Two shots of vodka and a packet of crisps

On a lighter note, today I’ve been covering the news that fancy-dan Midlands crisp makers Tyrrells have got the go ahead from the planning permission guys to set up a vodka distillery at their farm in Herefordshire. Cue lots of workplace discussion, and a terrible Warsaw/Walsall joke in a leader column.

In the Post tomorrow, on the web at some point in the future, as always.

Sorry for my absence

I know the updates have become a little thin on the ground recently, apologies everyone. I’ve recently been absolutely inundated at work, having to plan out Christmas stories for both news, the Enterprise pages and now I’m doing media and marketing stories while my colleague Joanna Geary is in Hong Kong. More to come soon hopefully, when it calms down a bit at the Post.

Economic migration – the other side of the story?

Well interestingly enough today, the Sunday Mercury here in Birmingham has followed up my article on economic migrants in the West Midlands, after having seen a previous blog entry here. They pay particular entry to what I was talking about here, Czechs and Romanians pretending to be Polish to improve their chances of getting a job in the UK.

The interesting thing about their coverage is quite how diferent it is to mine, given that it’s based on exactly the same material. Unfortunately there’s no internet version of the Mercury article up yet (will link as soon as I can), but although both pieces were based on the same study, mine showed migrant workers as an unqualified bonus (economically speaking at least) for the region, they focus on the idea of British workers losing out on jobs to migrants.

I’m not necessarily saying the Mercury is wrong (although I genuinely think mine provides a better balanced picture of the report as a whole). But it’s an interesting insight into quite how much of their own spin a journalist can put on a story, to see such different coverage come out of the same source. Makes you rethink how you approach a story from a single media source though. And makes me grateful that, tanks to the internet, there’ such a massive range of different journalistic sources out there, both professional and amateur, so you can at least see the same thing approached from different angles before deciding yourself where the “true” story really is.

Nudity, naked celebrities, sleaze and journalism

Well, this modest blog has been pretty much inundated with hits after I wrote about the Tiger Woods girlfriend fake nude photo scandal. Maybe people liked that I posted the frankly hilarious apology from the Dubliner magazine in full, didn’t see it done as a whole in the mainstream press anywhere. Or maybe they’re just here hoping to find the so-called naked photos.

The NUJ – journalists need to brand themselves

I never meant to do so much media commenting on this blog, but after the NUJ report on the digital future for journalism came out, there was one thing I wanted to talk about. As Paul Bradshaw highlights (literally) in his photoblog review of the report, the NUJ thinks it’s important that journalists brand themselves on the web.

This seems to tie in with a previous post of mine, where I talked about branding myself by putting up a proper “Tom Scotney hub” online. This was also an issue whcih came up with some feedback from work I got today. I think there’s an interesting debate to have about whether there’s any need for personal websites in this Web 2.0 world. I hope so (if nothing else because I still haven’t got bored of telling people to “go to tomscotney.com”).

I’m planning to read the report in full over the weekend to see if there’s anything else worth picking out myself. But for some proper heavyweight comment I can heartily recommend Paul Bradshaw and Neil McIntosh.

What happens when you print fake naked photos

No one’s perfect, we all make mistakes. But I’ve not seen many mistakes in journalism as big as this one, where the Dubliner magazine printed fake nude photos of Tiger Woods’s wife and linked her with porn websites. It’s absolutely gobsmacking quite how much they cocked this one up, getting it completely wrong on almost every count in the article, not-so-hilariously-now titled “Ryder Filth for Dublin”.

So the Dubliner is now out of pocket by an estimated 125,000 euros. Their apology statement, which I’ve included in full here, simply has to be read to be believed at the sheer level of grovelling they’re having to do. And it’s also a bloody good laugh too, if only to know (hopefully) that you’ll never mess up quite as badly as these guys did . Enjoy!

“In our September 2006 issue we published an article which referred to Elin Nordegren Woods, at a time when she was in Ireland, attending the Ryder Cup in which her husband was playing on behalf of the United States.The story was cheap, tasteless, and deliberately offensive. It was also completely untrue. The article was accompanied by a nude photograph of a woman falsely identified as being Elin Woods, and the article falsely stated that other such photographs were to be found on internet porn sites. The article was entitled “Ryder Cup Filth For Dublin?”.

The Birmingham Post, Web 2.0 and me

I know I ought to be putting some actual content on this blog instead of messing around with the format just a few posts in. But I thought I’d explain what I’ve been trying to do with the redesign of this site and how it would affect the way I work and present myself.

