An online notebook
I don’t tend to respond to this sort of thing, but this one pressed several of my buttons. The so-called “citizen journalists” will never offer a real replacement to newspapers and television news, he told Cheltenham Literature Festival. He said: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot … Keep reading
Take a look at this story, excitingly titled on the BBC News site “Council Twitter users face rebuke“. Councillors in Cornwall could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee for using social networking sites. The trouble is, no they’re not. Later in the article: It follows claims that a number of councillors used Twitter … Keep reading
John Lanchester is quickly becoming my favourite contributor to the London Review of Books. So much of his writing is both accessible and informative. This issue he looks at computer games: From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share … Keep reading
John Naughton‘s Observer column on ten years of blogging is a delightful read: This openness to immediate criticism and/or rebuttal is another revolutionary aspect of blogging. What we are seeing, wrote Clay Shirky some years ago (available online at http://bit.ly/fkxik), is nothing less than the ‘mass amateurisation of publishing’. What’s happening is a radical shift … Keep reading
Nice, longish essay in the LRB this issue, by Theo Tait on Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday which I have written about now and again. A more unified and organised book would have excluded many of Born Yesterday’s highlights: the brilliant description, for example, of Kate Middleton being hit simultaneously by a paparazzi ambush and a … Keep reading