It’s always good to know that people have their priorities right. Sadly, I don’t think they often do.
Today, for example, there has to be something else happening in the news, but the only thing people seem to be interested in is the death of Michael Jackson.
Well, no. There is one thing that rates higher than the Jackson stories on the BBC website shared stories list:
So, what matters to you today?
Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?
Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.
But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax.
Continue reading “panics and pandemics”
Yesterday I mentioned the 1939 Spectator diarist’s fear of what might happen when the newly invented cheap ball point pen got into the hands of the “inexpert and frankly incompetent”. Of course we’ve gone way beyond that now.
Now, anyone who owns a digital camera thinks he is a photographer; anyone with a computer is a journalist and anyone with a mobile phone is an on-the-spot reporter. And very few of us have any professional training in journalism.
Continue reading “journalism for beginners”
It’s always nice when the walk to the village has some kind of productive outcome, other than the purchase of a not-quite-a-baguette Spanish loaf and the inevitable associated longing for proper English wholemeal.
Today there was the pleasure of finding two ‘letters’ in the PO Box. Well, “letters” es un decir: one was a glossy flyer from the bank assuring me that if I use my credit card over Christmas and get further into debt, Continue reading “a critic barks”
Is it only me, or does the juxtaposition of these two headlines – from the same page of today’s El País – catch the attention of anyone else out there?
Was it the proximity to the first story that forced the headline writer to use such an ugly adverb as “laboralmente” in the second?
And am I the only person who noticed the flyer which fell out when I turned the page?:
Continue reading “explosive news?”
don't confuse the narrator 