Being A Reporter And Being A Columnist: The ‘Good Story’ Trap

I’m a journalist. You probably knew that. But since focusing on being a columnist (rather than a reporter) I’ve tried to avoid the journalist crowd. Not because they’re not interesting, dedicated, very smart people, many of whom I count my friends. It’s just that journalists have a certain way of thinking, and I’m not convinced, … Read more

Blink, Diallo And The Serpico Blog

I re-watched the excellent Serpico recently: A classic movie that should be watched back-to-back with The Corporation. Hunting the web for more on Serpico the man I found he has his own blog: the Official Frank Serpico Blog. I find that a pretty amazing example of how the Internet, and in particular blogging, has changed … Read more

News, And Tumbling Words

An interesting way of looking at news: 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris: Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this … Read more

The rise and fall of the Internet cliche

I thought I would try out Edward Tufte’s sparklines idea as a way of presenting some research I have been doing into how the mainstream media has been covering technology over the last decade or two. I went through Factiva (part-owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and my paymaster), noting down the … Read more

Recording Skype conversations

Update: Writing in August 2006, I’ve decided to turn this page into a list of Skype conversation recording software, after asking this back in January 2005: One drawback of Skype: recording conversations. For a journalist this is quite an important drawback since recording an interview over the phone is as necessary as recording an interview … Read more