Category: Media

  • Sunday Times photo competition: bastards

    This week’s Sunday Times went into great detail about a photography competition for landscape snappers, but strangely didn’t highlight that you have to pay to enter: £7 for one image, or £25 if you want to send in the maximum of fifteen. Given that the total prize pot is £20K, if 1,000 people enter 15…

  • Gamekeeper turned poacher

    I reckon that these days, about three-quarters of the work I do involves writing tutorials. It’s not the most glamorous kind of journalism, for sure, and writers who don’t do it often look down on those of us who do – but I really like doing it,  and in the case of Windows Vista magazine,…

  • Violence in videogames

    The other day, Penny Arcade took a swipe at a “video games did it!” story about a group of US teenagers who murdered a homeless man and blamed it on video game violence. It turns out that the stepmother of one of the boys is a PA reader, and she emailed PA. [scroll down to…

  • How not to win magazine competitions

    Over at All Talk No Action, Paul’s published a chat transcript that shows how not to win magazine competitions. The reader’s rock-solid reasoning amused me immensely.

  • Why not be a writaaaaaargh?

    The “Why not be a writer?” ads are everywhere, and while most of the success stories are crap – “I’ve had three letters published in Bathwater Collector Monthly!” – others are more impressive: sign up for this course and you could get a £25K advance for your novel! Many such claims, though, seem to be…

  • Lad mags in decline

    Remember when lad mags ruled the world? Those days are gone, it seems: the latest circulation figures show massive declines almost entirely across the board. According to UK Press Gazette, the big losers include: FHM (down 25.9% in the last half of 2006) Loaded (down 29.9%) Maxim (down 29.3%) Arena (down 29.9%) Zoo (down 21.5%)…

  • Fergie “looks like something Aquaman would fight”

    If you’ve ever wondered why celebs are mumbling unhappily about appearing on giant, high definition TV screens, the professionally nasty What Would Tyler Durden Do? gives an insight: hi-res pics of erstwhile Black Eyed Pea Fergie are perhaps a little more hi-res than she might like. Usual disclaimer: WWTDD is usually foul-mouthed and more often…

  • Slugger O’Toole on battling bloggers

    Mick from Slugger O’Toole casts his eye over the current Britblog battles. Although the current barney revolves around political blogger Guido Fawkes, Mick’s interested in the bigger picture. And yet, according to Ipsos-Mori: “Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information than television advertising and email marketing.” So it is the case that…

  • Dr Ben boots old boot-face

    Ben Goldacre’s gone after Zelda from Terrahawks Gillian McKeith again, and this time it’s serious: ASA verdicts that she can’t call herself a doctor, selling products in defiance of the law, that sort of thing. So naturally he does what any right-minded person would do: he sticks the boot in. Heh.

  • Has a review hurt your feelings? Then why not sue?

    This is rather worrying: according to Slugger O’Toole, a Belfast restaurant successfully sued the Irish News for libel after the paper printed a negative review. If Slugger’s commenters are correct, the jury didn’t find the paper guilty because the review was factually incorrect; it found it guilty because the review hurt the restaurateur’s feelings. [Via…