NUJ

Also appearing at: bad bus companies, funding threat and Life Membership for Maggie

This is your irregularly scheduled update of what I’ve been doing since I last blogged on this site.

I wrote about some friends’ horrible experience with Vintage Bus Hire Ltd of New Romney. You can read my blog post on The Restless Consumer; I hope it will warn others not to use this firm for wedding transport.

SEO surprise

Today I searched Google for “NUJ” as a lazy way of bringing up the website for the National Union of Journalists.

Also appearing at: health journalism masterclass

I recently attended the NUJ’s Reporting on our health services masterclass. It was about how to carry out quality reporting on health issues, at a time when the cuts and restructuring in our health service are mirrored by cuts and restructuring in our newsrooms.

It's time for geeks to organise

Last Wednesday I bagged myself a Pitch slot at Oxford Geek Night 27, which gave me a minute’s worth of attention from the 150 or so assembled geeks. That minute wasn’t enough to get my point across, even given how fast I talk; hence this blog post.

Operation Bullfinch: how to handle a tricky story

Regular reporting is tough enough to get right – but when you’re covering a crime story involving the sex trafficking of underage girls, it’s a legal and ethical minefield. And that’s before you think about how to handle your relationship with the police. But when the Oxford Mail newsdesk found out about Operation Bullfinch, the police investigation into an Oxford child prostitution ring, reporters rose to the challenge.

The model behind the curtain

Jeremy Hunt has now announced plans to give out licences for local television stations. Ofcom has identified 65 towns and cities where local terrestrial TV is technically possible and these places will be invited to bid for licences.

Why we should save the opt-outs

The BBC is currently considering axing three of its regional news services. The local “opt-outs” for Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Jersey (plus surrounding areas) may be closed as part of the BBC’s money-saving drive, misleadingly branded “Delivering Quality First”. This blog post was written to answer some of the more common questions about the proposals.

Counting the costs of cost-cutting

“What we do matters. That’s a point I never thought we’d have to make.” Anna Wagstaff opened the Quality in Publishing summit with a snapshot of the current situation in academic publishing: cost-cutting and outsourcing leading to a decline in quality.

Speaking up for quality in publishing (upcoming event)

Attempts to harmonize easily strand when considering population environmental banks to harmonize with disease-oriented/clinical banks.

Make sense? Thought not. But that sentence was taken from a medical journal with subscription costs of nearly €900 a year, a journal covering important developments in European medical research.

Trouble in the hub

Newsquest’s “regional operation” could mean big job losses. Sub-editing jobs at the Oxford Mail and Times are under threat from plans to centralise. Subs were recently told of plans to create a “regional editorial production operation”, combining the subbing departments for for Newsquest Oxfordshire and Newsquest Wiltshire. The new regional operation would be based in Oxford.