hackbash

There’s a set of responsibilities incumbent on a journalist that needn’t trouble a copywriter, PR executive or marketing assistant. The latter are generally assumed to have an agenda, with a message to sell or place, and their words regarded accordingly. The former should be writing for the reader.
Given the above, it’s not always surprising that […]

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I’ve been banging on about hyperlinks a bit lately, but they’re a pretty important part of writing online. Done well, embedding links within your copy can provide context, give a route to further reading, or even act as punctuation or emphasis. Taken together, the benefits improve the reader experience, and will help your visibility in […]

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Charlie and I normally agree on a remarkably high proportion of things, so much so, in fact, that people are beginning to see us as a happily married couple. Just to scotch that particular rumour, then, here’s something we don’t agree on.
Or should that be, “here’s something that we don’t agree on”?
In the context of […]

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For all my protestations that there’s no great secret to writing for an online audience, after a few months in the job I’m beginning to notice a couple of more subtle differences in the way that it’s possible to use language when writing for the internet.
One area where this keeps coming up is with hyperlinks […]

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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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On one of the sites for which Charlie and I write, we also moderate reader comments. Aside from the genuine responses and the occasional shameless plug for people’s own projects, there’s an increasing influx of spam.
Now, I consider myself fairly liberal when it comes to smut, but some of the links in our moderation queue […]

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Dear God I’m addicted to Scrabulous.
For anyone who hasn’t been playing (or reading Charlie Brooker), it’s a Scrabble plugin for Facebook. Except, inasmuch as I can be bothered to find out, it started out as a turn-based email game.
Whatever, our Charlie’s “no Facebook till lunch” note to self is still as apt as a couple […]

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Right blogging powerhouse I’m turning out to be. What’s this, five posts in a month? Anyway, I’ve opened this up to my colleague Charlie, aka the Bird Man of Firle. I hope he’ll offer something more insightful than my usual carping about BBC News.
I’d invite other journalists I’ve worked with, but they all work for […]

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