Blog posts by year and monthAugust 2010
Posts (27)
Event: Data Journalism
Wednesday 22 September 2010, the Frontline Club, London. Managing large amounts of data is one of the key skills of the modern, digitally minded journalist. So how do top data-driven journalists collate, analyse and present vast amounts of facts and figures in interactive graphics, searcha...
Trapped
Let's start by congratulating the News of the World for its exclusive on what we've come to call 'spot-fixing'. I have a lot of reservations about entrapment, whether it's carried out by the 'forces of law and order or by newspapers. But it does seem, on the face of it at least, that this par...
Russian wildfires produce media smokescreen?
Environmentalists and freedom of information campaigners have accused the Russian authorities of failing to provide vital information about the wildfires that have devastated huge tracts of the country's forests and the death rates in Moscow caused by extreme heat and choking smog. In som...
CoJo Summer Tips #8
Spurn relatives: Not relatives as in great uncle Albie and his stern second wife. But relatives like 'better', 'worse', 'faster', 'slower'. They're words we use entirely innocently in most sentences we speak in everyday life. But for journalists - and especially journalists aspiring to impar...
Event: Papal UK Visit
Wednesday 8 September 2010, BBC Television Centre, London. Pope Benedict XVI is to visit England and Scotland from 16 to 19 September, in what will be the first papal visit to the UK in more than 25 years. The BBC College of Journalism will hold a lunchtime briefing to discuss the significan...
Bangkok blames the international media
The dust has settled in Bangkok after weeks of protest and a violent crackdown in May that left 91 dead and hundreds injured. But the anger is still simmering below the surface, with plenty of criticism of international media coverage on newspaper letters pages and ex-pat discussion boards...
Obama and the "hyperkinetic, souped-up, tricked-out" media
September's Vanity Fair includes a long piece by Todd Purdum about a day in the life of the Obama Presidency. It's a well-argued case for the impossibility of the job. Purdum vividly describes the unmanageable confluence of pressures: the daily briefing from 16 government intelligence age...
The profits of unpaid journalism
A few weeks ago I tried my hand at contributing to the US online news aggregator Newser. Its Newser by Users section asks readers to pick stories and and to write and upload intros to them, just as Newser's staff do on the rest of the site. There's no pay for these contributions, so the o...
Will BBC values translate into Chinese?
I've been researching material for a speech I'm giving next month to an audience of Chinese television executives in Beijing. I'm told they particularly want to hear about the way the BBC is structured and the values on which it is based. Well, whatever else you may think about it, the BBC...
Radio haze
The latest radio listening figures are still rumbling round the media columns. The numbers, from the industry body, RAJAR, have generated a tremendous range of stories, even allowing for the time of year. Radio listening is at a record high, said the Guardian, suggesting interest in the G...