I’ve owned http://www.tomscotney.com for a few years now, and I’ve always used it before to have an old-fashioned Web 1.0 website stuck together out of HTML and Dreamweaver, half to show off and half to put my life online.

But then when I thought about redoing it, I had a change of heart, inspired by how useful I’ve found WordPress since I started (No I’m not getting paid for this shameless plug). I was inspired partly by Paul Bradshaw, whose web site declares “The personal website is dead. Our new media identities are no longer static or chained to one site, they are various and in flux”. Which is very interesting.

But I don’t see why that has to be the case. Of course I’ve got a facebook account, twitter, blog, flickr, so on and so forth. But I thought there’s no reason why they can’t be all brought together on one site. I’m not claiming any particular brand currency for my name, but I still think it would be nice, and possibly helpful in my future career, to have an identifiable online brand that I could call my own.

So I’ve decided to put together tomscotney.com, not as a trying-too-hard jumble of poorly thought out code, but a bundle of Web 2.0 applications created by people far more talented than myself. As a massively flexible and easily viewable medium, WordPress had to be the start, but I’m either in the process of or planning to incorporate pretty much every other web application I use for work-related purposes.

So hopefully this site is going to be nothing more than a bundle of Web 2.0 applications, like a super-Facebook page for my work persona if you will. I’ll have my blog, my CV, a detailed “about me” page alog with anything else I feel like adding on the WordPress pages. But how does this relate to the prospective Post website?

This website already has a live feed of blog entries that I upload, as well as a live feed of my Twitter updates. What I’d love to see, when the Post website goes up, is feeds of articles sorted by author. This would involve the capability to use tag searches as RSS feeds, so that users can create their own customised feeds. I’ve been told negotiations are ongoing as to whether this is feasible for the post website. But what I’d like ideally is a Tom Scotney feed, which could then be incorporated into this personal website, to show say the last 10 articles I wrote for the Post.

Of course the thing that worries me about this is where it leaves me: with a sort of semi-autonomous role as part of the official role of the Post’s online presence. But I think this would just be beneficial for both of us. Obviously I’ll have to behave (no drunken photos – not that there are any of me of course – on this “work facebook”), but it would obviously be good for my website to be affiliated with one as (hopefully!) prestigious as the Post, in terms of links and visitors, perhaps just Post readers interested in the work of the journalist behind the stories. And it could be a chance for people reading to find out how exactly I go about gathering the news they read, If I put in regular updates about my work.

I’d love to hear what anyone thinks about this, whether there’s anything useful in the redesign, or if it’s just an exercise in ego massage. Let me know!

Sabaah al-khayr (good morning)

Well another day, another day of news. Yesterday I was covering the latest Birmingham City financial results and talking to parents outside William Cowper primary school in Aston, where all the English SAT results were annulled over claims the school were fiddling the results. (unfortunately no link to the extensive Birmingham Post coverage yet, see todays paper).

On a lighter note, it’s a Thursday, and I’ve got the evening free, which means I can finally get back to my Arabic classes at the Brasshouse which I’ve had to miss for the last couple of weeks. I’m going to have to do a lot of swotting up today to catch up, and I can tell you, Arabic is not a kind language if you’ve got a sore throat like I have at the moment.

But I’m really pleased, because it’s something I really like doing. Haven’t got the language skills to express quite why it’s so wonderful, but learning a new language (especially one as radically different to English as Arabic) really is an insight into the different ways people think, I think.

Languages, like music lessons and homework, are one of the things people wish they’d done more of when they were kids, as it’s only later that the benefits become obvious. Oh well, youth really is wasted on the young.

Ma’asalaam (byeeee)

Things are changing

You might have noticed this blog is now at http://tomscotney.com. It’s all part of a reasonably big overhaul of the way I’m presenting myself online, hopefully to something more professional, much more Web 2.0 and something that will integrate well with the upcoming Birmingham Post website. More soon, hopefully

Happy birthday to the Birmingham Post

Hap hap huzzah and so on, we are 150 today. Birmingham has changed a bit in the last 150 years, and so has the Post I imagine.

After a wonderful evening out seeing past and present colleagues, it makes you wonder: where will the Post be in 2157? Although the last 50 years of progress has been a disappointment (we’re still waiting for our hovercars, bacofoil suits and purple-haired alien women asking us to show them this earth thing called “love”), let’s hope that however you choose to multi-download your organic info-sphere into your cranial download zone (or whatever) in the future, you still love the Birmingham Post.

Live long and prosper. (And read the Birmingham Post while you’re at it.)