It’s a tough world out there in the media – what with grinding recession, a skillset that needs updating by the hour and a revenue model that’s been turned upside down by the web. It doesn’t help that more students than ever before are being turned out by the UK’s journalism courses. That makes it […]
It seems that “the long tail of blogging is dying”. For those who prefer English to techie jargon, the long tail refers to the millions of blogs with few incoming links, compared to a relatively small number of dominant blogs with many thousands of readers and lots of presence in the wider web. But this […]
FleetStreetBlues is offering a fantastic opportunity to blog about your search to find work in the journalism business for no money at all. But you do get, you know, exposure. Go on, give it a go…
From the Twitter feed: do journ educators misunderstand level of students’ web skills?advanced online journalism module set up at Sunderland-only 4 signed up From my observations – yes, I think we do. As I’ve noted before, journalism (and other) students live their lives on Facebook, but when it comes to actually using the web more, […]
Regular readers of this blog will know that I can get a bit cranky and irritable about the generally poor literacy of undergraduates. Happily, however, there is still some very good work being produced by journalism graduates, as I discovered yesterday evening at the private view of UCA Farnham’s graduate show. Adam Leveridge – who […]
Because marking student worked is tiring, my goodness yes. Yesterday’s all-day marking bonanza was certainly interesting (it was my first time, but they were gentle with me). There were some shockers. Some of the spelling and grammar was pretty weak, and there was at least one example of a student writing submitted assessment work using SMS-speak […]
…fear my judgement – yeay, fear it! Yes – today I enjoy actually marking the work of online journalism students in Farnham. After blathering to them about blogging and web video, among other things, I get to look at the end of year assessment work. But fear? Really? No. Actually I will stand as impartial as the […]
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 […]
I just got into an interesting spat with Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism. Apparently he thinks only the phone is good enough for journalists to use to chase up stories. For contact with interviewees or sources of information the telephone is ALWAYS the right way to make the first […]
Today I spent an hour in a vast lecture theatre giving a talk about freelance journalism to first-year students at Kingston University. It was great fun, actually, and I got to use their super high-tech AV equipment (which luckily didn’t break down on me). That’s me on the right looking suitably dorky in front of […]