All Fools day has come early this year with The Telegraph and The Sun among those hoaxed by sightings of a bear in Rendlesham forest, Suffolk, previously best known as a landing place for aliens from another world.
The East Anglian Daily Times which ran the story yesterday, today revealed that it was all a stunt [...]
The East Anglian Daily Times has redesigned its EADT24 website. It looks really good, with much clearer navigation but I fear they are spending too much time twittering about their stories rather than getting out and covering the ground.
One of their stories today (a page lead in print) is about a pub landlord who woke [...]
Finding out where a business is making a profit or not is always difficult, especially between annual reports. Within groups of companies it is even more difficult even by examining annual reports, let alone between reports. So it is not entirely surprising that that journalists working for for Guardian Media Group in the Manchester area [...]
Wordblog us undergoing a long overdue updating. The change to Wordpress 2.7.1 has gone fairly smoothly and I am now figuring out how to use a rather different interface. There will probably be more experimenting with themes but the important job now is to update links and basic information.
I have seen some pretty silly schemes to save local newspapers but the idea trumpeted in the lead of today’s Observer Media and Business section takes the biscuit. The idea is that the publishers will ask the government to relax takeover rules so that super groups could be formed. “Let us merge or we will [...]
Thank goodness Andy Burnham, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has ruled out a subsidy for newspapers. It is an idea which has always worried me deeply, a cure that was worse than the disease.
But in his interview with the Scarborough Evening News he does say that he will look at other [...]
This morning I was going to provide a link to the Barclays Bank documents the Guardian was forced to remove from its site. Feeling sure that the documents would have escaped into the wild before the 2.30am court ruling against the Guardian I went looking for them yesterday afternoon.
They were at https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/The_Guardian:_Censored_Barclays_tax_avoidance_leaked_memos%2C_16_Mar_2009 but this morning [...]
Not too long ago the idea that the government should distribute leaflets with details of offenders in the courts would have been totally ridiculous. That was the job of local newspapers.
Yet the idea of “naming and shaming” offenders is floated on the front page of the Guardian today. It is seen, by Home Office officials, [...]
At the end of October I suggested the mainstream media was not paying sufficient attention to Allen Stanford and his offshore bank. It was, at that time, a relevant British story because he was using millions to buy influence in the world of cricket.
The attitude seemed rather like that of the desperate depositor outside the [...]
For the last few months I have watched fascinated as British media discovered Roanoke, Virginia, as a representative of middle America. Today, The Guardian carries Gary Younge’s account of his journey to the inauguration with 13 citizens of Roanoke.
Since I visited it 35 years ao I have thought about Roanoke whenever I need reminding that [...]
