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One of the guest lecturers this term, and I can’t for the life of me remember which one[1], mentioned the difference of levels of trust the public have in various news media.
The percentage of people who felt that broadcast news was trustworthy was far higher than that for print. This was assumed to be due […]

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While “sorry” may be the hardest word, the hardest words are undoubtedly “I don’t know”.
Today we were visited by Simon Lewis, the Director of Corporate affairs at Vodafone and brother of Telegraph editor William Lewis, here to talk to us about various PR-related things[1].
Actually, most of those “PR-related things” were just about his own career, […]

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I’ve held myself back a couple of times this week from blogging about appalling misuse of words, mainly “tragic death”[1]. But then I came across this on Wikipedia:
“An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet beyond the Solar System.”
What with “extrasolar” meaning “beyond the solar system”, I’m pretty sure we could’ve figured that one out, […]

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Andy and I had another debate on the minimum wage last night. This despite the fact that we basically know no economics (for my part, other than what I’ve picked up from Tim Worstall’s blog).
The Public Admin course that forms part of my journalism diploma is the first instruction in anything vaguely like politics, too […]

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The uni Christmas panto last night was incredible, a series of miniature satires sending up everything - Big Brother, “emo” culture, celebrities, the student who bought a bag of sand thinking it was a laptop computer - set to a twisted version of Jack and the Beanstalk.
I’m astonished that something so professional could be produced […]

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The Boss’s email update on Stuff That Is Happening In Journalism alerted us to this story from that unexpected source of predatory capitalism, the Media Guardian, about how it’s good content that keeps monthly magazines going over and above everything else.On the success of Men’s Health:
He went against the prevailing trends - Nuts-style semi-pornography or […]

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We’ve not even finished the first semester and already we’ve had a minor spat (spatlet? Spatkin?) with the PR diplomides, partly springing from the exercise I mentioned here. Prospects for harmony in our parallel future careers do not look rosy.

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Looking around for the recording of John Kampfner and Jon Snow’s debate with some PR people, I managed to find the talk by Alan Rusbridger and Georgina Henry about Comment Is Free at Hay Festival last May - the one I couldn’t find when I wrote the very first post on (the current version of) […]

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Probably the most apposite thing that Rodney Pinder from the News Safety Institute said in his guest lecture a few weeks ago was that even when covering such frivolities as celebrities falling out of taxis, accurate reporting is essential in order to maintain public trust in journalism (if there’s any left to maintain).
Having looked at […]

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From an email from the North-East Liberal Democrats, about their new mailing list:
TO SUBSCRIBE IS SIMPLE. Just reply to this e-mail, and include your details (name, e-mail address) in the response.
If I reply to the email, my name and email address are already in the response. Definitely not renewing my membership now. Idiots.

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