It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an editor in possession of a new website (or a newspaper) must be in want of a redesign. The Jane Austen phrasing was irresistible, but this is one of the true certainties of journalism: when a publication gets a new editor, he or she will want it to look different. When I was a print journalist I live through three different redesigns. And in my time in online…
The recent furore surrounding the publication of a hoax blog post at Huffington Post SA has had me thinking – about hate speech (which I wrote about here), and about the process by which decisions are made about publication or non-publication of a particular piece of writing. In years of experience at IOL, I had more unsolicited pieces of writing cross my email inbox than I care to think about now. Over time, I learned…
South African journalists (and perhaps some bemused bystanders) have been consumed for the last week or so by a chain of events centred on the country’s instance of the Huffington Post. In brief, this is what happened: Huff Post SA published a piece saying white men should be disenfranchised. This duly went viral. Then things got sticky. It transpired the piece had been written as a hoax by a white man trying to make a point about…
I am experimenting with making online lessons. This is my first effort – a look at three ways to embed social media in online posts (complete with videos).
I spotted this on a site which shall remain nameless*. In an article about a musician who had killed two people in a car crash was this phrase, used as a subhead: “Singer takes to Facebook to express his distraught”. Distraught is an adjective and can’t be used in that place in the sentence. The verb “express” needs a noun, and the right one here would be “distress”. The singer, on the other hand, can be…
My first foray into the world of training could not have been more fraught. It was the mid 1990s and the afternoon newspaper on which I worked as a sub-editor was about to make the change from one production system to another. Editorial staff were already working on computers (the Atex system) but the newspaper was still being made up by human hand. Now, people were going to move to a fully electronic system, on…
This is my second video, demonstrating how to embed a YouTube video in a post:
