Posted on Thursday, 11 February, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
This is funny and sad when you have a newspaper career somewhere in your past and can still recall once having some sort of passionate feeling about them. Then you remember the incredibly thick-headed herd of corporate executive types who were basically doing news rags in faster than any other force ever could hope to, and that thing that could have saved them (the web) was looked at suspiciously by the majority of this same cadre of non-contributing mouth breathers who didn’t spend any time in news rooms and who could only imagine the possibilities of online distribution in terms of an outmoded, outdated business model that had been used for decades to erode independent journalism in favor of higher quarterly profits and car advertising inserts.
Posted on Monday, 18 May, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
This is hilarious and landed in an in box of mine via a circuitous route that was interesting only in how news orgaizations find their source material. I’ve redacted all email addresses, but if this is you, or someone you know, you may want to contact Splash News press agency, and the irony in that name will become apparent upon reading the below email:
—–Original Message—–
From: [mailto:address@redacted.com]
Sent: 14 May 2009 12:05
To: address@redacted.com
Subject: Request from Natasha Kleanthous, Women’s magazine
If you have relevant information for the media professional concerned please click this link to reply: mailto:ddress@redacted.com
Request deadline: Friday 15 May, 2009, 5:00 pm
Contact me by e-mail at mailto:ddress@redacted.com
My request: Hi, I work for Splash News press agency which writes features for national publications worldwide. I am looking for a woman who successfully got pregnant using a turkey baster. The case study would need to be happy to be identified and photographed. The interview would be conducted in a very sensitive and positive way. I would be aiming to place this article in the features section of a national newspaper or a woman’s magazine.
The deadline has since passed, but it looks like a tough one to track down, so there may still be time. If this is you, then you could be famous.
Posted on Thursday, 5 February, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
How do we define commercial free? Let’s not resort to the dictionary here. Quite simply for a media enterprise, it’s to not sell time or space to advertisers. Now, why provide this? Again, we don’t have to get too technical here. It’s not because soap and car commercials are annoying (though they are) but so that the organisation’s content is not bound or somehow compromised by deals with businesses or individuals who may have interests contrary to the public good.
There is ample room for a healthy debate on the merits of this argument, and I don’t really fall directly on one side or the other, but I’ll leave it for the comments section of this post. Publicly funded news has its compromises just like commercially tied organisations. But what happens when a purportedly noncommercial news organisation tries to have it both ways? This brings us our current episode’s subject: The BBC.
Posted on Saturday, 4 October, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Kirk
Few things surprise me anymore. And the things that do, well that I’m surprised by them is one of the few things that still surprise me. And strangely enough one of the most shocking things to flicker across the in-box of my email was the news that Kirk Ericson was quitting The Olympian. Maybe it’s better to use the lexicon more acceptable in these times of financial duress, he accepted a “voluntary separation package.”
Every time one of my friends leave The Olympian, it’s a mixed blessing. Bad for the paper, good for them, and good for me as I can miss the newsroom a little bit less. Two out of three ain’t bad.
I never worked in journalism as long as Kirk worked at the Olympian. In the last days of Kirk’s 18 years at the daily paper of Olympia, WA, he wrote an online column (some people call these blogs), called These Times. The thing about These Times that stood out from the usual online stuff that newspapers ply was that it was a throwback to an earlier concept was once dominant long before newspapers had websites: That people went to them because they liked to read things.
Posted on Thursday, 14 February, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
My college-mate Sara is rabble-rousing for the Bay Area Newspaper Guild. She’s contributing to the news guild’s spiffy new site. I’ll be following the battle from afar, and it looks to be an exciting one. — One Big BANG
As a graphics person, an information architect and erstwhile designer, graphical depictions of data always fascinates me. The impending FCC vote on media ownership rules has been big news for media types and has led to a flourish of linking to those same media-ownership graphic representations at Media Channel, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, etc. that stories linked to when this was going on in 2003. But as I look at these maps, and see Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media holding’s in one sphere and AT&T in another one, I wonder if I would really care whether one really bought out the other. I mean, if both offer crap that I now readily dismiss, should I really give a fig if it’s this company or that company running E! or Fox News? Either way, it will still suck.
“Be reasonable. Even when your fury seems to gain control of you… Stick to those basic standards of justice.”