"Ask not for whom the web trolls, it trolls for thee"
The way we buy news is a ridiculous bundling mess. The news needs to go Netflix. I don’t buy weekday newspapers now, that change happened years ago, because no one newspaper is going to have all the news I want to read. Simple fact. Buying one paper means a lot of redundancy. Take Thursday. There…
Stringwire is buzzword of the week in so-called ‘social journalism’ circles, with the Monday announcement (furiously copied-and-pasted) that NBC had acquired the company to help it in its bid to source live UGC from breaking news events. Nearly all of the previous attempts to garner precious breaking world news content failed because they didn’t take…
I’ve been involved with creating some small-scale storytelling projects for non-journalistic ends in the last few years. All of them have had two things in common – zero budget and, as a result, forced simplicity. If you have budget, good for you. Spend it wisely, and you have the luxury of options. But if times…
Journalism jobs are under threat and being lost by the score every day. So with the rise in demand for sponsored content and brand newsrooms (See what Forbes and WaPo are doing), are the laid-off masses going to fill the seats in these new quasi-journalistic enterprises? I’m not so sure about that. If you’re hiring, you…
March 5 marks the one-year anniversary of a film that blindsided everyone who has an interest in NGO communications, or how narratives emerge from developing countires – Kony2012. The video defied all logic for web videos. It dealt with a complex and obscure topic, lasted a half hour (most ecof the popular web videos are…
Henry Peirse, who runs GRN (a global network of stringers & freelancers) reckons that training journalists to be entrepreneurs is moronic. I engaged him on the topic, and there was an interesting back and forth – which I’ve added to here.
Guinness’s October ‘cloud’ ad floated softly near many of the YouTube videos I’ve been watching lately. It’s a 30-second version of a TV ad which has been sliced down for the web. It normally appears with the option to click out after five seconds and go through to my chosen video (what YouTube call a TrueView…
In small publications, covering a wide remit using scant resources makes it very hard to please everyone. And if your main demographic includes a lot of expats who’ll break out the flat caps at any given opportunity, you know that leaving them displeased is going to mean fielding a lot of angry phonecalls and meandering…