Archive for the ‘Writing/Publishing’ Category
No April fool, Dean Letfus claims: “DEFAMATION!”
The Jekyll & Hyde-like transformation of Dean Letfus into Phil Jones continues. Now, apparently, he’s sending half-baked threats of ‘legal action’ to people who point out his, um, inconsistencies … Earlier this week I pointed to lawyer/investor/whistleblower David Whitburn’s blog in which he shared his concerns about the way US tax liens were being sold […]
Nice writing on a smear campaign
MSNBC took out a full-page ad in Friday’s Boston Globe for a ‘letter’ from their talk show host Rachel Maddow to her fellow Massachusetts citizens. This was a response to Senator Scott Brown’s claims (in an effort to raise money, apparently) that she is planning a run against him in 2012. Her letter contains some […]
Fearless: Margaret Moth RIP
Margaret Moth was the trail-blazing, globe-trotting photojournalist and camera operator whose jaw was blown away by a sniper’s bullet as she and her CNN news crew were traveling through Sarajevo’s infamous Sniper’s Alley in the early 1990s. Terribly injured, she recovered and eventually went back to work, doing what she did best with tenacity and […]
What new media needs to learn from old media
COURAGE . What journalism should be: Dogged and fearless Wise words from one of my former editors, Don Rood, reviewing Nothing but the Truth by Anna Politkovskaya on Radio NZ this morning. Yeah! Damn right. Dogged and fearless. To proudly call yourself ‘new media‘ and talk about freedom of speech is good. But recognise that […]
Why ‘legal action’ can be sooo dangerous …
Look at the sort of thing comes out in the wash: For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them […]
Murdoch: It’s not old media versus new media …
… it’s about how the content is produced and who is paying for it.” Paraphrase: “Google do not have the right to scrape our very expensively produced content if we want to stop them.” I see content scraped from news sites and reproduced in its entirety on discussion forums and blogs — with a credit […]
Farewell Charlie Gillett – Mr Eclectic
We’ve lost Charlie Gillett — longtime advocate-promoter-svengali of ‘world music’ … rock ‘n’ roll historian, and the supportive champion of so many different types of music. Not so much a gatekeeper as an enthusiastic enabler, Charlie helped so many careers and helped people get ‘heard’. I loved his BBC show. You never knew what you’d […]
A tale of woe … or fevered imagination?
The vast majority of the world’s population will NEVER visit an online discussion forum. They don’t care. (More important things to do etc.) Those who do (visit, and care) can be divided into a few categories from lurkers (who look but don’t post) to occasional and regular posters, to fanatical networkers and naked self-promoters who […]
Now Attack ads?
This fantastic spoof of a political attack ad just works. Excellent! Like Fake Steve Jobs, it’s brilliant satire — all with the ‘aim’ of getting 37Signals’ new book REWORK ahead of Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight on the best-seller lists. I love the sunrise and the uplifting music […]
Exquisite writing…
“ There were those who considered themselves lucky and those who considered themselves unlucky. Those who put their loss behind them and those who would never be the same again. Those who prayed and those who cursed and resented. Those who stole and those who gave. Jokers and worriers, optimists and pessimists, opportunists with an […]
Ad-supported site … or ‘supporting’ the advertisers? A case study.
An interesting debate is rumblng about the use of Ad-blockers on web browsers… Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher laid out his case “Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love” including this section which got me thinking: My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not […]
“If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers…”
First raised in a comment here, this story of a fabricated Enola Gay memoir, an imaginary PhD supposedly issued and withdrawn by Victoria University of Wellington (my Alma Mater) complete with “baseless and defamatory” allegations of a hot debate about evolutionary theory (!) … well, the whole thing just gets more and more interesting … […]
Erring on the side of ‘simple’
A police investigation into ‘stolen’ or ‘leaked’ emails from the Leader of the Opposition’s office reveals just how slack so-called computer security can be… until we have reason to beef it up. I bet they’re more security-conscious now! “While it is accepted by the experts interviewed that external hacking can never be fully eliminated, ‘hacking’ […]
Neither one nor the other…
The profession “blogger” is still not considered “journalism”, depending on whom you ask and the time of day. Comment 42 from ‘Gus2000’ on Roughly Drafted Magazine blog re Daniel attending and asking questions at the recent Apple shareholder meeting but not being ‘allowed’ to report them. Gus has it right. (But for how long?)
That’s not copyright theft. It’s ‘intertextual mixing’… (Yeah, right!)
“Ooops, you caught me passing off someone else’s work as my own.” From The Independent Shortly after Ms Hegemann’s book appeared, a blogger pointed out that passages of it bore an uncanny similarity to Strobo. In one case a whole page had simply been lifted from Strobo and planted in [her book]. … “There was […]
