News Ltd excelled itself this weekend with a piece of journalistic sleight-of-hand designed to deceive readers in the quest for more website clicks. The story – Erotic dancers at charity launch for sick kids – first appeared on the front page of the NT News and their website. It wasn’t long before other websites in the News Ltd group picked up on the story’s “click potential.
31/01/2010 By
How journalism works: Sex, lies and voice recorders
28/01/2010 By
Capital punishment: why using random capitals is a crime!
Agh – few things annoy my linguistic sensibilities more than random capitalisation. Sure, misplaced apostrophes are probably a greater grammatical blot on the language landscape, but the capitalisation of words is more irritating because of its intentional nature. I’m currently editing and rewriting the copy on a massive IT website and still come across examples of nail-on-blackboard level irritation.
25/01/2010 By
News manipulation: The impartiality dilemma
In their efforts to avoid accusations of bias, the modern news media has become more biased and more distorted than ever before. A perfect example of this ‘biased impartiality’ occurred this morning on Channel Seven’s revamped Sunrise program.
20/01/2010 By
Comedy as art
Comedy writing has always had a harder time finding legitimacy than other forms – television comedy even more so. Different writing genres have always been prone to elitism and arbitrary labels of legitimacy or triviality, which seems a mite unfair when we look for genuine artistry.
02/12/2009 By
Content marketer, consultant, magazine columnist, event speaker, workshop trainer, jobbing copywriter, angry blogger, pop culture geek and aspiring novelist. Blue Mountains, Australia.
