Category Archives: media

Who needs a paywall?

1 Reply

Paywalls have been the hot topic in UK journalism since last year, something that Malcolm Coles has covered in great detail since The Times decided to put their content behind one.

However, the local newspaper here in Gibraltar, the Gibraltar Chronicle – which just happens to be the second oldest, English language paper to have been printed continuously since it launched, in the world, launching in 1801 – have taken a slightly different tactic to ensure revenues. I used to see this once in a blue moon whilst catching up on the latest news from my home town, but now, it’s on every, single, piece of news: SEE MORE IN PRINTED EDITION

Image: Who Needs A Paywall?

Want to read the full article? Buy the paper (which, incidentally, is 50p and averages 20 pages or so!). Who needs a paywall? Not the Gibraltar Chronicle, apparently!

BBC Breakfast displays pornographic file

3 Replies

Watching BBC Breakfast this morning, I took a half-hearted interest in the piece on the UK’s Information Commissioner issuing the first Data Protection Act fines. During the explanation that a certain county council had been fined £100,000 for faxing details of a child abuse case to a member of the public, the item of news ran what seemed like a relatively innocuous piece of stock footage showing various file names contained within a temporary directory on some form of server or workstation. See if you can tell which ones originally caught my eye: (Excuse the quality, Mobile phone recordings of a playing television aren’t usually that great!)


Gave up on YouTube so have chucked it on Vimeo instead!

As a long time fan of The Pythons (Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin) I thought it amusing to see a bunch of deleted MP3s which must surely be the Monty Python Sings CD, but it was another file on that page that caught my eye, can you guess which?

BBC Breakfast shows dodgy filenames

Click to enlarge

A quick search on Google, for those unfamiliar with the reasonably popular Sybian sex aids, shows exactly what that file is referring to: bailey sybian (Google Search Results for a NSFW phrase)

So, Mr Thompson, whose computer was that footage filmed on? I hope it wasn’t a member of your staff, as the downloading of sexually explicit material on a paid-for-by-taxes computer over a paid-for-by-taxes network by a paid-for-by-taxes employee is surely not the best way to be spending any of the UK’s severely stretched budgets.

[Edit: This would have been live at 0900 GMT if it wasn’t for YouTube taking for EVER to process a 20second video!]

Remembrance Day 2010 Logos

Leave a Reply

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918, The Great War came to an end. Two years later, a two minute long pause of silence was suggested as a mark of Remembrance to the 16,543,185 dead and 21,228,813 casualties. Last year I reported showed the Google and Bing Remembrance Day logos, and thought it was a good idea to carry on the tradition.

Bing have done a full page takeover again:

Whereas I find Google’s attempt less eyecatching that in previous years, with a solitary Poppy underneath the search buttons, and is only available on Google.co.uk:

We also covered newspaper logos showing their signs of respect last year, or at least Malcolm did. The MailOnline was getting a bit of bad press, but they seem to have changed their ways this time around:

The other mainstreams I checked all did something similar… except, as you can see, the Guardian, who are this year’s black sheep of the bunch: