Entries from June 2009

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Why corporate communications should lighten up

In the course of my series on how to survive the media recession, I talked about investigating membership professional organisations in order to boost your profile. I also mentioned that I had written a free piece for the member magazine of Communicators in Business, the organisation for corporate communications writers and editors. The idea was to try […]

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Do we overestimate journalism students' web skills?

From the Twitter feed:  do journ educators misunderstand level of students’ web skills?advanced online journalism module set up at Sunderland-only 4 signed up From my observations – yes, I think we do. As I’ve noted before, journalism (and other) students live their lives on Facebook, but when it comes to actually using the web more, […]

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Can a donation model fund web content?

Media owners and publishers are, to say the least, anxious about the financial viability of journalism, given the web’s capacity for undermining the usual business model for content (buying stuff) by, basically, giving it away free. The UK government is even thinking about annexing part of the BBC licence fee to support regional news on […]

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Great beginner's guide to CSS

I’ve just come across this simple start-up tutorial to cascading style sheets (CSS), which is ideal for the absolute beginner. Much like style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS is at the heart of the look-and-feel of content management systems (CMS). But unlike style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS code looks like, well, code. […]

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Navigating the CMS minefield

Regular, geeky readers of Freelance Unbound will know that I am striving hard to become literate in the ways of CMS – that is in actually constructing a CMS-based site, not just using one. This stuff is pretty hard to get to grips with for a non-techie journalist, so I’ve been trawling the web for […]

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I can't seem to StumbleUpon myself

I recently reported a minor traffic spike from a bookmark on Reddit, which rekindled my interest in social bookmarking sites.  So imagine my excitement when I got an inbound referring link from StumbleUpon, which is one step better at number three in the social bookmarking rankings.  “One of our members added your page to the Writing […]

Monday, June 15th, 2009

What's the scoop on LivingScoop?

Back to the grind this week, but just time to wonder what’s up with “video sharing site” Livingscoop.com. Like other journos, perhaps, I received an email invitation to “register my interest” in the site a few days ago. In slightly strangled English, it claims to be:  A very good place for training, improving and to promote […]

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Four pillars of freelance success, part four

The final part of four pillars of freelance success should be up on FleetStreetBlues today. Normal service on Freelance Unbound should be resumed next week…

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Four pillars of freelance success, part three

Your third pillar of wisdom should be online at the fine FleetStreetBlues today. Meanwhile, I am enjoying art and other fine highbrow things in St Ives…

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Four pillars of freelance success, part two

Still in Cornwall, still minimal internet access. But part two of four pillars of freelance success is over at FleetStreetBlues. Enjoy…