Monthly Archives: May 2008

The death of TV reviewing: an explanation

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Television

Why is TV review­ing dying on its knees? The Daily Tele­graph has just bid farewell to its TV reviewer. Is tele­vi­sion no longer worthy of cri­ti­cism? Buzz. Dumb question.

What actu­ally has happened is that review­ing has been bypassed alto­gether. Take Chan­nel 5’s Stran­gelove: Mar­ried to the Eif­fel Tower*, a pro­gramme which fea­tured women who claimed to be mar­ried to — yes — the Eif­fel Tower and the Ber­lin Wall. Con­tinue read­ing →

Making sense of Twitter for journalists

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I know there’s noth­ing like being late to a party, but if you’re still won­der­ing how to make sense of Twit­ter, then let me share a couple of tips.

You need Twhirl — think IM inter­face — an RSS reader and Tweets­can/Sum­mize/Twit­buzz. Then you can set up cus­tom searches on Tweets­can, dump them into a reader, and man­age your tweets with the IM inter­face. As culin­ary phil­an­throp­ist Gor­don Ram­say would say: — Twit­ter. Done.

Update: Try Twits­coop for a live Twit­ter tag cloud.

Democracy, markets and the BBC

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BBCI have fre­quently found myself talk­ing to reform-minded indi­vidu­als in the Middle East. Many like the idea of demo­cracy. They admire it. Per­son­ally they are lib­eral, pro­gress­ive, secular.

And yet the closer they are to power — or when hold­ing office — the more they con­cede that the time is not yet ripe. Their work is too import­ant, and the people are too eas­ily led, too poorly edu­cated, too rad­ical, too sectarian.

Speak­ing yes­ter­day at the BBC, I had that feel­ing of Middle East­ern déjà vu. Con­tinue read­ing →