A wonderful headline malfunction at the Telegraph, in their story about the Dawkins Forum dustup, where the discussion forums at richarddawkins.net have been summarily suspended and made “read only”.
My take is that the Telegraph is rushing to catch up with a “religion” story that the Times got hold of first. Ruth Gledhill already had an interview with Richard Dawkins done before it even appeared on the Telegraph website.
They all seem to have got the wrong end of the stick in several respects, including Richard Dawkins himself, and are playing the “nasty rotten horrible anonymous internet culture” tune. Further, newspapers seem to have invented an intra-atheist culture war where one doesn’t exist, albeit based partially on Richard Dawkins’ own misapprehensions.
The actual history is well summarised by blogposts by former moderators Pete Harrison, Jerome23 and Darkchilde.
Last month the first submissions by students on the MA in Online Journalism landed on my desk. I had set two assignments. The first was a standard portfolio of online journalism work as part of an ongoing, live news project. But the second was explicitly branded ‘Experimental Portfolio‘ – you can see the brief here. I wanted students to have a
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Very odd scenes at the coroner’s court at Newport in the Isle of Wight, where VentnorBlog’s Simon Perry was ejected by the coroner’s officer – at first, according to Perry, on the grounds that he had suddenly ceased to be a journalist (VentnorBlog have a fine record of attending meetings and hearings), then as a member of the public on the
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Curious goings on at Yelp, which is being sued for alleged extortion. TechCrunch reports that The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding
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Interesting post over at Vertical Leap on the apparent plan of local newspapers to sell links, revealed at an SEO conference in Brighton: “Apparently a very large network of hundreds, if not thousands of local and national newspaper websites across the US and UK have apparently signed up to begin selling of links. The plan is for them to identify
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Here’s a video interview by Conrad Quilty-Harper with the creator of the ASBOrometer app for iPhone and Android. The app pulls information available through Data.gov.uk, allowing you to see levels of antisocial behaviour (and other data) near you. More broadly he talks about the potential of data.gov.uk going forward. Obvious implications for local and hyperlocal journalism…
Ben Harrow, a student in my undergraduate online journalism classes, has written a blog post about the environmental news RSS feeds of some of the national newspapers. It appears that the Telegraph ‘recycling’ RSS feed hasn’t been updated in 3 months (even during the Copenhagen talks), while “The Daily Mail has upwards of 30 RSS feeds, each updating you on a
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Today I’m trying an experiment with a group of students on my undergraduate Online Journalism module – a ‘Social Media Treasure Hunt’ on their patch: Birmingham. The students are all reporters who will, next week, be reporting for the environmental news website Birmingham Recycled. Last week they set up their systems – RSS reader, Delicious, and Twitter – and this
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