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 […]

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Tameside Council blocks microbloggers – because they get the story

Tameside Council has declined to provide “Twitter accreditation” to bloggers and other citizens – thus supposedly preventing them from reporting via social media from council meetings. It seems the council is much more comfortable with the idea of “professional journalists” covering its activities. Could this be that they are less of a threat? The Daily Telegraph […]

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Modern media is rubbish #1: two examples

Yesterday’s “news” carried two items that should have been shocking in their inability to separate hysteria and PR puffery from proper reporting. If that wasn’t really what the modern media is all about. The stories are from supposedly opposite corners of the media ring – one super serious, the other light-hearted. Each is crap in […]

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Surfing or diving? Google and the “deep web”

Here’s an interesting piece from the Guardian about the deep web – the more than 99% (it claims) of the world wide web that is invisible to everyday search via, say, Google. Also interesting is the paper’s editorial stance on this. According to the standfirst: Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, […]

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Bloggers and anonymity

Shocking though it is to say, as I’m not a huge Guardian fan, The Guardian‘s comment on the unmasking of a police blogger by The Times is spot on. Crucially, Guardian digital content director Emily Bell recognised The Times‘s move was: No surprise given that old publishing models benefit from restriction rather than spread of […]

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Could investigative journalism save the Evening Standard?

Unsurprisingly, journalism bloggers have been keen to jump on the relaunched Evening Standard as a topic for posting. (Surprisingly, I got in quite early – normally I’m days or weeks behind the curve).  I wrote that the Standard could go for a local news aggregation model in a bid to offer something different, and attractive, […]

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

The investigative journalism debate hots up. Kind of.

Despite the fact the the internet is essentially destroying [if creatively] my profession, I love it. Mainly because in the space of a few days it can create links between me and a journalist in Leeds via a publication I’d never heard of and a blog that he’d never heard of.  So thanks to Simon […]

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 […]