Category: Publishing

I waved goodbye to my last full-time role in the newspaper industry six years ago and immediately found myself embroiled in an online row regarding the quality of the blogs the company I had just left were introducing.

The subject matter of the blogs was not the issue. The poor spelling, grammar and overall style of many of the individual posts was, however, proving a major source of distraction and irritation.

It wasn’t just me complaining, regular readers were not impressed either. When such mistakes were pointed out, apologies were forthcoming…initially.

But there came a point when the newspaper, the bloggers and their editor went on the offensive and stopped apologising for the regular mistakes. “The rules have changed,” I was reliably informed. “This is blogging, it isn’t journalism. So that stuff about spelling and grammar doesn’t always matter these days.”

My argument did not change. It came down to … [Read More]

The way we get our news and gather information is changing at a pace we have never seen before.

There are now so many ways to get up-to-date on what is happening locally, nationally and internationally it would take a while to list them and far too long to digest them all. It is also a list that continues to grow by the day.

From 24-hour television news to the continued rise of Internet use, we can have a bewildering array of news and information sources available to us 24/7 with a flick of a TV remote or click of a mouse. We have the world at our fingertips.

It has led some to complain of information overload, but such claims miss a vital point.

We have the best possible filter available to us – we get to decide whether we access this information or not.

The opportunity to find … [Read More]