Category Archives: Journalism

There are two science stories which promise to change the world irrevocably. What’s interesting is that they contradict each other. The first is the optimistic one. We hear less of this since the dotcom crash, but it is still true … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I just spent four hours straight with Robert Trivers, one of the greatest biological theorists of our time. For two of them, I had a digital voice recorder going, with a new battery carefully inserted and all the old tracks … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Some readers may have been puzzled by the <mailscience> tags I put on the previous entry. I hope the picture below, from Monday’s Daily Mail, will spare me typing a longer explanation. Continue reading →

A great quote from Bruce Schneier: One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, ‘news’ means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

When first I read that Michelle Delio, a prolific freelance for Wired News, had been caught making up sources, I felt a twinge of sympathy, as anyone would who has had stories fact-checked and legalled to death. But the report … Continue reading → Continue reading →

General election campaigns are normally wonderful for newspaper circulation: it was the 87 election which rescued the Independent from an early grave. But in this campaign, the Guardian’s circulation has only risen by 2%. By contrast, the issues dealing with … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Two people wrote to the Guardian to complain that Alfred Duggan had never lived at Blenheim. Er. Hrmph. An error in transmission, as we used to say before email removed that alibi. However, poking around Google print revealed the unlikely … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Claud Cockburn used to say that there are no real secrets. Anyone who spends a week reading all the available newspaers and talking to well-informed newspapers can figure out what the government is up to, and must be up to. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m off to see old friends and meet new trout around the West Country for the next few days. I thought I’d leave you (below the fold) with a piece about news and fiction, lifted from a Church Times column. Continue reading →