Archive for May, 2009
Any local newspaper is only as big as the village/town/city/area it serves, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to attracting an audience online. In two years at the Sunderland Echo our most popular story by far has been the tale of two Wearside twins who revealed a secret double life of escorting and [...]
I’m off to France for the next ten days or so. Apologies in advance if the frequency of my blogging drops. I’m sure I’ll get connected once or twice. A plus tard.
“So, do you read our newspaper?” It’s a simple enough question, and a predictable one if you’ve been drafted in for work experience at your local daily. Yet it seems to bamboozle almost every student, as if it’s the precursor to some Stasi-style interrogation. In fact there’s no wrong answer, provided you respond like a rational human. [...]
Having investigated whether any local papers are live blogging the Premier League I’ve only found one title that is doing so independently, and it seems they are operating outside the rules. Under the terms of the tiered Dataco licence you can only update with three texts and nine images if you’ve signed a Level One agreement, and with nine [...]
One of the most common questions from Avid users is ‘how do I obscure the identity of individuals using pixelation effects?’ Blurring faces is a skill you’ll find especially useful when handling CCTV footage supplied by the police. Here’s my video demo showing how to do it. IT Big Brother means I can’t use capture software on my Avid machine, [...]
A genuine example, but not from our newspaper, of one journalism student’s comment to an editor… Asked to accompany a reporter on job they said they would prefer to stay in the office as they don’t like dealing with the public. “Okay,” agreed the somewhat bemused editor, adding, “you can stay here and make some calls.” “I’d prefer [...]
One staple source of stories for local newspapers is the RSPCA press office. The tales of cruelty we hear are routinely stomach-churning, but sometimes we get images that are genuinely shocking – even to hardened news hacks. A recent example of this involved photographs we received of a horse found dismembered in a river. The key image was gruesome; the animal’s severed [...]
I’ve not seen a live blog of a Premier League clash on a local newspaper site. Most of the live football coverage centres on lower league sides and the occasional FA Cup game. To officially blog from a game you have to be mindful of the Dataco agreement which covers fixtures, results and reporting on England’s [...]
