Freelance Unbound

Which is exactly what life should be like…

  The lovely Eleanor Riches at Acorn Independent Press writes: “I was wondering if you might be interested to see the new edition of Good Times Bad Times by Harold Evans. A pioneer of investigative journalism, Harold worked his way through the ranks of student journalism, through regional papers, before becoming editor of The Times. A proper [...]

*[Not, clearly, on Monday or Tuesday. Too many undergraduates to deal with. Wednesday, probably] It’s time to clear the tumbleweed from the streets of Freelance Unbound, so we’ll be back next week with some real content to celebrate the start of the university teaching term. Look forward to a long, rambling essay on the lessons [...]

Unlike those organised folk at FleetStreetBlues, who actually bother to give their readers notice that they will be doing other things than blogging for a few weeks, I just stop posting anything and let people drift away in boredom and confusion. (Or is that what happens when I do post? Hmm.) Anyway – the doldrums [...]

Here’s a video from a talk by social media editor Chris Street to journalism students at UCA Farnham about the skills and role of a social media editor, and why traditional media need to develop social engagement. Broadcast is over If you think of yourselves as broadcasters, you’ve lost the battle – the broadcast days [...]

If you saw the fascinating Stanford University data visualisation of US newspaper expansion and contraction over 300 years or so, and thought “hey, I’d really like to see an animation of that,” this video is for you.  The original visualisation took the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress and plotted [...]

In the spirit of full disclosure – here’s an irresistible offer just received by the Freelance Unbound bribery and corruption department. Hello! I was wondering if you took paid guest posts on Feelance Unbound? Not a traditional “guest post” but one you’d be compensated for and have complete editorial control over. Wow – fantastic. This [...]

A bit late, but here’s a few problems with that really great human interest amnesia story from last week: when 34-year-old Naomi Jacobs (or 35-year-old, depending which version you read) woke up in 2008 convinced she was 15. Naomi Jacobs, of Manchester, recalled nothing after 1992, did not know she had a son and thought [...]

Journalists need to get to grips with social media – and especially the world’s inexplicably most-popular site, Facebook. But Facebook sucks. It’s not just its hateful approach to individual privacy. It’s the fact that it’s such a complete pig to use – if you want to have some control over what you are doing and achieve [...]

If anyone’s getting withdrawal symptoms from the lack of their News of the World fix on Sundays, take heart. There’s a daily dose of trashy inanity readily available in your inbox or local bus. As a selection of headlines from last week’s Metro shows, even the middle market media are trying gallantly to fill the [...]