wake up and smell the copy
Posted in blog, online journalism, writing on Feb 27th, 2008
Kind of a note-to-self: editorial process is a Good Thing. And although blogging is all conversational and flexible and 2.0, it’s sometimes handy to ask a friend (or, what the hell, journalistic colleague) to cast their eagle eye over your draft. Especially when you’re planning to post at the end of the day. So, Handolio: [...]
Posted in journalism, work, writing on Jan 3rd, 2008
Last week Dave Lee picked up on Spannerworks’ advert for a new journalist, and drew our attention to the fact that it was, frankly, rubbish. I hope that Charlie’s reply to Dave’s follow-up post explains a bit more about how we work and what we’re doing in a marketing agency. We’ve spent plenty of time [...]
Posted in journalism, work, writing on Dec 29th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in online journalism, writing on Dec 17th, 2007
[NB - I broke the images in this post. Sorry.] 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 [...]
Posted in writing on Dec 6th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in online journalism, writing on Nov 22nd, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in writing on Oct 10th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in online journalism, writing on Oct 3rd, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in writing on Sep 26th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in writing on Sep 20th, 2007
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 [...]
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