Entries from June 2009

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Summer reading suggestions for journalism students #2

Yesterday I suggested journalism students should read Jeffrey Goldberg’s financial feature “Why I fired my broker” from the May issue of The Atlantic magazine. But I’m well aware that most student journalists aren’t that keen to write insightful business articles.  Instead, I’m sure a lot of you want to write witty and amusing columns of your clever […]

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Summer reading suggestions for journalism students #1

A little while ago, I suggested journalism students should read Raymond Chandler instead of just reading journalism. But I also promised some suggestions for really good journalistic writing to read. (Well, it’s summer, so what better way to relax on the beach?) I’ve got two suggestions – one, which I’ll look at today, is a […]

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Blogs are dying. Great news for bloggers… and journalism graduates

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 […]

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Calling new journalism graduates

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…

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Print versus online journalism – the view from Belgium

Here’s a very interesting post by, of all things, a Belgian linguistic researcher, about the differences between print and online journalism. I like its academic slant (something which often puts me off), as it actually helps to illuminate the murky way that news journalism is constructed and then passed off as something whole and authoritative.  […]

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Handy guide to better writing

Bill Bennett’s Knowledge Workers blog is running an ongoing series of posts on better writing. Today’s offering suggests why short sentences are only best up to a point, and why you need variation in your writing to help it develop an engaging rhythm. It follows others that cover journalistic staples such as the inverted pyramid, […]

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 […]

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Why journalism may become software development

There’s an interesting comment from Soilman on my post on whether a donation model can fund web content. It’s worth a closer look. He argues that the three things users may pay for are: Data Services Software/apps  If you’re a business mag/website, you create a software programme that helps professionals in your industry do their […]

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

I still can't seem to StumbleUpon myself

Ever since I got an email from social bookmark site StumbleUpon I’ve been trying to figure out how on earth the site works and where to find myself on it. Just for the hell of it, I tried emailing StumbleUpon’s technical support. I was pretty terse initially, as I was fairly ticked off with what […]

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Why newspapers still need sub-editors

I didn’t manage to get this cutting into the blog until today, but this item from the June 17 edition of London financial free paper City A.M. is a stark warning about the perils of doing without a sub-editor. I like City A.M. – for a freebie it’s a well-put-together paper for the financial/business world […]