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News round-up: A new toy for Piers, and Craigslist eyes up civic journalism

Posted: 19/05/05 By: Jemima Kiss
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Piers Morgan expressing his opinion on something

I'm back from Cornwall's nether regions following a couple of weeks wrestling with dire old dial up.

After three years on nothing but broadband, it felt like trying to navigate a skyscraper without a lift.

• Piers Morgan is rumoured to be front runner to buy trade publication Press Gazette, reported Media Guardian this week. Quoted in PG's own media pack, Mr Morgan says: "Press Gazette has always been a tremendously valuable source of news, gossip, advice and comment and no ambitious journalist should miss it." Well quite.

Maybe he could lift the circulation above 6,000 ...

• Community journalism is brewing at Craigslist. Not content with outwitting newspapers on classified ads, founder Craig Newmark has been brainstorming with grassroots journalism evangelist Dan Gillmor. He wants to recruit 'talented amateurs': "People are looking for attitude and guts in reporting - not full-on gonzo journalism, but 'hey, tell us what you think'."

Will there be any news on the BBC next week?

• BBC chairman Michael Grade is getting some flack from unions for refusing to meet to discuss staff concerns over job cuts. "It is inappropriate for the governors to engage in formal or quasi-formal consultation with the unions," said Mr Grade in a letter to TUC leader Brendan Barber.

Strikes are due at the BBC from Monday. Paxman's refusing to do Newsnight, and Radio 4 faces a crisis as staff are expected to walk out on a long list of well-known shows - Today, Start the Week, the World Tonight, the World at One, PM, Money Box Live, Front Row and Woman's Hour.

Good for them, I say. But it just won't feel right waking up without Edward Stourton...

NYT teases bloggers

• The New York Times is floating an interesting marketing technique - paying bloggers that successfully encourage take up of its new $49 TimeSelect subscriptions. Interesting, but isn't the blog world a bit sceptical for that?

• Mimi New York - our favourite stateside blogging harlot - has a journalist's visa in the pipeline but Village Voice is refusing to employ her until it's sorted. Keep an eye out for her on BBC.co.uk some time soon...

• The end of pure RSS feeds is truly nigh: Google has launched AdSense for feeds.

Sign of the times for media-less Fleet Street

• The last old school media company in Fleet Street is leaving. After 66 years in its Lutyens-designed HQ, Reuters is leaving for hi-tech offices in Canary Wharf. It now has a big shiny news screen outside and a news ticker wraps round the building displaying the latest market data. But it's just not as pretty...

• Hellomagazine.com has introduced natty little video celebrity bios, which could be useful for background research if you’re in that neck of the woods. And there's a Johnny Depp one due next month - I checked. Hello did try and introduce video back in 2001, but without widespread broadband it just wasn't viable, it says.

• Alas, Channel 4's superlative FactCheck has come to an end. It'll return in some form, the team assures us.

Tony Blair's spam

• Tony Blair's email account has been hacked? As with most junk emails, if this subject line sounds too good to be true it probably isn't. If you get this email don't click on the link, no matter how tempting it seems. It'll smuggle all sorts of nasty things onto your PC, as the nice people at PC Pro explain.

While we're on the subject of junk mail, has anyone else noticed a massive increase in spam over the past month or so? There's one news story from German news site Der Spiegel that's being spammed all over the place for no obvious reason. The spamming isn't actually from Der Spiegel, but it can't be harming their web stats for the month...

In addition, the filter on my usually excellent Eudora email program seems to be missing a big chunk of junk. So time consuming and absolutely infuriating. I don't believe in capital punishment, although I could make an exception for spammers...

• Finally, and almost entirely off topic: Dylan Thomas is still raging against the dying of the light. There's a smashing story on the BBC site about an art student creating new footage of the writer using animations based on scans of his death mask. Five minutes of new footage showing Dylan reading 'Do not go gentle into that good night' will be shown during the Edinburgh Festival.

Comments? Email me.

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