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The glory that was Rome
Today at the Reuters Institute a fascinating collision of Italian and Anglo-Saxon journalism. (I can’t resist the Anglo-Saxon bit, it appeals to the medieval historian in me – the Venerable Bede would be proud.) The big theme was trust, and the Anglo-Italian contrast, but what came through for me were the personalities in Italian journalism:…
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Anthony Mitchell
Spare a thought for the family and friends of Anthony Mitchell, of the Associated Press, feared lost on Kenya Airways FQ 507. He was 39, married, with two young children. Here’s one of his stories from April on the U.S. government’s use of Ethiopian jails in its extraordinary rendition programme.
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Journalism by numbers
Next time you do a word count, check out one of the stats offered up by your word processor – the Flesch reading ease index. It was devised in the 1940s by an Austrian, Rudolf Flesch, and is a simple number crunching exercise that uses the number of words per sentence, and the number of…
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First rule of terrorism?
Don’t go on the telly. ITV News reporter Jon Gilbert gives the back story to his interview with FBI informant Mohammed Junaid Babar. In 2001, it ran on my old show – five news (we couldn’t afford capital letters) – and was then picked up by CNN on syndication from ITN. That’s when someone from…