hackbash

A moment, if you will, to mark a milestone dear to our hearts. Some time this week, BBC News Online marks its tenth year.
Though I frequently knock it, there’s a lot to love about the site and what it represents - the availability of almost its entire archive, for example.
Charmingly, unlike most other sites out […]

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There are people starving, others dying of disease and many millions who are oppressed and victimised, but if there’s one thing that people seem to give a shit about it’s technology. I’m utterly at a loss to explain why.
This isn’t the grumbling of a marginalised old-timer, I should point out. I may (dimly) remember playing […]

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Good to see the Financial Times opening up - a bit. You can now access 30 articles per month if you’re registered with the site, although my registration confirmation took about three hours to come through yesterday. Best not to wait until the moment you need to see something before signing up.
Anyway, the use of […]

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It’s easy to get wonderfully carried away with this whole internet news revolution thing. The argument for it goes something like this: the internet lowers the barriers to participation in the gathering, distribution and discussion of news, and makes information freely accessible to all.
There’s no doubt it’s happening. Consumers are today presented with a wider […]

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I seem to remember reading that every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off your life. If all you’re going to do in the extra seven minutes is invent equally smug statistics you might as well carry on smoking.
Another way to chisel away at your life expectancy is to watch 24-hour television news. I can’t […]

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I’m intrigued by this story in the Guardian. The headline, YouGov claims influence over Brown’s election retreat, sounds distinctly sinister to me. Isn’t the purpose of a polling organisation to find out what people think?
A quote from the company head also sits uneasily:
YouGov chief executive Nadhim Zahawi explained that in the past polling firms tested […]

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One of the best things about English is the fact that, if you know what you’re doing, you can mess about with it. In fact, even if you don’t know what you’re doing you can often get away with it. If everybody stuck to the rules we wouldn’t have the twisted brain-wrong of a one-off […]

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Charlie recently had a rant about newsreaders who don’t understand what it means to ‘log on’. I couldn’t agree with him more. I think the minimum requirements for logging onto something are supplying a user name and a password, and I write for a computer magazine so I should know.
Still, it’s not always that straightforward: […]

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Back in our first post I was reflecting on journalists’ ability to pick the wrong metaphors, but yesterday Charlie pointed out that it wasn’t only hacks with the habit. I’m rather grateful that he did.
I wrote a Living post based around the road casualty statistics that time forgot. Wondering if the DfT had an opinion […]

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