Wordblog

Number of days since there has been a new post on any of the Independent’s blogs: 14

For a thoughtful and practical look at newspaper blogs take a look at an interview with WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin at cyberjournalist.net. It is a great example of thinking before jumping on the blogwagon.

The best thing that can be said about The Independent’s entry into newspaper blogging is that they are wasting very little time on it. Martin Stabe took a look just after Christmas and reached the conclusion that the paper’s “cringeworthy effort at blogging” needed sorting out. He was almost too kind.
You might have expected someone [...]

Mobile phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution has brought to the fore on the first day on 2007 the debate about how far availability on the internet should influence what is shown by mainstream media.
Writing in the Guardian about coverage of the execution on CNN and Fox News, Dan Glaister said :
But neither could keep [...]

Emily Bell, the Guardian’s director of digital content, takes a look at political blogging and viral video in the media sections opinion column today under the heading “separating the bloggers from the tossers”.
Her conclusion is: “No doubt between now and the next election the increase in politicians blogging will be like lemmings falling off a [...]

Getting names wrong is one of those things that is more likely to happen in a blog than in traditionally edited media, but the effect is the same: the person whose name is wrong is disgruntled.
And I am disgruntled by being called Adamson-Grant almost all the way through the BBC’s response to my questions about [...]

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC global news, makes a fascinating comparison, at his Sacred Facts blog, between the reaction of newspapers and bloggers to the appointment of Bob Gates as Donald Rumsfeld’s successor. A fresh and moderate voice according to the papers while the bloggers are looking at his past and the Iran-Contragate connections.

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 did something pretty revolutionary this morning in the slot it reserves for a review of the papers in a world news hotspot. The review of US press reaction to the election included blogs as well as papers.
It is possible that it was not revolutionary but I had not [...]

Ruth Gledhill, religion corespondent of The Times, is the paper’s top blogger. Her Articles of Faith blog is well ahead of any of the others from The Times and The Sunday Times published on the papers’ website, according to the Technorati rankings. Gledhill has 772 links from 160 blogs. At the other end of [...]

For the lack of anything other to do on a wet Sunday afternoon — we were planning on lunch in Southwold but decided it was too cold and windy — I have started compiling the newspaper blog index. So far the data is just the numbers of blogs but I will develop it into a [...]