Category: Journalism

  • Let them hear cake…

    Jon Manel tackles ten years of the NHS on Today this week. He enlivened an interview with John Appleby from the King’s Fund by the use of a real BBC cake (‘how do you slice up the NHS cake?’), a simple visual gag ironically re-worked for radio. Unfortunately the fondant fancy of crassness collided with…

  • Jonny Vaughan is staying at Capital…I knew I was lousy at gossip.

  • Much huffington and puffington over the FCC‘s decision to bury a report on media ownership. Burying reports is – of course – plain dumb. The report in question, from 2003, analyzed over 10,000 news stories from five years before. FCC economists found that “local ownership adds almost five and one-half minutes of local news” per…

  • Over-egging the pudding

    Some of my favourite writers are unreliable. Ryszard Kapuściński isn’t one of them. Favourite writers, that is, because he was certainly unreliable. In a touching tribute, Jack Shafer in Slate reminds us that RK wasn’t a real journalist because he made things up. Shafer reheats John Ryle‘s critique of Kapuściński. This is the thrust of…