Travel and culture
It’s obvious to any observer that the United States needs urgent social, political and judicial reform at many different levels. We as a society must listen to the protesters, debate solutions to these underlying problems and demand that our leaders enact them.
According to the experts at snpros.com - "The Social Networking Professionals" - my Twitter account is worth US$83.20 as of five months ago. If you have a Twitter account, I encourage you to do the same - just google your name and it'll be somewhere down there. Some robot has gone through all of our… Continue reading My Twitter Account is worth $US83.20
Brisbane literary figures have expressed support for the Man Booker Prize’s decision to open the competition to any novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom. The prize had previously been open only to authors from the British Commonwealth, and some literary figures in the United Kingdom have expressed concern that American writers… Continue reading The Man Booker Prize open to American authors – Now what happens?
In her lectures to journalism students at QUT, Susan Hetherington often talks about celebrity death hoaxes and how they can suck in unsuspecting journalists desperate to be first at the expense of being correct. Well, a quick search around the internet has found that most of those celebrity death hoaxes (Jeff Goldblum, Charlie Sheen, Owen… Continue reading Tim Tebow breaks both legs in Dallas car crash
Nate Thayer is an American freelance journalist who has worked all over the world and, in recent years, has focused more on North Korea. In March he wrote an article about basketball diplomacy in the country, following Dennis Rodham's visit to Kim Jong Un for the website nknews.org. After the article was published, Thayer received… Continue reading Nate Thayer is a Legend
In a media landscape of shrinking budgets and a growing necessity for immediacy in reporting, we're going to see more and more journalists with job descriptions like that of Marissa Calligeros from the Brisbane Times. Marissa is in charge of reporting breaking news for the Brisbane Times, and describes arriving on the scene of, say, a… Continue reading I Don’t Think I Could Do Marissa Calligeros’ Job
It strikes me how quickly some more traditional (or at least I think of them traditional) media institutions have taken up the whole shift from paper to pixels. The ABC is one of those - the old girl usually the domain of crusty news anchors like Rod Young (well, I remember him as a little… Continue reading Listening to the Radio Man
Am I the only one who feels weird about politicians using social media? Maybe I'm still too young to be feeling this jaded, but every tweet, every Facebook post seems so obviously contrived, so carefully worded by handlers and probably focus-grouped three times over before pressing the blue button. Until they go home and do… Continue reading Politicians are still finding their feet online
Once you put the internet into numbers, the whole thing becomes so huge that it's impossible to comprehend. This week's Online Journalism lecture threw statistics at us like those that say that this year, 16.8 million Australians will spend 40.3 billion minutes on the internet and view 33 billion web pages. What does that even… Continue reading “There’ve been lots of glum faces in our industry of late”
So for a class this semester - "Online Journalism 1" - we all need to be keeping blogs about online journalism. That is, the world of blogs, tweets and jazzy words like that. Having sporadically maintained the Naked Pun for over a year now, I've often struggled with the fundamental question faced by most bloggers:… Continue reading Apparently it’s good for journalists to have a blog