This is bad journalism practice. Not good for media transparency.
The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper.
Bill Bennett joins Kathryn to talk about how Twitter has changed in the year since Elon Musk’s $44b buyout. He’ll also look at why video streamers are pushing up prices well beyond inflation and why it might come with ads. And North Korean agents have been insinuating their way into tens of thousands of freelance IT roles around the world - what’s the danger and what are some of the signs one has been hired?
Here we go again with another cyclone potentially heading towards northern New Zealand. Thankfully this one should diminish before it gets here, apparently we may see a few over the next six months or so.
Where is Roadrunner?
Modern etiquette question.
How rude is it if I never answer those damn customer service surveys?
I used to answer them honestly, but that turns out to be a huge problem.
Trying to figure out if all the Federation development that’s been going on recently means I can now follow an indieweb enabled site like boffosocko.com from micro.blog.
The website hasn’t been updated in over a decade, yet there is still value in Unnecessary journalism phrases.
It is just what it says on the label. The website shows the wordy phrases journalists use to pad their copy.
Each phrase is simply illustrated with a handful of recent examples, mainly taken from US newspapers.
Some examples:
Never Before Lifeless body 4 p.m. in the afternoon
Before we get carried away, many journalists, including myself are paid by the word. A few unnecessary phrases will buy a cup of coffee. Write enough and you can pay off the mortgage.
I’m not one for new year resolutions, but IF I had one it would be to not write trolling, dumb-arsed questions in headlines.
That said, stories with questioning headlines tend to get read more often and propagated more widely around the internet. Which is a minor moral dilemma.
Some questions are legitimate. I’d argue that
are fair enough. You’ll notice they can not be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
This week I had a couple of emails from Sky TV telling me the payment for Sky Sport Now has not gone through.
The wording makes it look as if the non-payment is an accident. That’s not the case. I want to put it on hold for a week or two while I take another look at my total digital subscription spending.
It’s high. Too high. But not out of control.
And it’s not out of control because I make a conscious effort to stay on top of spending on digital subscriptions.
In 2021 my annual Sky Sport Now subscription was $299. Last year I paid $399, but had a $100 rebate making it $299.
This year Sky wants $450. In effect a 50 per cent price increase.
That’s fine. I get my money’s worth from Sky Sports. Each week I watch three, four or more hours of Premier League football. If there is international cricket, football or Rugby I’ll watch that too. At times I also watch baseball and other sports.
So on a dollar per hour basis, $450 a year isn’t bad value.
It’s even better given that I no longer have to subscribe to Spark Sport as well.
Sky doesn’t seem to cover the Champions League and I can never be sure the cricket I want to watch will be shown, but these are not deal breakers.
So why haven’t I renewed yet?
That’s because I’ve set myself a hard limit on digital subscription spending and something needs to drop out before I use the debit card to pay for Sky. There are plenty of candidates. It won’t be long. And I can watch the Ireland - All Blacks game on free-to-air, so that’s not a problem.
What IS a problem is that digital subscription prices are rising faster than general inflation, while my income is not. In fact my income has almost stood still during this recent period of inflation. They may be able to charge more, I can’t.
Sky is up 50 per cent. Streaming TV prices are either up or soon will be. Software subscriptions continue to rise.
I get that companies want to use inflation as a way of squeezing higher profits. It’s not good, but that’s how it is.
Food costs more. Everything costs more. Many of those price rises are unavoidable. Digital subscriptions are, for the most part, optional. They are what economists call ‘discretionary spending’. I’m using my discretion and not spending any more.
I’ve already trimmed a number of digital subscriptions. Next week a couple more come up for renewal, but I won’t be buying them any more. I’ve reached my digital subscription limit.
Last Christmas Jo and I were given annual passes for Auckland Zoo that come with a photo ID and lanyard. I enjoy walking up to the entrance and telling the ticket collector that “I’m with the band”.
Was confused by all the Thanksgiving posts I can see on Micro.blog until I realised that Canada has a different Thanksgiving day to the US.
