1. I grew up in a home where the King was revered. In the ’70s I couldn’t get excited about big ballads, curious concept albums and woeful film scores. The Sun recordings, however, had a raw, personal, intensity to which …
Tracks of my tears: an internal jukebox selection Read more »
Buried deep in this summer’s Latitude Festival line up was a curious outpost from a very different cultural moment. The three-day event’s insufferable up-from-London-middle-classness is a well worn riff for compares. But among the up-and-coming performance poets who provide the …
To its detractors the European Union is a faceless, unresponsive monolith, remote from the citizenry and indifferent their needs. That an EU Commissioner might listen to an individual’s voice, much less change European policy on the basis a single voter’s …
Face to faceless: going solo to thwart the eurocrats Read more »
The shock of navigating Mombasa’s roads, even in a giant Land Cruiser, was such that survival was my only concern for some time. The surge of vehicles, each trying to gain advantage by any means, was in a different order …
IFJ/NUJ/Guardian conference – Journalism In An Age Of Mass Surveillance The Guardian, London 16 October 2014 Above: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger Cocktail shakers are newly popular among Guardian journalists, and manual typewriters are making a comeback. Both result from rising …
Source marked: how journalists’ smartphones blow contacts’ cover Read more »
Watching television pictures of the demonstration outside the BBC’s Scottish headquarters yesterday, I felt concerned for my friends and colleagues who work there. Estimates of the crowd size outside their place of work started at around 1,000 – some called …
Bias cut: why journalists should embrace the angry mob Read more »
Hollywood and horror writers have seen to it that graveyards evoke feelings of dread, fear and apprehension. At best they are where the grieving outpour their despair; at worst they are the scene of spines chilled, foul deeds and the …
The living dead: my faith was renewed at a socialist pioneer’s graveside Read more »
TES column 25 July 2014 “We all have a talent – it is just a matter of finding yours”, was a popular mantra among the teachers who tried to guide my education. Certainly at school, some pupils excelled – effortlessly, …
Shocking as was the sight of Al Jazeera journalists Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed locked in a cage while they were sentenced to long jail terms, broadcast pictures rendered the scene remote. Meeting with the three journalists’ colleagues, …
Captive audience – applying pressure to free journalists jailed in Egypt Read more »
This is a written up version of a speech that I gave to the Association of Journalism Educators’ annual conference on 13 June 2014, at Liverpool John Mores University. When Keri Hudson was 21, she took on an unpaid internship …