Media

Headline news at the BBC

Bernie Russell Media
Headline news at the BBC
The BBC news website is to carry longer headlines in a bid to boost stories’ searchability.
Front page headlines will still be limited to 31-33 characters so that they can appear on Ceefax and Digital Text.
Search me
But internal pages will carry 55-character headlines, which means they will be more search-friendly, as news editor Steve Herrmann explains on his blog.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/11/changing_headlines.html
Short changed
It makes sense. I always held up the headlines on the BBC news site as a great example of tight, disciplined editing. But it’s unlikely having another 20 characters will change this, and headlines have to be written for search engines as well as for humanoids.

The BBC news website is to carry longer headlines in a bid to boost stories’ searchability. Continue reading →

Great news – newspaper plan axed

Bernie Russell Media
Great news – newspaper closes
Some good news from the newspaper industry at last – Press Gazette reports that “Thurrock Council has abandoned plans to launch a fortnightly council newsletter costing £300,000 per year”.
http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/wire/5817
None of our business
Council leaders found there was no business case for the publication. (It’s very rare that there’s a business for anything local government does – but let’s not carp …)
The report quotes Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw as saying that council-run newspapers “reminded him of Pravda”. (I’m not sure whether that’s praise or condemnation. But, again, let’s not carp …)
Not now
The report was slightly marred by a classic typo:
In an investigation for the Evening Standard, Andrew Gilligan revealed that council-paid journalists and press officers may not outnumber independent local newspaper journalists in London.
What Gilligan actually said was:
A Standard investigation has found that in London more writers are now employed by these official papers than by the local independent press.
Lies, damned lies, and council news
But as the Gilligan piece makes clear, these council-run propaganda sheets pose a threat to real newspapers, and possibly even a threat to local democracy.
At least, they would if anyone read them. Mine go straight in the cat-lit tray.
Nuff said
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23724285-the-propaganda-newspapers.do

Some good news for the newspaper industry at last – Press Gazette reports that “Thurrock Council has abandoned plans to launch a fortnightly council newsletter costing £300,000 per year“. Continue reading →

Thoughtless for the day

Bernie Russell Media
Thoughtless for the day
The BBC has rejected requests to open Radio Four’s Thought for the Day slot to atheists, humanists, secularists, and…er…anyone who thinks anything really.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/bbc-thought-for-the-day
The BBC Trust said that Thought for the Day was religious output, and as such, didn’t breach the BBC’s guidelines on impartiality.
We never had a prayer
Secularists are bitterly upset at the trusts’s ruling, while the Church of England has welcomed it. No religious group has commented so far.
There’s probably no Richard Dawkins
National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson said: “Naturally we are very disappointed. This is a campaign we have been waging for 50 years, ever since Thought for the Day and its predecessors were first broadcast on the BBC.
“Of course, to look on the bright side, it does mean people like us can give up and get a life, or at least find something more important to obsess about, such as the way they make crisp packets look bigger by filling them up with air, even though there are fewer crisps in the packet than there were even five years ago, let alone 50. Now that’s a real scandal. I was only saying as much to Richard Borekins the other day…”
Actually, he didn’t say that at all. I made the last bit up.

The BBC has rejected requests to open Radio Four’s Thought for the Day slot to atheists, humanists, secularists, and…er…well, anyone who thinks anything, really. Continue reading →

Access charges at The Times

Bernie Russell Media
Access charges at the Times
Times editor James Harding has told the Society of Editors conference that readers will be paying for web access to the paper by next spring.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=44649&c=1
He said the battle against free content is “the fight of our lives”, saying “we have to make sure that we put independent reporting, investigating the powerful, on an economically sustainable footing.”
Paper view
It won’t be cheap either, this independent reporting. Harding says that readers will pay about the same to view the Times web product as they would to buy a copy of the dead-tree version – 90p a day.
Second online
There are already news outlets that charge for content such as the Wall Street Journal and the FT. But Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will be the second general news organisation to charge readers for its web content.
The first being, of course, the BBC.
From Press Gazette via Twitter
http://twitter.com/pressgazette

Times editor James Harding has told the Society of Editors conference that readers will be paying for web access to the paper by next spring. Continue reading →

Fee at the point of need

Bernie Russell Media
Fee at the point of need
https://rbrussell.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/11/12/nice-big-earner/
BBC salaries are in the news again. DG Mark Thompson, we’re told, earns – well, gets – £834,000 a year. Again, to use a comparison from an earlier post, he’s a long way from the J. Ross ball park.
Fee market
But it’s not bad, is it? It comes to Lfp 5,852.6 (licence-fee payments) at the current exchange rate.
And he gets expenses as well – £3,364 (Lfp 23.6) in the three months to the end of June this year.
Lost Wages
That includes £647.50 (Lfp 4.5) for two nights at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.
Nuff said, I think.

