hackbash

A while back, the BBC caused a ripple of excitement (at least for this blogger) when it started to furnish stories with social bookmarking links. Far more significantly, perhaps, BBC News has just embedded a YouTube video directly into an article. I’m not a regular reader of the BBC’s entertainment stories, but this is the [...]

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I love the BBC’s most emailed and most read lists, partly because they help you spot interesting stories you might have missed, but largely because they show you where its readers’ collective mind is at: in the gutter. Every now and then, particularly prurient and snigger-worthy stories resurface as a new wave of people dig [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Ok, I promised that my next post wouldn’t be about the Beeb. Sorry. Just wondering if anyone else finds it annoying to be told to ‘log on’ to a website. The BBC do it all the time. Earlier this summer there was a particularly grating little segment they kept playing on South East Today (be [...]

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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 [...]

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Anyone would think the gentlemen of the press wanted Northern Rock to go tits-up. At the very least there’s been some incautious language going around these last few days. You can understand a bit of hysteria from people whose life-savings might be on the line, but isn’t it our job as journalists to get a [...]

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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 [...]

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“Fact me till I fart,” Chris Morris once commanded. That man was way ahead of the curve. In this little beauty, the BBC has bravely dispensed with those troublesome linking ideas that pull a story together, in preference for the stark-bollock-naked facts. It’s all rather conventional up until the crosshead, but then the journo lets [...]

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Alright, it’s not just about the BBC, but are all the sub-editors on holiday? Apparently, eight out of ten people feel safe. What about now? Do you feel safe now? And now? Still, at least you haven’t got global warming to worry about, as a Scottish bus builder hopes to invent a bus with zero [...]

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