video cameras desirable to media courses. They are simple, single purpose and don’t offer a host of cool features, like gaming or apps. And because they don’t have a phone, they don’t require a contract with a telecoms provider.

Tip for journalism course leaders – better snap the remaining stock up before they all disappear and you have to justify spending £400 each for student iPhones…

Here’s a fascinating piece about the over-priced and over-blown higher education market in the US.

Killer quote by very successful hedge fund manager Peter Thiel:

It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage. You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.

Students planning on paying that £9,000 a year for tuition in the UK – maybe think about following Thiel’s suggestion of ploughing that money into a start-up company instead…

This morning’s report on the Today programme that “one-in-10 of all cancers in men and one-in-33 of all cancers in women are caused by past or current alcohol intake” must have come as a bit of a shock (source: BMJ).
After all, it was only a month or so ago that we were told that alcohol in moderation “can help prevent heart disease”. Which is good news.
So good that the media was all over it like a rash. Just like they are with the cancer thing.
But wait – surely the cancer news isn’t actually new. Here’s a page from Cancer Research UK from 2009 that says, basically, “alcohol gives you cancer”. And it links to a whole host of studies to prove it (or, “prove” it, depending on your level of scepticism).
As for the benefits to your heart, well – here’s another BBC news story, this one from 2005, reporting findings published in the Lancet. It seems a New Zealand team of researchers claimed that previous studies claiming that moderate drinking had cardiac benefits were “flawed”.
The killer quote?

Indeed, there is more evidence that heavier drinking provides the most heart protection – alcoholics have relatively ‘clean’ arteries – they say.

Oh, for god’s sake. None of this is news – not really. Scientific studies – and scientific studies of scientific studies, which is what the most recent ones have been – happen all the time. And they tend to contradict the ones that have gone before. And they will, in turn, be contradicted by ones that come afterwards.
Just go out in the sunshine and have a beer. We’re all going to die anyway…

Quote of the day from James Fallows’ fascinating profile of Gawker Media in an Atlantic magazine feature on new media:

[Gawker Media founder Nick] Denton has concluded that courting commenters is a dead end. A site has to keep attracting new users and an in-group of commenters might scare new visitors off. “People say it’s all about ‘engagement’ and ‘interaction,’ but that’s wrong,” he said. “New visitors are a better indicator and predictor of future growth.”

So that’s it – who cares about building your loyal readership? The only thing that matters is wave after wave of new consumers, grazing like mindless cattle on your relentlessly refreshed content (which flies in the face of the idea that newspapers should be more selective about the customers they welcome into their online news outlets, but hey).

Loads more, too, including a terrific discussion on headline writing:

“I’m against verbs,” Denton told me. “It’s almost as if you’ve got to get the whole story into the headline,” [staff writer] Brian Moylan said, “but leave out enough that people will want to click.” […] “The public is not very forgiving of wit in headlines,” Denton added. “Or irony. You can get away with one opinionated word, if the rest is literal and clear.” [writer] Maureen O’Connor had a further rule: “It can’t be more than two lines on the home page. Your eyes can’t take it in. You want the dumbest headline possible!”

Read the whole thing – great stuff.