Greenwald on Snowden, self and conventional media

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Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald, who brought NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the public eye, speaks at length on the last few momentous weeks. His speech follows a series of scoops revealing the massive extent of US government surveillance and storage of digital communications worldwide. The talk, which starts at 10 minutes in, features Greenwald’s reflections […]

Fraudcast News reloaded, nearly

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I am getting through the final stages of re-publishing Fraudcast News, a process that involves changing print-on-demand publishers (from Lulu to Lightning Source) to allow me a better distribution arrangement and greater flexibility in the cover design. That’s the idea anyway. The first tangible evidence of the change arrived yesterday in the form of a […]

Ethics in journalism? Nice idea

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I wrote the following email post for the Baron website in response to an article about the Hacked Off co-founder and ex-Reuters reporter Brian Cathcart. It speaks for itself: Brian’s doing a great job at Hacked Off [■ The Reuter Society – Brian Cathcart: My debt to Reuters]. I went to one of its events […]

Snowden’s act of sacrifice echoes self immolators

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Edward Snowden is a remarkable man. His decision to release a cache of top-secret intelligence documents was cooly considered for years. It will totally change his life and could even have him killed. He knows that, having worked for the CIA and for outside contractors to the US National Security Agency. In a note accompanying […]

And the winner isn’t…

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Development reporting suffers exactly the same sort of problems as does  journalism that purports to cover conventional politics and economics – probably worse even. Too much focus on official sources and too little questioning of mainstream Western ideas about what countries and their citizens must do to “develop”. All the arguments of Fraudcast News with […]

UK book price – fixed or variable?

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I’m busy setting up a print-on-demand publishing agreement for Fraudcast News with Lightning Source, part of my ongoing and rather haphazard marketing and promotion efforts for the book. I’ve been told Lightning Source will be a better bet than Lulu, my existing choice, for distribution and trade catalogue services, amongst other things. The idea is […]

Why the media don’t understand money

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This is a recent talk I gave to the annual conference for the non-governmental organisation Positive Money. A word to make clear my interests: Positive Money is an organisation whose work I greatly admire and for whom I have done some volunteer work in the last year or so and for whom I may do […]

Graphics journalism as real journalism

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I tried but failed to register a comment this morning on an article carried by the Global Editors Network about how the Guardian covered US elections. Something to do with captcha errors that I couldn’t be fussed to wrestle with. The piece was all about the whizzy things done by Gabriel Dance and his team, […]