I’ve haven’t for some time rounded up a diverse collection links in a weekend post because I noticed that the readership of this blog falls to its lowest on a Saturday and Sunday.
But I’ve also been noticing that my posts have quite a “long tail” and get looked at some time after they’ve gone up. So here’s some varied weekend or weekday reading. There is absolutely no common theme.
Continue reading →
Kelvin MacKenzie sounds off today about university journalism schools, how they’re all a waste of space and how they should all be shut down. If training on the job was good enough for me, runs the argument, then it should be good enough for today’s generation.
Kelvin MacKenzie
First, a declaration of interest: I lead a university journalism school. Second, Kelvin is talking bollocks.
There is a delightful irony in the route that Kelvin’s opinion took to be published. Last November, he came to speak on a panel at City University on local television news. While wandering round the subject in characteristically subdued fashion, he took a sideswipe at journalism teaching in universities and advised any students present to abandon their course and get a job as a reporter on a local paper. The students took this on the chin and ignored the advice. And one of them must have thought: there’s an idea there someone can use.
What tests a political leader in an open system is how he or she reacts when something goes pear-shaped, as it always will. On the campaign trail, endless, intense, tightly-scheduled days when the candidate gets increasingly tired and hoarse, things go wrong more often.
When a missile struck the Barrack Obama campaign, what happened? Hardly an eyelid moved. He was Doctor Cool. The message is not just one of calm purposefulness to the world in general but to the candidate’s team. Obama’s body language said to those closest to him: nobody even thinks about blinking. We deal with it, whatever it is, then we stop dealing with it and move on. Saying little and saying it only once takes nerve.
The small tragedy of Gordon Brown’s reaction to the voter from Rochdale was not what happened when the Prime Minister climbed into his car but what followed after his “bigot” remarks had gone global. The Labour campaign have agonised about getting the “real” Gordon Brown across to voters; attaching a lapel mike was one small way of making that happen. Brown’s ticking off his aides for the “disaster” was recognised by his team because they knew it was the truth. “Authentic, at least,” said one long-suffering Brown aide familiar with mood swings from the Prime Minister. A fit epitaph.
And then Brown could not even exercise the self-mastery to keep his apology short. This mistake is well caught by Matthew Parris in this morning’s Times.
Out of Print: Newsapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age, published on September 3rd, 2013.
The book examines what's happening to journalism now – and argues the case for optimism.
You can order it by clicking right here.