Now I’m curious. Are they giving thanks for the same thing?
For a decade I didn’t have a single bad debt for my freelance journalism and writing business. Apart from one or two minor administration issues, the average time it took to get paid was less than two weeks.
When Covid sent New Zealand into lockdown, the work slowed, but the invoices kept on being paid.
Then, about 18 months ago, I noticed customers starting to string out payments. The average payment time climbed. Soon after, I had my first bad debt in 15 years of freelancing. There have been a couple more since. The bad debts aren’t huge, but collectively they mean I’ve worked for a couple of months without getting paid.
It was worse in the early 1990s here in NZ and in the mid-1980s when I was in the UK. But either way, it looks like the bad times are back.
This isn’t just a whinge (although I accept it is a touch whingy) it’s about the wider economy. It’s about business confidence and investment opportunities.
Technically we’re not in a recession, but that’s not how it feels and I know I’m not alone. It’s what I hear when I talk to friends, my customers and my business suppliers.
Memo to self and anyone else who uses Apple kit:
Hang on to that USB to Lightning connector because any day now you will need to charge a device that still uses the old standard. Never mind that you haven’t found such a device yet, there WILL be one somewhere.
It could explain a lot if it turns out that Elon Musk has been testing his brain implant technology on himself.
Apple Watch has “complications”.
These are the last things I want in my life. Looking forward to when Apple Watch can offer me “simplifications”.
#Apple
My last story on NZBusiness magazine.
There will be an online edition, but the print version has finished and so has the budget for freelance journalist.
25 years ago I was in a bar with an older journalist discussing how the internet would affect us. He said the demand for journalists would die. but that the new industry would “see us out”.
I was less optimistic. Apart from anything else, I had longer to go. He was about ten or 12 years older than me and passed away a few years back.
He was right, the industry did see him out. Just about.
Me? I’m not so sure. Technically I’m close to retirement, but traditional journalism barely makes up a quarter of my income now. If another publication closes, that’ll more or less be it.
Your school may have taught you not to end a sentence with a preposition. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek. Sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.
Years ago I worked in communications for Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.
He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.
Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.
While the grammar police won’t agree, this is a rule you can ignore. It doesn’t apply to everyday writing, business writing, journalism and online communications.
There will be times it doesn’t make sense to twist sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.
Relax. You’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it. Most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.
It’s old, but I love this cartoon:
“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it is enemy action.”
Went to the Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery today.
It’s a huge exhibition, so much that I couldn’t take it all in on a single visit. Will need to go back at least once more before it closes.
Definitely recommend it. Worth travelling to Auckland for if you live elsewhere in New Zealand.
Google is one of a rare breed of companies that has moved into everyday language as a verb.
There are language purists who argue against turning nouns into verbs.
Don’t worry. It’s fine to “google something” online. People have “hoovered carpets” for years.
Note the lower case G and H.
Most of the time Google and Hoover are proper nouns requiring a capital.
There’s no such thing as a proper verb, so why should Google or Hoover take a capital when they are used as verbs?
Years ago when I was starting out as a journalist there was a regular supplement in the UK Press Gazette which argued exactly that: a company name used as a verb needs a capital.
I wasn’t convinced then. I’m not convinced now.
There would be a place in Ben Werdmuller’s otherwise excellent Publishers on social media are between a rock and a hard place to mention Micro.blog.
It doesn’t drive much traffic to my website, if any… but it gives me a lot of what Twitter no longer can. Also, it meshes nicely with Mastodon.
My site traffic is down by between 20 and 30 per cent now I’m not active on Twitter. I could make a faustian pact to get that traffic back, but at least I’m comfortable with myself.
This would be a fascinating story to read, until you get to “Macalister was not willing to reveal the names of the 16 companies.”. At which point I lost all interest.
In the latest Download Weekly newsletter:
Vodafone FibreX party leaves One NZ with $3.7 million hangover
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