JOBS FOR JOURNALISTSInteresting and detailed post on Mediashift about jobs in journalism. Its key m essage, that print jobs are falling away and being replaced by jobs online, should be familiar to anyone working in journalism in the UK.I've said before that if I was coming out of college now, I would be looking for a job in online journalism, rather than print or TV, not just because there is more work, and more prospects, but...

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BRINGING GOOD NEWS ON A FAST TRAIN, BRINGING FAST NEWS ON A GOODS TRAIN...Whatever happened to the Desperate Bicycles? Their Smokescreen single was one of the first, possibly the first, DIY single of the punk era and made a virtue of its cheapness and independence, explaining on the sleeve how simple it was to make and declaiming in the lyrics "It was cheap, it was easy, go out and do it yourself." Others, such as the Buzzcocks...

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THE MIRROR RUMBLEDThe Daily Mirror has been caught trying to place a journalist in a salaried job at Tory Party HQ. It seems that the paper's Emily Miller got close to gaining a job at the heart of the Conservatives' organisation but was rumbled during the reference-checking process, in part because officials checked the IP address on the machine that she used to mail her application and found it was a Mirror computer (who knew...

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SCRAPING THE BARRELI got a call yesterday from a harassed BBC radio producer asking me to appear on a show which I used to be invited on regularly but haven't heard from for years. "Well, it's August" he explained "and everybody else is on holiday or busy". Funnily enough, I was busy t...

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THE DEATH OF THE UNDERGROUNDThinking about poor old Tony Wilson made me muse a bit on whether the 'underground' exists any more. In the punk era, there was an active and thriving national music scene that barely found its way into the mainstream media. Newspapers wrote about punk bands only to excoriate them for being anti-social, rude about the Queen etc; on the radio, you heard them only on John Peel and television, with the...

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TONY WILSON RIPTony Wilson has died of cancer aged just 57. He was a big figure in my youth because, as presenter of the ITV local news in the north-west, he gave slots to bands such as the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. It doesn't seem like such a big thing now, but back in the 70s, you didn't see bands of any sort on TV outside Top of The Pops and the Old Grey Whistle Test; punk bands were at the time treated with hatred, fear...

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