Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Beyond journalism

I was happy to see the stalwart folk at FleetStreetBlues flag up my online how-is-your-media-recession poll a while ago. But a comment they made in their post begs for a little more attention. (Actually, it begged for it weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit preoccupied.) Freelance Unbound reckons he’s survived the recession just about OK, […]

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The changing face of journalism jobs

It’s always interesting to observe the changing requirements of media employers. But sometimes you have to wonder what’s going on at these companies. Eager young journalism graduates wanting to make their mark in the world of showbiz reporting might well be tempted to apply for this recent ad from entertainment news agency Bang Media International […]

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

I become an übergeek

Spent part of the weekend installing Apache and mySQL on my laptop to turn it into a “web development platform”. If you’d have spoken to me even a year ago, I would never have believed I could have written such a thing.  It was kind of easier than you’d think, given that most of my […]

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Teaching web audio and video

Just got my first sessional lecturing gig at Southampton Solent – teaching first-year journalism students about web audio and video. I’m pretty pleased about this, as it was the result of a spec email I sent to the course leader. Which goes to show it’s always worth punting for work – you never know who’ll […]

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Why Journalism shouldn't be taught as a BA

I posted here about Paul Bradshaw’s interesting video touching on the inflexibility of journalism education. I was surprised about this – until I started having more to do with journalism colleges. You’d think colleges and universities would be falling over themselves to offer what employers wanted. But it’s not quite so. Why should this be? […]

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Journalism skills gap

Saw this on the excellent Online Journalism Blog – a video taken at the Society of Editors 08 conference about the skills seen as desirable by media employers and by training and education providers. There’s a very interesting statistic at about 3m:30s in the video, which is the willingness of the different groups to compromise […]

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Money, sex and power

That’s what we all want – and basically that’s what you won’t get as a freelance writer/journalist or sub-editor. Not directly, anyway. And in the case of money, not promptly. So why bother? Why put in the hours of creative fervour and spend all that time parsing sentences correctly in order to turn in polished […]