on March 23, 2009
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Further evidence of decline in the established print media from Daily Mail group newspapers. Regardless of what you think about the politics of the Daily Mail itself, this is extremely bad news for a lot of highly skilled, diligent journalists, sales people and print production folk.
I joined the trade of print journalism at the end of the 1980s and, even then, it felt as if I’d arrived at the end of a really great party, there was still plenty going on in the kitchen, but it was definitely the fag end of proceedings.
The lights are going out now.
If you’d like a reason why this is happening I can refer you to a small but instructive story about how newspapers forgot they-were-documents-of-public-record. (This implies a certain responsibility to the public to be fair, truthful and accurate in your reporting – or, at least acknowledge who is telling you what and why).
The most recent one concerns one of my old papers – The Sunday Express – which recently published a dreadful piece of nonsense about how the survivors of the 1996 Dunblane school massacre were shaming the memory of the dead from that event by getting drunk and behaving like teenagers do. The ‘information’ from this ‘story’ was culled from personal facebook pages of the teenagers in question.
Happily, Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads has done a wonderful piece of campaigning journalism in return and has, with the help of may others active in the digital world, succeeded in getting the paper to apologise for publishing an awful and unjustifiable piece of tat. All-Media Scotland have a good round up piece here.
UPDATED: March 24th *am. Good analysison The Scottish Sunday Express by Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism blog.
on March 22, 2009
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Pope Benedict and the condoms cartoon caricature © Matt Buck Hack cartoons
One from the Hack Cartoons archive.
on March 20, 2009
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Keep Calm It's Gordon Brown © Matt Buck Hack Cartoons
The Keep Calm and Carry On poster is hard to resist as an image. Jonathan Calder taks about the power of visual messaging here and James Graham takes a contrary view here.
on March 18, 2009
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Well, for once US government policy is following a example from the UK – and so it’s all together down the road of inventing new money. The US Federal Reserve banks will be buying large amounts of public debt with new paper assets. Here we are learning to know this process as quantitative easing, or, queasing for short. In the US, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of banks, Ben Bernanke, prefers to call it credit easing.
The initial amounts are very large indeed, although, typically, the FT have found a nice way of bringing it down to earth with an illustration (although I see they’ve found it from Mint.com).
Inventing money on this scale often acts against the value of the national currency and makes, in simple terms, paper money worth less.
UPDATED: 19th March 2009. The BBC is reporting declines in the value of the US dollar against a range of other international currencies. This is important because the US dollar is often though of as the global ‘reserve’ currency. This means that lots of national and corporate investors have traditionally liked to hold a lot of wealth in dollars because it has felt a secure investment.
on March 18, 2009
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One brilliant piece of visual journalism about what is happening in the UK economy. Kudos to Paddy Allen and Simon Rogers at the Guardian.
on March 18, 2009
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Here is the text of a post made under Robert Peston’s financial reporting blog at the BBC. The thread was the_goldman_infallibility_myth made by Robert on 17th March 2009.
>>>>>>>>>>>
At 00:14am on 17 Mar 2009, spur22 wrote:
The following link leads to an an attempt to put what has happened in the financial world into a piece of picture reporting.
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn’t able to get this published by anything other than a small print run magazine. This was a shame because I think it says something about what has happened to our country.
on March 17, 2009
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Drawing.
I am asking in the spirit of discovery to try and find out if there are differences in the use of BBC moderation towards words and pictures. This is because both forms of communication can tell a story or, have a point of view.
I’m testing the theory on Robert Peston’s blog – the post in question is No 131 under the Goldman Sachs infallibility post. I am spur 22.
(This post was edited for awful sentence structure and grammar at 10.25am on the same day)
on March 15, 2009
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Red-Handed fat cat © Matt Buck Hack Cartoons
This is just one of the chores which has to be done and although there is some heavy duty talk about the deployment of Toilet Duck going on in the financial and political worlds, it’s useful to watch who is doing the actual cleaning. This is something I might look at in one of my drawings this week.
In the UK, Conservative party leader David Cameron has apologised for his party’s part in the ’cosy economic consensus’ about the behaviour of the financial industry in the past decade. This was a smart political move because apologies cost little, if you are not PM, and it makes the prime minister and former chancellor look even more tin-eared and stubborn than he is. Both sides of the great UK party political divide have reaction to it which is available here and here.
Politically, it also pays to remember the national budget is not far away. This is very important to the government as it will be one of their last chances to throw cash at the electorate before they have to have an election. Even if Labour can’t win, they can, perhaps, reduce the scale of any defeat.
In the US, some rather brilliant cleaning fluids have been applied by Jon Stewart and the team on the Daily Show in a a series of recent clips which demonstrate what journalism can and should be. I can’t recommend the half hour of your life you should spend watching the recent set of interviews with CNBC Business Analyst Jim Cramer too highly. And the FT’s Alphaville agrees.
