ChristopherWhite.info

Having had a look around at my colleagues‘ comments on the Daniel Meadows lecture that I missed, the following, from Jon’s blog, seemed quite pertinent:
“Everyone has a story” was his mantra, repeated over and over again. Earnest as he was, he couldn’t convert me.
Capture Wales is a nice little project. Some citizens get to […]

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Two things to comment on from head of BBC News Interactive Peter Clifton’s (delightfully sweary) guest lecture on thursday:1) He mentioned that political editor Nick Robinson not only posts several times a day on his Newslog (I’d have said “Newsblog”, but there you go…) but also takes the time to respond to questions, criticisms and […]

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This is tangential, but it’s just occured that what’s happening with journalism and blogging seems to happening across other forms of entertainment.
(It’s also just occured that despite my defence of journalism as a still-noble craft in my previous post, I’ve just reduced it to pure entertainment in one swift sentence. There’s nothing like consistency. That […]

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It’s the epitome of circular arguments. The Freedom of Information Act says we can have information. The Data Protection Act says we can’t. The FOI says we can have it because it’s in the public interest to release. The DP says it’s in the public interest to withold. The Information Comissioner, who I imagine (without […]

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YouTube showing abuses of power:

UCLA student gets Tasered for not showing ID: here.
LAPD “getting stuck in” here.
More of the same here.
And here.

If part of the point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account, then I think it’s fair to say this lot qualifies.

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On Friday, a handful of us forsook the day’s lectures and made another trip down to London for the NUS/Press Association Training National Student Journalism Awards.Somehow, I won the Diversity Writer category.
Plenty of people were quick to point out the irony of a young, able-bodied, protestant-backgrounded-atheist, middle-class(ish), straight, white male - and especially one as […]

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Although under-publicised, glue-sniffing is as dangerous as ever — but it can be beaten with hard work
Solvents kill. They kill around 70 people every year, more than hard drugs and ecstasy combined – and they can kill first time. Last October, promising 17-year-old Cardiff schoolboy Martin Kane died after experimenting with lighter fuel. Like […]

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It’s easy to dislike journalists - even if you are one. Michael Bywater [1] wrote on his blog a bit over a year ago:
“I spend much of my time in journalism and the words “Press” and “media”, even to me, carry the second-order signification of a cynical wet-lipped sleazebag destitute of moral sensibility, of a […]

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One of the films showing at the Cardiff Film Festival is called “F*CK”.
How are you supposed to pronounce that? “Can I have two tickets for eff-star-cee-kay please?” Or, more likely, people will just say “fuck”.
Andy and I have had countless conversations about this kind of censorship, it being one of many things that really winds […]

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Though Matthew told me about this a while ago, I’ve only just got around to reading Edd’s discussion with some Muslims about creationism.
It looks to have gone about as well as the late-night chat Andy and I had with David the Evangelist a while back, characterised in the main by a (wilful) misunderstanding of evolutionary […]

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