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Browsing All Posts filed under »Media«
[Comment is free] It isn’t girls who need to watch their words
Originally published by the Guardian. I probably shouldn’t say too much. I’m female, you see, and scientists have said that “girls [are] at risk of talking too much”. It was a headline in the Telegraph. Scary stuff. If we ladies don’t stop our nattering, all human culture could be swept away by the chirruping tide […]
Private lives
October 9, 2011 by Sarah Ditum
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I feel ancient. I remember when a Tory vice girl story was a thing of joy and wonder, a hose full of snigger juice soused across the news. “Aha!” you could chortle back in the days of section 28 and Back To Basics, “They love to govern our bedrooms, but they’re not so straight themselves!” […]
The political myth kitty
October 7, 2011 by Sarah Ditum
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Criticising the media gets boring. Even Chris Morris – who did it better than anyone with The Day Today and Brass Eye – found that he couldn’t bear to do it anymore when he came to work out his response to the war on terror: “I did formalise some ideas,” he told the Guardian, “but […]
What’s the blogging story?
October 25, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
What’s the Blogging Story?, Recorded on 22/10/2…, posted with vodpod There are some questions I didn’t realise were still worth asking. Is blogging journalism? Will blogging kill journalism? Can bloggers save journalism? So I was a tiny bit surprised to find myself talking about all these at a Bristol Festival Of Ideas event last Friday. […]
Gawking and geeking
October 18, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
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An interesting aside from The New Yorker’s profile of Gawker founder Nick Denton: The “geek” sites, as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, io9, and Jalopnik are known internally, bring in twice the traffic of the “gossip” sites, suggesting that British-inflected class angst may not be a long-term-growth model. The New Yorker, 18 October 2010, Search And Destroy: […]
Fast paper
October 3, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
All debates about the influence of social media come down to this. It is just fast paper. Was anyone expecting anything else? I mention this because The Observer today contains a summary of the Gladwell v Shirky spat over the power of Twitter, and while it’s presented as an argument, both of them are basically […]
What to say about Ed
September 27, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
It’s the decision that will determine Labour’s fate over the next five years. It’s the difference between a demoralising era of electoral devastation for the party, and the chance to mount an effective challenge on the next polling day. It’s the choice that could make Labour a force that’s ready for power, or inaugurate a […]
Who gained from Hague’s embarrassment?
September 22, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
Guido Fawkes likes to style himself as a bottle-throwing avenger of the internet. No party, no loyalties, nothing but unconstrained contempt for the people in charge and a free-ranging vocabulary of abuse. It’s part of his MO to deny any editorial responsibility for what appears on his site: the comments go unmoderated, even the cartoons […]
Contraception: worth talking about, but very quietly please
April 7, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
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Obviously, sex sells. Ad breaks are full of it, explicit and implied – writhing perfume models, the jeans left grass stained by a hot date that only the right detergent can save, flirtatious chocolate-shilling sensualists – and basically that’s fine with me. If advertisers’ didn’t have sex, Christ knows what kind of terrifying methods they’d […]
Maternity grief
March 28, 2010 by Sarah Ditum
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Lucy Cavendish visited an online forum for mothers, and was amazed to find them discussing motherhood – sometimes quite heatedly! While I dislike the tone of her article, the premise is pretty robust. Motherhood is a sensitive issue, many mothers become entrenched in their parenting choices and defend them bitterly, going to work when you […]
October 11, 2011 by Sarah Ditum
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