BBC salaries are in the news again. DG Mark Thompson, we’re told, earns – well, gets – £834,000 a year. Again, to use a comparison from an earlier post on this subject, he’s a long way from the J. Ross ball park. Continue reading →

Long life for short links

Bernie Russell Media
Long life for short links
I wrote recently about the problems of using shortened URLs to reference sources in dissertations.
The main concern was what would happen if the companies offering these services died off, and took the URLs down with them.
That problem may be about to go away away with the launch yesterday (November 11) of 301Works.org, a service that will archive shortened URLs.
The launch announcement says that more than 20 URL-shortening organizations are involved in the project, and “industry leader, Bit.ly, has already begun donating archives of their URL mappings (pairs of long URLs and the generated shortened URLs)”.
Shrink that link
https://rbrussell.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/10/06/shrink-that-link/
From Tim O’Reilly via Twitter
http://twitter.com/timoreilly/
http://www.301works.org/

I wrote recently about a student request to use shortened URLs to reference sources in dissertations. Continue reading →

Nice big earner

Bernie Russell Media
Nice big earner
Judging by the salaries of its senior management, the BBC is clearly weathering the recession reasonably well.
Licence fee to print money
A quick burst of arithmetic via my calculator revealed, for example, that senior managers in the Journalism Group pull in more than £4.5m a year in total.
Fee speech
OK, it’s wouldn’t pay Jonathan Ross’s salary.
Still … I mean, it’s not bad, is it? For an outfit that gets its money from a compulsory levy on everyone with a TV.
No matter what they earn.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/running/bbcstructure/index.shtml
From Labour MP  via Twitter
http://twitter.com/tom_watson/

Judging by the salaries of its senior management, the BBC is clearly weathering the recession reasonably well.

Licence fee to print money
A quick burst of arithmetic via my calculator revealed, for example, that senior managers in the Journalism Group pull in more than £4.5m a year in total.

Fee speech
OK, it wouldn’t pay Jonathan Ross’s salary.

Still … I mean, it’s not bad, is it? For an outfit that gets its money from a compulsory levy on everyone with a TV.

No matter what they earn.

From Labour MP Tom Watson via Twitter.

Internet excess?

Bernie Russell Media
Internet excess?
The Danish government is to allow pupils full access to the internet during their final school exams.
What a piece of work
Fourteen schools are piloting the scheme and all schools are being invited to do the same by 2011.
To thine own self be true
What about cheating? They have a plan. The plan is… er … to trust the students not to cheat
A king of infinite [web] space
The minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says he is proud that Denmark is leading the world on this, and believes other countries will adopt this system.
Maybe they will.
Flaming youth
Or maybe they won’t. Leaving the infrastructural problems of installing networked machones into examination halls, there are bound to some concerns that this is dumbing deeper down that many would care to dumb.
A leading English academic said yesterday (or it might have been fifteen years ago…):<splutter>We will fight this in the seminar rooms, we will fight this in the lectures, we will never surrender.</splutter>
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/05/danish-students-allowed-use-of-internet-in-exams

The Danish government is to allow pupils full access to the internet during their final school exams.

What a piece of work
Fourteen schools are piloting the scheme and all schools are being invited to follow suit by 2011.

To thine own self be true
What about cheating? They have a plan. The plan is… er … to trust the students not to cheat.

A king of infinite [web] space
The minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says he is proud that Denmark is leading the world on this, and believes other countries will follow suit.

Flaming youth
Maybe they will. Or maybe they won’t. Some are bound to think this is dumbing down deeper than many would deign to dumb.

A leading English academic said yesterday (or it might have been fifteen years ago…):

<splutter>We will fight this in the seminar rooms, we will fight this in the lectures, we will never surrender.</splutter>

Ora pro nobis

Bernie Russell Media

It seems there’s a new religion on the block: ecomentalism. New to the courts, that is. No-one who has seen an Al Gore movie or read a column by the Moonbat can doubt that these two are members of an eco-episcopacy, and are followed by a huge fervent faithful.

Lord have mercy on us all
Now there’s legal backing for this. A UK court has ruled that an executive can sue his employer for unfair dismissal because of his green beliefs – which means ecomentalism counts in law as a religion.

Mad hatters
The judge is right of course. I could tell this was a religion because of the hats. I mean,

  • bishops have miters;
  • rabbis have yarmulkes;
  • the Yellow Hat school of Buddhism is even named after a hat;
  • and the ecomentalist faithful all wear those Peruvian hats with the ear-flaps and the odd smell.

Dead giveaway. Nuff said.

China best at banging up bloggers

Bernie Russell Media
China best at banging up bloggers
A map of bloggers in jail around the world shows that when it comes to arresting bloggers, China leads the pack, with 33 in the slammer.
Egypt is a close second, with 29, and there’s a solid cluster around the Middle East.
There are two in Cuba, and one in the USA.
The UK has none. So we can assume they haven’t got Jan Moir.
Yet.
Map from the Electronic Frontier Foundation via Titter
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/map-of-threatened-or.html
http://twitter.com/EFF/

A map of bloggers in jail around the world shows that when it comes to arresting bloggers, China leads the pack, with 33 in the slammer. Continue reading →