Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

When FOI requests are no substitute for real journalism

Here’s a great post on FleetStreetBlues about a Guardian story on the lack of ethnic minority representation at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Alongside the reported difficulty of black and minority ethnic students to gain admission to Oxford and Cambridge, the Guardian reported: “The FOI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab […]

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

State of the Blogosphere Survey – Technorati needs you

Having posted previously about Technorati’s annual state of the blogosphere survey, I am pleased to actually take part this year. Tellingly, one question asks me “Which best describes how frequently you blog now versus when you first launched your blog?”. To which the answer is a shameful “I blog a lot less now”. But I’ve […]

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Web traffic: what goes up must come down

Readers may remember the run-in I had with the Clinique press office a little while ago, and the flood of visitors that were drawn here by a repost at US journalism college web site the Poynter Institute. It was very exciting – my readership spiked tenfold, and I had loads of comments. So – I’m on […]

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Why I should take my own writing advice

As my dozens of regular visitors may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet around here for the past week or so. In my last post I took journalism students to task for strenuously avoiding core things on their course such as, well, actually writing copy. In the light of the lack of updates […]

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Self-hosted 3-column Pressrow

Well, it’s been a long, hard road, but here we are. A brand new web host and a brand new look. Well – a brand new look that looks very much like the old look, but hey. All visitors from the old wordpress.com address should be automatically redirected here. I’ll probably try to nudge people […]

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Coca-Cola Unbound

What a difference a grinding advertising recession makes. Only six months ago, culture secretary Andy Burnham said that a three-month consultation between the government and advertisers had “failed to produce a convincing case for product placement”. As ever, of course, the usual government terror of bad things happening to people because of the economy has […]

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Half-yearly blog stats geekery

In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, and because such things may be of interest to new and student bloggers (and hopeless WordPress geeks), here’s the first installment of what should become a regular series of half-yearly posts on the statistics behind Freelance Unbound. First off – Freelance Unbound is not a hugely visited […]

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Critique of the Online Journalism Blog's new look

Being as I’ve been too busy checking, unchecking and then rechecking tick boxes on a CMS for the past few weeks, I’ve only just caught up with the redesign of Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog. The OJB is excellent as a resource, but it used to look dreadful – tiny type, an unattractive colour scheme […]

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Call yourself a writer? Meme response

It’s meme day on Freelance Unbound – mainly because it’s August and I think we all deserve to enjoy the Silly Season. (Though in the era of 24-hour rolling news, does that even exist any more?) Here’s an interesting meme started by Linda Jones. (Well, she hopes it will become a meme, and I’m calling it […]

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Why paid journalism is in trouble

As a coda to my post on why journalists can’t afford to be purist about their trade anymore, Eat Sleep Publish sums up exactly why the paid journalism model is in such trouble. Former P-I staffer Curt Milton runs theEastlake Ave blog. He keeps a part time job, makes tons of local connections, writes his posts, edits […]