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, […]

Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

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I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics. I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere. Just in […]

Stand aside George

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People’s budgets The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames. News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with […]