Entries from March 2010

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

What journalism can learn from internet marketers

Given the turmoil in professional media at the moment, there’s been a fair amount of talk about entrepreneurial journalism recently (ie if no one else is going to pay you for being a journalist, maybe you’ll have to figure out a way of making it work as a business yourself). As it happens, I’ve been […]

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Today’s shameless plug: The Trusted

It turns out that my friend and regular Freelance Unbound commenter Mel is at more-or-less the cutting edge of publishing. Apart from the time she spends as a welcome gadfly here, it turns out she is a secret novelist. In fact, I’ve just received her latest (well, first) outing through the post after ordering it […]

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Murdoch makes good on paywall promise

It seems Rupert Murdoch is actually going to start locking away his online newspaper content behind paywalls. From June he’s going to charge for access to the loss-making Times and Sunday Times. Will the gamble work? More informed commentators than I have argued strongly that it won’t (though that hasn’t stopped me doing the same). At […]

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Modern media is rubbish #3: how to mangle social networking stats

Caught yesterday in the Metro – a brief news report on a social networking survey by InSites (ugh) Consulting. As reported in Metro: 77% of UK internet users use social networking sites 42% of UK internet users use Twitter 50% of UK internet users use Facebook Let’s look at those numbers, shall we? First – […]

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Online journalism by the book

I’ve been rewriting some undergraduate course descriptions for online journalism and I’ve realised I have one big problem with them. I can’t think how to update the recommended student book lists. One problem is that whatever I choose has to have longevity. Every time a course is rewritten, it has to be validated by an […]

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

ASA climate change ad ruling: Miliband misses the point

Here’s a nice exchange on this morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 between Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) chief executive Guy Parker and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband. The ASA has ruled that Government advertisements on climate change were exaggerated – specifically that they made definitive predictions about future weather effects that could not yet be proved. […]

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

My tangled web of analytics

Warning: intense WordPress stats geekery ahead We’re coming up to the annual WordPress geekery blowout that is my full year web stats report. Freelance Unbound’s half-yearly web stats geekery report came when the site was hosted on WordPress.com. This had its ups and downs. The upside was that it was simple to understand – WordPress […]

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Modern media is rubbish #2: the Toyota hoax

Here’s a nice dissection on the Forbes web site of a Toyota Prius accelerator fault hoax that has hit US news media. Apparently, James Sikes was driving a Toyota Prius in California when the accelerator jammed – the same fault that is said to have caused the death of a family in a Lexus and […]

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Interns and the plummeting value of a university degree

The BBC has caught up on the whole unpaid internship debate. The Your Money segment on BBC News 24 on Saturday March 13 featured a new web site set up by disgruntled former intern Alex Try. Interns Anonymous is quite well done, actually – with video documentary material, surveys and resources for interns. It’s also a […]

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Tales from the trade press: ‘soft’ features can be harder than you think

I suspect that most journalists and journalism students assume that the toughest feature assignments are for the nationals – hard-hitting investigative exposes of political corruption, say – or for dirt-digging celebrity magazines. All that hanging around in the pouring rain at 3am to catch Ashley Cole in a compromising SMS incident, maybe, or pretending to […]