hackbash

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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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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Writing online gives you the welcome opportunity to fix the kind of clangers that, were you in print, you’d be stuck with. On the other hand, changing stories that are already live can leave your readers with an insight into the editorial process that you might not have intended.
Spending a lot of time looking at [...]

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Attempting to extract information from a press office yesterday, it occurred to me that press officers need to get with the programme, or social media is going to whup their sorry asses.
My request wasn’t a toughie. I’d seen a story on BBC News that I wanted to cover for a client. The source was research [...]

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Now I wasn’t going to go on about the BBC again for a while, but this is interesting so bear with me. Last week I happened upon this BBC story, which informed this piece for Living.
You’ll notice that in the Living story I refer to “the BBC’s enthusiasm” which, to put it mildly, was gushing. [...]

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As if things haven’t been busy enough in the three months or so since Charlie and I joined Spannerworks, we’re now involved in interviews for a third journalist. Some might see interviews as a curse, but it’s all pretty new to us. We’ve been amazed by the experience and qualifications of the people who want [...]

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The quip in Simon’s recent post* that journalists on proper magazines enjoy perks like, um, a readership has been playing on my mind. One of our most promising projects is very much, let’s say, under-read at the moment, despite some rather splendid content.
I guess the concept of building a readership comes more easily to a [...]

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