The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine – where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk (this is cross-posted from my blog).
They are continuing their habit of undermining public-health initiatives with their latest scare story about the safety of the cervical cancer jab, after the tragic death of a schoolgirl who had the vaccine the same day.
This week a new nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of journalistic objectivity. The culprit? The Washington Post’s leaked social media policy. The policy is aimed at preserving the appearance of objectivity rather than its actual existence. It focuses on what journalists are perceived to be, rather than what they actually do. And in doing so, it hits
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On 18 September 2009, beloved London evening freesheet thelondonpaper folded. In its wake, London Lite remains. While the closure is part of a larger effort by owners News International to trim the fat from their portfolio and erect paywalls around profitable titles, it also speaks to the future of freesheets on the web. Back in April, thelondonpaper re-launched their web site.
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Even though I had followed the latest financial crisis since its inception on every news site of relevance, I had to wait for the Atlantic’s cover story on the topic to understand where Wall Street had gone wrong (at least to the extent that anyone understood it). While online news as it exists today is great for 24/7 access, real-time
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One of the UK’s leading newspaper is reporting lies about the ‘teabagger’ Congress protest – but why is it doing this and what are the repercussions?
When news breaks, if you want to do well for news searches, publish early and publish often. From an SEO point of view, the more stories you can pump out targeting different (or even the same) keywords, the more chance you have of appearing at the top of Google’s search traffic – and scooping up the traffic.
Some of the newspapers may have taken this a bit far with news of Patrick Swayze’s death …
A curious piece of data emerging from a conference at the American Press Institute. It seems that in “nearly all markets, newspaper websites receive 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews for each unique visitor.” Is this a 90-9-1 rule for the newspaper industry? If you want to make it snappier, multiply by 10, so it becomes: 100 pageviews and 25 visits
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So Google launched Fast Flip yesterday, a Labs experiment that allows you to ‘experience’ news websites in a similar way to their analogue equivalents. Yes, you can ‘flick’ through pages of news. Woo-hoo. Superficially this appears little more than a repeat of many similar experiments in the past decade from publishers who thought readers wanted an analogue experience online and
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Back in June I posted ‘In defence of paywalls (a thought experiment)‘ where I said: “When you’re driving a tanker and you see a big rock ahead – do you ask everyone on the ship to rebuild it as an aeroplane? Or do you start steering away in the hope that your part of the tanker will somehow avoid the
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When the lack of comments damages your news brand
If you want to skip the background, go to the next subheading Last week the BBC Education website published a piece about a report into the use of technology by schoolchildren: “Tech addiction ‘harms learning’”: “Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned,” the intro led, before describing the results of the
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UGC • Tags: alfred herminda, Andrew Kakabadse, annemarie cunningham, bad science, BBC, bbc education, comments, cranfield university, Education, gary eason, glyn mottershead, Nadia Kakabadse, neil thurman • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post