It is confession time. Cabinet ministers are queuing up to admit to smoking cannabis and BBC producers are admitting they misled their audiences. Today the culture of confession is spreading to newspapers, with Mark Lawson in the Guardian, admitting to faking letters to the editor.
He tells the story of crisis which destroyed the [...]
Peter Wilby attacks the press coverage of the BBC Trust’s report on impartiality (or the lack of it) in his Media Guardian column today and then moves onto his other target, the Trust’s report itself.
On the press coverage he writes:
It is impossible to imagine any newspaper conducting a similar [...]
This morning I have spent some time looking at the BBC’s new document "From seesaw to wagon wheel — safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century".
I pity the programme makers who are going to have to apply this to watchable, informative and entertaining TV and radio. First they will need to decide [...]
Yesterday Tony Blair met Wallace and Cromit, welcomed the prime minister of Lithuania, welcomed the prime minister of the Slovak Republic and made a speech on the role of the media. His official spokesman held two press briefings giving Blair’s views on Iraq, Scotland, the EU constitution, intelligence, the 2012 Olympics, discrimination law, the BAe [...]
Can separate regulation of the media (statutory Ofcom for for broadcast and the voluntary Press Complaints Commission for print) last in an age of converged media?
Peter Preston, in the Observer, today has no doubt which he prefers. He points out that while the PCC turns round judgments in five weeks, Ofcom has [...]
The suggestion that every newspaper journalist should have a blog, made by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, is appealing (via Matthew Ingram). My concern is that some very good journalists make lousy bloggers and having their own blog would have no advantage for them.
Look at some of the blogs that have appeared [...]
Comment from Terry McCarthy, ABC’s Baghdad correspondent, on the killing of two colleagues, as reported on the ABC news site:
They are really our eyes and ears in Iraq. Many places in Baghdad are just too dangerous for foreigners to go now, so we have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out. Without them, we [...]
The BBC is trying out embedded Flash video on its news site and a very welcome development it is. One of the items is a report on a Gloucestershire family that tried out all the latest new media gizmos but decided they would wait until there was better content.
Alfred Hermida who was involved in setting [...]
Replacement of the BBC’s governors with the BBC Trust which is also the regulator is blamed for the BBC falling behind in its bid to lead the new media revolution, according to Bobbie Johnson’s lead story in Media Guardian today. He writes:
With the Trust now the arbiter of which projects get the go-ahead - and [...]
Bill Gates has been looking at the fairly near future of the media and his prognosis is equally bad for scheduled broadcasting and print on paper. Speaking to the the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit this week he forecast that the “transition point” for the move from paper to electronic reading would come in the next [...]
