A PR firm recently invited me to review their client’s product, saying that if I did review it I would be entered into a prize draw with other ‘qualifying’ bloggers to win an iPad 2. It was a product I might ordinarily have covered, but this approach made me reluctant. Here’s reason number 1: I asked myself whether the PR
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On Friday I had quite a bit of fun with Churnalism.com, a new site from the Media Standards Trust which allows you to test how much of a particular press release has been reproduced verbatim by media outlets. The site has an API, which got me thinking whether you might be able to ‘mash’ it with an RSS feed from
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When the telephone first entered the newsroom journalists were sceptical. “How can we be sure that the person at the other end is who they say they are?” The question seems odd now, because we have become so used to phone technology that we barely think of it as technology at all – and there are a range of techniques
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With so much news content available online and a host of ways to promote and share that material it’s often hard for journalists and bloggers to know how to make their content stand out. There are a host of companies offering a quick fix to this problem with promises of Facebook friends and sky-high traffic stats. However, some of the
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In the week that a general election is called, Heather Brooke’s latest book couldn’t have been better timed. The Silent State is a staggeringly ambitious piece of work that pierces through the fog of the UK’s bureaucracies of power to show how they work, what is being hidden, and the inconsistencies underlying the way public money is spent. Like her
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On the day that Parliament released MPs’ expenses in their ‘official’ form, I was hawking around on Twitter trying to find a good way to crowdsource analysis of the documents (this was before The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool went live). Central to the problem was that the expenses were presented in search-unfriendly PDFs. So I was looking for a place people
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Listening to news executives talk about micropayments, Kindles, public subsidies, micropayments, collusion, blocking Google and anything else that might save their businesses, it occurs to me that they may have missed some developments in, ah, well, the past ten years. For those and anyone else who is interested, I offer the following primer on how things have changed. Any attempt to
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