Mark Pack

I've often quietly muttered (not shouted you understand, I am English after all - regardless of what the Daily Mail thinks) at the TV news, "But why haven't you put a scale on that map?" as another map appears that gives you no clear whether the disaster being reported on is taking place over an [...] »

Here's the simple challenge, with £50 to charity of your choice on offer to the first person. Find me a story in a mainstream media outlet about exam results in the UK this year. Oh, and it has to have at least one photo. Oh, and the photo(s) have to be of photogenic boys, not [...] »

A useful set of statistics about how the pay wall around The Times and The Sunday Times is working out has been pulled together by one of my research whiz colleagues at work, Katrine Birk. Although the published data from News International has been fairly limited so far, there is data that can be extracted [...] »

Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding [...] »

Most of the punditry about the internet and the general election has focused on the impact of the internet, and social media in particular, on politics. Although journalists often get a mention, the basic frame of reference is “how is politics changing?” However, there was a hint of a different perspective at the launch at [...] »

An eleven month review into the workings of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has made 75 recommendations but is not suggesting any fundamental alterations in the ways in which the PCC works. The relatively modest total set of recommendations is in contrast to the views of the Culture, Media and Sport committee in the House [...] »

From DarraghMc on Twitpic: "Woman in sumo wrester suit assaulted her ex-girlfriend in gay pub after she waved at man dressed as a Snickers bar" »

I took part this morning in a panel chaired by Rory Cellan-Jones titled "Networked Journalism & Political Reporting" at the Value of Journalism conference. Also on the panel were MORI's Robert Worcester, Rishi Saha of the Conservative Party, Labour MP Douglas Alexander and BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg. You can watch the session via UStream. My [...] »

Of course, if newspaper paywalls don't turn out to work outside the existing niches such as the Financial Times, their impact on general online commenting habits will be very limited. But let's assume for a moment that paywalls work well enough to spread across various newspaper and other sites. A core feature of paywalls is [...] »

Yesterday I took part in a panel on this topic at #Jeecamp2010. You can watch again the live tweeting of the event here. The main point I made was that the combination of opening up government data, extending freedom of information and publishing details of government contracts will provide a flood of raw material. It [...] »