Wordblog

Journalism in a changing world

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

What kind of idiot thinks email is confidential?

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Apr 12th, 2009

Labour spinners for a start. Damian McBride and Derek Draper were certainly foolish to even consider their plan for a blog to spread smears about Tories (Sunday Times et al) but completely mad to discuss the plot in emails. It does not take much brain to  understand that emails are just about the worst medium [...]



Blog first: write for print second

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jul 21st, 2008

The intro on Jeff Jarvis’s Digital Media column in the Guardian today had a familiar ring. It was, given a bit of subbing to sharpen it up, the same as one on his blog on July 10.
Is this testing the argument or, in the web jargon, some form of “crowd-sourcing” or a kind of informal [...]



Should blogs be edited?

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Nov 18th, 2007

How nice it must be as a blogger to have an editor to protect you from your solecisms. That would be a real luxury. A Washington Post memo on blogging includes a checklist for new blogs which says: “Blog items need to be edited. Your proposal needs to say who will edit blog copy.”
The bit [...]



If the future is “conversation” let’s start here

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Aug 27th, 2007

After reading the comments on Jay Rosen’s post attacking Michael Skube’s Los Angeles Times piece on blogging, I went out and bought a copy of The Cult of the Amateur.
It was probably only a few of the 339 comments that motivated me but they gave an overall impression of a bunch of people who simply [...]



‘Blogging is about changing newspaper culture’

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Aug 24th, 2007

Little more than a year ago Ray Hartley was blogging his experiences at the about-to-be-launched South African paper, The Times, of which he is editor. He is still blogging and has been joined by other staffers working in the paper’s integrated newsroom.
He reflects on the paper’s first year in an interview at RAP21, African press [...]



If the story is in the links who will follow them?

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Aug 22nd, 2007

The question of the extent to which a story can be told through the links in a blog post has been raised by Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, commenting on my criticism of Jay Rosen’s attack on the writer of an article in the Los Angeles Times.
The LA Times article was a slack piece of [...]



A debate worth having

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jun 15th, 2007

While media converges and faces a future of which we know little, it would be surprising if all those who teach journalism agreed. So criticism by Jeff Jarvis (City University of New York) of Pete Hamill (New York University) is notable only for the entrenched position it suggests.
Hamill talking on New York public [...]



Sport reporter evicted from stadium for blogging

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jun 12th, 2007

The ejection of a reporter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, from a baseball match for blogging should should concern journalists in the UK, says Roy Greenslade.
He points out that attempts to restrict press freedom in the reporting of football have mostly affected photographers. Celtic tried to licence photographers and, in 2004, an [...]



Don’t write-off the blog

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Mar 27th, 2007

I missed the Sunday Times piece that suggested that because a lot of blogs are started and then abandoned the form is “destined to become a footnote in the history of computing”.
But The Australian republished it yesterday (via ABC digital futures). As a piece that provides an excuse to mention some celebs who have [...]



Mysterious surge of page hits at Wordblog

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jan 28th, 2007

There was a surge in page hits at Wordblog last week. That was pleasing but on examination a considerable proportion of them are for robots.txt.
In the past neither of the stats systems (one from my hosting company and the other a blog plug-in) on the site have shown much evidence of them. But last week [...]