Entries from May 2009

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Why we still need sub-editors #1

The first in a no doubt ongoing series, (which also happens to combine my hobby and my day job). A bout of insomnia had me watching Channel 4 at an ungodly hour this morning. I managed to catch the second half of Psyche and Eros – an animated retelling of the ancient Greek myth (god […]

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Why the old media model is utterly broken

A very good piece by Bob Garfield in Advertising Age explains why not only print is dead, but the rest of the media as well.  The key is this quote from Randall Rothenberg:  “Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are built into her laptop. So from a very […]

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Nice work at UCA Journalism’s graduate show

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 […]

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

The power of social bookmarking

With one bound, this blog has gone viral. (Well, kind of). I’ve always been curious about social bookmarking, but never really explored it very much. Aside from signing up to StumbleUpon to see how it worked, I haven’t really used sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to steer or filter my web use. […]

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Why journalism students should read Raymond Chandler

Good writers read. They read a lot. And they read widely.  If you’re a journalism student, the best advice I could give you would be exactly that – to read, and read widely. Most importantly, it would be to read not just journalism. I imagine that’s probably difficult when you’re doing a journalism course – […]

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Why journalism lecturers seem so drained at this time of year

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 […]

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

I stand in judgement of journalism students…

…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 […]

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Quark 8 versus InDesign CS4

Steve Hill’s New Journalism Review blog has a note about the comparison of Quark 8 and InDesign CS4 in MacUser (which isn’t yet online, apparently).  My take is that the debate on software features misses the point a little. The question of which to buy normally doesn’t depend on which is the best product. It’s […]

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Will people without web access be denied news?

From the Twitterfeed: #media140 question from audience: if journalism goes online what happens to needs of those citizens who not got web? It’s an interesting (if slightly garbled) question, especially given yesterday’s story about people without web access being denied cheap rail fares. It seems around 25% of UK citizens don’t have web access at home, a […]

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, […]