alexlockwood.net

What a few weeks. It’s the first time that blogging has coincided with the beginning of a new term at university. We’ve launched four new journalism degrees here at Sunderland, three of which are accredited by the NCTJ. So the blog posts have dwindled considerably. It’s been a trend I’ve seen across a number of [...]

“When we launch, we’ll have the largest single professional network online in the UK. The community lends itself to a social media network.”
Building a framework for half a million users to share and rate teaching materials is now the focus for the Times Educational Supplement, the PPA Business Media Brand of the Year in 2008. [...]

Tony at Harmless Sky has been following , for 18 months at least, development of BBC policy on the coverage of climate change.
He picks up on this line from a rather obscurely-titled BBC report on impartiality:
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view [...]

Paul Bradshaw at City has ‘produced’ (and that word is carefully chosen) another inspired blog post, pulling together the views of a number of journalists and academics to answer this question:
Should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn’t want them?
Go read it, it’s excellent. I’ve only a little to add, which [...]

Articles decrying environmental practice as “a tyranny of environmentalism” which is leaving people with more “fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could” are interesting cultural artefacts to examine.
Like fossils, they help us understand how previous cultures and the people that lived in them went about their [...]

The timing of these two stories was interesting. First, George Bush reported as signing off from the G8 with the line: ‘Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter‘. Picked up the Independent, Telegraph and across the blogs; Climate Progress or, perhaps, the Greenpeace US blog probably says it best:
193 days, 19 hours, 22 minutes until Bush [...]

Each day this week I’ll be posting on Local & Green: why environmental journalism is best at the local level, and can help grow a renewed local media industry. Today I’m looking at…
Flicking the Switch: which newspapers are making the leap to communal green media?
Inspired by last month’s Carnival of Journalism, I blogged about why [...]

Any reactions to the new Sunday Times design? Personally, I’m impressed.

It’s amazingly colourful for a broadsheet, and makes the paper feel more consumable, more easily. As editor John Witherow says, “It’s the first time in its 186-year history that the Sunday Times can use color in all sections and we plan to use it to [...]

The Columbia Journalism Review and The Onion have both turned their attention to climate change, running a couple of good stories about how the topic is covered.
First, the CJR looks at the rhetoric of the term ‘carbon footprint’ and wonders if we adopt new terms far more easily than adopting the substance or actions behind [...]

Yesterday in the Guardian Simon Hoggart referred to the environmental movement as a ‘religion - dogmatic and irrational’ in a small aside about wind power as the last entry in his week’s sketch. The full quote:
We are to have across our still beautiful countryside thousands more ghastly, noisy, hideous wind turbines, which produce very little [...]