There’s lots of talk now that Murdoch is going to sell up his UK newspapers, all his newspapers, and that he’s not going to launch a Sunday edition of The Sun. They may all be true. But if he did any of those, he’d be throwing money away. Take a look at the readership figures, … Read more
My bet, though, is that even in 2020, 10 years after this writing, the poor – even the mobile-owning, Internet-surfing, technology-savvy poor – will still be with us. Mobile phone owners won’t be much better off than they were before, and owning a mobile phone, however fancy and Internet-enabled, won’t do squat for helping a person … Read more
Citizen journalists are usually passionate about what they cover. That’s the problem. As a journalist you can’t be passionate about it because you are supposed to be impartial (this doesn’t mean you don’t care; it means you listen with a detached but compassionate ear). And I reject arguments that this is not possible. Of course … Read more
I don’t really know what to make of this, but I occasionally trawl Google Search Trends/Insights to see what people are looking for, and whether they’re changing much over the past few years. This seems to me to be as good an indicator of things as anything else. I did it back in 2005 with … Read more
Good grammar is important, whether you’re pitching a story to a journalist or a scam to a dupe. Here are two examples: how not to and how to. First off, a PR pitch that endangers its credibility with an error in the subject line: And now, here’s an example of getting it right: A scam that not only … Read more