Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

How local content could save the Evening Standard

Yesterday I posted about how news wouldn’t be the selling point for the new-look Evening Standard, unless perhaps it was a real engagement with local news. Obviously, Recovering Journalist Mark Potts takes a much more incisive and in-depth look at such issues – and his latest post is particularly relevant.  In it he suggests local […]

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Will the all-new Evening Standard halt its decline?

Like many Londoners – or at least near-Londoners – I picked up a gratis copy of the Evening Standard (now rebranded the London Evening Standard) out of curiosity about how it could reinvent itself as a viable paid-for paper in a world where people [a] get their news for free, and up to date, from TV, […]

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Web identity and old media thinking

I posted earlier about my run-in with the Centre for Journalism at the University of Kent.  I had commented on a blog post by professor Tim Luckhurst on the need for journalists (particularly students) always to use the phone and nothing but the phone when sourcing stories. In the comments to his blog, I argued his underlying […]

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

I soar up the Technorati rankings

Out of curiosity, I just went back to Technorati for the first time, probably, since I registered there.  Kind of gratifyingly, I find I am now ranked at 2,476,024 in the universe of blogs. Well, in the universe of Technorati-registered or otherwise noted blogs. I don’t actually know the difference, strictly speaking.  Eagle-eyed readers with a […]

Monday, April 27th, 2009

How to build your online community

No, it’s not advice from me. It’s advice from hyperactive blogmeister John Scalzi, who has posted a handy video of a forum from the Tools of Change online media publishing conference thing in New York in February. I was aware of the event, and it looked very interesting. I would have liked to have gone […]

Friday, April 10th, 2009

The blogger's brick wall

A quick look at this blog’s stats shows a bit of a nosedive of views over the past few days. Yes – we’re coming into Easter, and I’ve noticed that people tend to look at blogs during the working week rather than at weekends or holidays. But it’s clear that traffic has some kind of […]

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Young people aren't quite the web experts you think they are

Just finished my first teaching session at Solent University – giving first year journalism students an introduction to web audio. It all went fine – certainly I had no trouble from the IT, unlike other teaching experiences I’ve had [*cough* UCA], and the students were, in the way of all the journalism students I’ve taught […]

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Connectivity, not content

Or, why the web can sometimes seem so very meta I noted recently that “people don’t care half as much about news as people in old media think they do. What they care about is entertainment and connectivity”.  Though it’s the sort of thing that has old-style news journalists weeping and tearing their hair out (well, […]

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Journalism.co.uk listing

On the day that Freelance Unbound is included on the Journalism.co.uk blogroll for the first time (and in the top slot no less! Though only as it’s the most recent) I checked out the WordPress web statistics to find – today’s was the lowest traffic since the start of March. Hmm.  Well, I sort of […]

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

Investigative journalism? Not really…

Regional magazine Leeds Guide flags up a “major investigation” into the death of print newspapers.  Well – it’s 1,250 words, which is hardly the Sunday Times Insight exposé of Israel’s secret nuclear programme we saw in 1986 (around 3,250 – and, you know, I think it probably took longer to research). Also, while it’s nice […]