Monthly Archives: April 2009

Two days on from days out in Whitehall and, for me, the lessons are clear. You can spend your time herding cats or participating in street-level conversations with your constituents. Mmmm…

Tis only Thursday; so Tuesday’s gathering of the great and the media good – and me – in Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons is still relatively fresh in the mind.
Given it was all conducted on Chatham House rules and given my knowledge of licence fee slicing and switch-over surplusses is sketchy at [...]

The BBC head to Mr Burnham’s table tomorrow bearing a few gifts for us all. And being this fledgling written content network, I might even be able to give them one back…

This is interesting.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/26/bbc-share-local-media
On a number of fronts; not least in the fact that someone, somewhere has found me a ticket to tomorrow’s ball and so alongside ‘… Helen Boaden, the BBC’s head of news, and David Holdsworth, controller of the English regions, as well as other industry executives and the National Union of Journalists….’ [...]

The lesson comes from the streets of Baghdad. That our future has to be a ‘joint operation’; you need grunts on the ground, you win no hearts and few minds with just drones in the air

Apologies if the analogy proves over-stretched.
Whilst there might be a forest fire of our worst imaginings raging all about us right now in old media land, it bears no comparison to events elsewhere in the world – notably, in this case, the conflicts that continue to engulf the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And apologies if [...]

If you can’t be hyper-national or pan-global and you don’t do what you do in TS10 in NR14, you’re in trouble. You don’t ‘fit’ easily into a Digital Britain.

For a fair while now, I’ve kind of worked on the basis that this web world of ours will go one of two ways… you’ll either be hyper-national a la The Telegraph, The Guardian, et al…
… or you’ll be hyper-local. A la Linda at www.darwenreporter.com And James at www.towcesternews.co.uk
And there won’t be too much left [...]

If only the UK had a Knight Foundation, says Roy, then we too might be enjoying the learning curve that is EveryBlock. But I think we have…

Mr Greenslade wrote an interesting post the other day – and all on a subject painfully dear to our hearts.
Who is ever going to fund hyper-local news projects in this country…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/apr/14/digital-media-local-newspapers
These days I can give you a list as long as your arm of those who won’t… For certain people charged with, quote, ‘making innovation [...]

Might Mr Reznor be about to bang a Nine-Inch Nail into the coffin of the web browser? He is hosting a conversation with his community off an app… not via a search…

For now, just a short post.
Weeds, more weeds and a late Easter Sunday lunch with the Old Dear await.
But sometimes, a thought and a coincidence strike together – and there is a need to put finger-tip to keyboard.
This is from C Shirky. It is from the piece that I read on my 40th birthday; January [...]

The three ‘P’ riders of Ms Bell’s forthcoming apocalypse. Press hall, paper boy and pension deficit.

One of the bigger tragedies of any impending break-up of Press Gazette would be a loss of Peter Kirwan’s Media Money column.
For me – ever since we first hooked up at a UCLAN speaking gig and in the hotel bar thereafter – he has been something of a shining light; a regular hook upon which [...]

Now the Wall St Journal ponders the same kind of thoughts as Mr Cuban and his Mavericks, that the time might be nigh for a ‘beat writers co-operative’…

This piece is fascinating. And, yes, I know I say that all the time.
But it is.
Particularly for anyone who spent a few quid the other year on www.mybasketballwriter.com. Along with www.mybaseballwriter.com and www.myhockeywriter.com. Just in case…
Anyway, here we go…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906424665995337.html
Basically, for those of you tired of linking, the two authors are starting to chart the decline [...]

How do we ’save’ journalism? By entering the spirit of this new, post-capitalist age and making transparency our No1 goal. We have to leave the ‘era of sunlight’ behind us…

It was this headline on BuzzMachine that got me a-thinking; that our Arianna was about to ’save’ journalism…
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/04/06/arianna-huffington-saves-journalism/
It is an interesting piece in the sense that it chimes well with the current debate about ‘not-for-profit’ business models; that, perhaps, the future of decent journalism might – for now – have to rest with the generosity [...]

If brown was once the new black, is small the new big? Because one or two people are starting to take offence at an oblique way of working…

There were a couple of Google bits and bobs that caught my eye today.
Both, for me, touch on an increasingly familiar theme.
Big.
Just how big would any Google-Twitter tie-up be?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/apr/03/twitter-google
And then something of a developing backlash about the search giant poking its big nose down my street… in an ‘unmarked black Opel… with a 360 degree [...]

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