The following is the first part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. The total runs to 3,000 words so I’ve split it and adapted it for online reading. The myth of journalism and the telegraph Samuel Morse was a portrait painter. And he invented the telegraph. The telegraph is probably one of the most
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The following is cross-posted from a guest post I wrote for Wannabe Hacks. Objectivity is one of the key pillars of journalistic identity: it is one of the ways in which we identify ourselves as a profession. But for the past decade it has been subject to increasing criticism from those (and I include myself here) who suggest that sustaining
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The Guardian reports on the AP photographer whose image dominated the front pages today. The following passage on how he returned to his office with a member of the public who had filmed it on his mobile phone passes by without remark: “The adrenaline was running by now. So I turned [the flash] on and took five pictures. I realised
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Pat Thornton writes on AP’s plans to stop people sharing news content… DRM always works like this: It never stops people who really want to steal or break the law, but it almost always hinders law abiding, paying customers. Will this extra layer of code eat up CPU cycles and RAM, bring computers to a halt and not even work
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The tanks are massing at the borders. The officers are drawing up “rules of engagement”. Soldiers are “rattling their sabres”. When times are hard, empires go to war. And so in the coming months we can expect to see “the web’s news cop” The Associated Press ignore the lessons of history and declare war against their perceived enemies. The AP’s
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Here’s the good news for mobile phone websites: Vodafone has “seen a 50% rise in revenues from its data services over the past quarter, after the number of its customers using the web from mobile devices more than doubled.”
I’ve written before on just how important geotagging will be in preparing for a mobile future – well, now that mobile future is here: “Apple’s newly unveiled second-generation iPhone includes a news service from the Associated Press which provides stories tailored to an individual user’s location. “The application uses the phone’s in-built GPS (global positioning system) and serves stories based
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