JOURNALISTS ON THE MOVEJeff Jarvis is puzzled by Peter Barron's move from Newsnight. Not so much because he's joining Google but because he's going in on the PR side.I don't know Barron at all, though I am a Newsnight fan but, speclating wildly, I suspect money plays some part in it all. Google are pretty good payers and the Beeb, on the whole, are not. Google also feels like a cool company to work for, whereas the BBC can be...
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LAST NIGHT A D-J...Quite interesting to read that Peter Barron of Newsnight is to join Google in a PR role. More interesting to me was the discovery that Google's European head of PR is one D-J Collins. I assume this is the same D-J who once ran the press office at the Department of Education and is, according to Rachel Sylvester in The Times, apparently part of the unofficial campaign team forming around David Miliband who is...
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HOW TO SPEND SUNDAY AFTERNOON
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HOW TO SPEND SUNDAY AFTERNOON
On a beautiful London afternoon, I got on my bike, cycled to Hyde Park and had a look at Frank Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion. The park was packed with sunbathers, roller-bladers, beautiful people in summer clothes. The Pavilion is worth a visit - I wonder if Gehry would do me a conservatory.
That's what I was doing. Meanwhile a bunch of people on Harry's Place were doing this. Reading the fruits of their afternoon's labour, I was reminded of this cartoon.
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GYPSIES AND THE DAILY MAILRebarbative though it can be, the Mail retains the ability to surprise, pleasantly. There was the Stephen Lawrence case, of course, in which it led the way in exposing racism and identifying the probable killers. For all its liberal principles, the Guardian has never managed anything so brave or important.Now it gives prominence to Italy's shameful treatment of gypsies, in a report by the excellent Sue...
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BABY TALKI quite enjoy Zoe Williams' writing in the Guardian but her Antenatal series is wearing terribly thin. "What's the ideal number of children to have?" she asks today. Two seems to be the answer. Coincidentally, it is also the answer to the question "how many articles can even a talented and amusing writer produce about her children before her readers rise up in protes...
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SCRABBLINGAccording to Valleywag, Hambros, the makers of Scrabble have filed a lawsuit against the men behind Scrabulous, which is now the only reason to spend time on Facebook. Valleywag, which is never wrong, says Hambros is bound to win.I can't help thinking that Hambros are in danger of buying themselves a lot of ill will, given the huge popularity of Scrabulous. If they close Scrabulous down and replace it with their own...
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WRITERS V SUBS"Subs is cunts", a former deputy editor of the Observer used to remind me when we worked together on another newspaper. Giles Coren of the Times certainly agrees.Here he is complaining in an email to subs about the removal of the word "a" from a restaurant review. It's an entertaining mail, clearly deeply felt, if a bit luvvie-ish ("It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine" etc).Though he comes...
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"I AM SOMEBODY!"Here's Richard Reeves, the new director of Demos, articulating his own significant place at the very heart of things in an Observer review of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein."Everyone who is anyone has been nudged by the amiable prof (I bought him dinner)."As Reeves points out, Thaler is very vogueish currently. He follows in a long line of American intellectuals crossing the Atlantic with theories that...
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GORDON THE GRINNING GUNMAN
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GORDON THE GRINNING GUNMAN
This is one of those pictures that I imagine we'll see again and again, whenever, in fact, someone wants to make Gordon Brown look foolish. It was snapped at Baghdad Airport on the PM's visit to Iraq, as he chatted to the crew of an RAF Puma helicopter. Seemingly, the gun was allowed to swing round in front of the Prime Minister, so it looked as if he was preparing to shoot someone, all the while with a slightly daft grin on his face. According to the Mail on Sunday, which carried the story, a Number Ten press office went white with shock on seeing the image.
Gaffes do happen, even though Gordon Brown has a press officer whose job it is to stop embarrassing pictures being taken of him (as Have I Got News For You frequently reminds us)
UPDATE: I see the Telegraph, Observer, Express and Independent are all carrying the pic, too, though the Obs nd the Express don't appear to explain the circumstances in which it was taken.
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LAWYERS, MADELEINE AND MURATRoy Greenslade in the Guardian asks some good questions about the tawdry way newspapers dealt with Robert Murat. In particular, he wonders why newspaper lawyers didn't rein in the coverage. In my experience of such cases, lawyers from different newspapers sometimes confer and agree how far they will allow a story to be pushed, even if they know it is legally questionable. The reasoning is that there...
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SEEQPOD IS GREATThere are a few tunes that I've been trying to track down and listen to for a while now: an EP of Fall covers by Sonic Youth, called 4 Tunna Brix and anything by the Desperate Bicycles, about whom I wrote last year.4 Tunna Brix, recorded for the John Peel Show may years ago, was never released officially, as far as I know, while the Desperate Bicycles oeuvre never made it to CD. It is all to be found online...
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EVERYONE'S A CRITICReally interesting article by Jay Rayner in Sunday's Observer on the web's challenge to newspaper criticism, which he blogs about here. As a newspaper restaurant critic, Rayner obviously isn't neutral in the debate but he's produced a fair-minded and compendious survey of the subject, which is well worth a read.A few thoughts:1 Several of the newspaper critics interviewed (notably Brian Sewell and Clement Crisp...
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