From the Online

I’m mostly offline until Monday but I thought I’d post a few of my highlights from today’s news:rewired event. Keep an eye on Journalism.co.uk / http://newsrewired.com for further session material / video content etc. It felt a little odd not to be live-blogging (Laura and I left that to the student blogger team and the many other [...]

If our marketing has been anywhere near successful, you should have heard about news:rewired by now - 14 January 2010. It’s Journalism.co.uk’s first big conference event, marking our 10th anniversary (my boss John Thompson set it up in 1999). It’s been fun getting it going and the delegate / speaker list looks pretty damn good, [...]

At a regional news debate at City University yesterday evening, media blogger Roy Greenslade asked us (me, freelance media reporter Jon Slattery, Northern Echo editor Peter Barron, Times web development editor Joanna Geary and paidContent:UK reporter Patrick Smith) if we thought pay walls would work. I said I thought Rupert Murdoch hadn’t much to lose [...]

FleetStreetBlues post with Belle de Jour’s quote referencing the manufacture of consent reminded me to do this post. Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to the UK was immensely popular: the LSE website was inaccessible within minutes of the tickets going on sale; at SOAS a line of last-minute hopefuls snaked down the corridor outside the lecture [...]

[Update: Christine Buckley was elected editor...]
Due to disruption during the postal strikes, NUJ members now have until November 16 to vote for the new editor of The Journalist magazine and website.
Members and non-members alike can put their questions to the eight candidates on the Journalism.co.uk forum - and vote in an informal poll.
See the NUJ’s [...]

How on earth to balance freedom of speech as outlined in the European Convention of Human Rights with the moderation of obnoxious and damaging views?
Channel 4 News has just neatly illustrated this conflict which lies at the heart of two very high profile UK stories this week:
Jon Snow was interviewing, among others, John Kampfner, chief [...]

A campaign to balance inaccurate news reporting about the cervical cancer jab is working. Malcolm Coles, SEO consultant and blogger, informs me that NHS pages with information about the HPV immunisation are steadily getting bumped up the Google rankings, displacing misleading and deliberately alarming newspaper reports. He says:
“The three NHS pages I was targeting are [...]

Nope, we haven’t moved on from Mad Men-esque gender roles. Pretty women on successful hubbies’ arms.
Yesterday OK magazine the Guardian ran a ‘Leaders’ wives’ photograph, and online you can find this G20 Leaders’ Wives gallery.

“What is everyone wearing? Who gets to go to the Ladies with Michelle Obama? What are the G20 spouses doing while [...]

I admit, I wasn’t really serious when I suggested that Kathryn Flett was politically motivated in her failure to name one ‘remotely famous’ Carolyn for her recent Observer Magazine column.
But take a look at p6 of Private Eye (no. 1244). Flett may well be leading a subtle Observer resistance movement, with subtext (buried in the [...]