Category Archives: Newspapers and Magazines

im off on travels. and when i return hopefully there will be plenty of material from my trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh.

in the meantime, here in London this weekend no doubt there will be plenty of rumination on Ken Livingstone”s latest mishap - press headlines across the world are already screaming headlines about “Red Ken and Nazi jibe” and “Mayor Ken suspended..” etc.

Looks like Ken, like myself, will be getting a well earned (well in my case anyway!) rest from worrying about London”s regeneration.

Time magazine has named U2 star Bono - and Bill and Melinda Gates -as its “Persons of the Year,” citing their charitable work and activism aimed at reducing global poverty and improving world health. This is of course set against the backdrop of a year which has seen numerous natural disasters- from the tsunami in South Asia to Hurricane Katrina, and the Live 8 efforts.

“For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time”s Persons of the Year.”

“A new wave of political bloggers is challenging Britain’s old media pundits. But who are they, and which ones matter? Oliver Burkeman reports...”

i suppose it would be useful to know what Mr. Burkeman is basing his analysis of ‘who matters!’ on - is he just going by blog stats i.e. in terms of who gets most traffic - and who’s managed to make ‘broadcast media’ sit up and take notice? well in that case, first of all, it would be nice to see these stats that he’s used - or maybe its just ’something everyone knows..duh!’

its a bit silly to compare broadcast news to blogs- on a competitive level anyway - because that’s like comparing internet publishing to the publishing industry: its a different scenario isn’t it - one you need to be able to publish something on the web ( ok you need some technical bits and bobs) and the other you need a hell of a lot more to get yourself a publishing contract for your book. one allows an individual to say what he wants without too much interference prior to publication - and the other simply doesn’t allow that because institutions get involved and voila! first you have the editors to deal with and then the publishers need to decide if its something they want to get involved with blah blah. a lot of political economy of media issues involved here - which i just wanted to touch on - obviously its a big deal and something we’ll want to look at later.

but this piece by mr. burkeman seems to imply- to a certain extent anyway-! that blogs don’t matter if they’re not being noticed by the newspapers or ‘big media outlets’…or have plenty of readership for that matter. And is that not one-sided? because then the danger is that blogs will just become like newspapers –’oh how much circulation have you got?’… ‘oh not much..ah well never mind then..’.

Well that’s not the point - i mean sure its nice to have people come and read your blog - but it fulfils a range of different functions than just getting circulation - surely. And that range will depend on the individual obviously. i just think that article somehow treated blogging in a somewhat cut-and dried- way. and before anyone says oh he was talking about ‘political’ bloggin - well actually i think it still applies!

the galloway mystery - - tried posting a comment on this entry on the guardian blog and it says:

“Comments have been closed on this entry. We automatically close entries to new comments after 2 days to prevent comment spam, or we may have deemed this particular entry unsuitable for open comments. However, you can still make your opinion known by writing on your own weblog, and linking to this page: our system will pick it up.”

Hmm! well a) it hasn’t been 2 days yet - ( unless im seriously out of sync) and b) well its not true in the sense that they’re not applying their rules correctly to all the other posts in the news blog - and the other Guardian blogs. loads of posts have have comments running for days . i guess they got fed up and decided the comments were too ‘open’ or sth.