Google vs The Belgians

The all-seeing search engine giant Google is facing a £39m damages claim from Belgian newspapers for publishing and storing their content without paying or asking permission.
In 2007, Google lost a lawsuit filed by a number of French-language Belgian newspapers and was forced to remove their content which had been posted on Google News and stored in its search engine [...]

Snobbery, an Apprentice failure and BBC News rebranding

Well, it looks like it is working.
He may have got unceremoniously and deservedly booted off The Apprentice in week one, but Nicholas De-Lacy Brown is managing to grab his 15 seconds of fame while he can.
The double-barrelled fledgling barrister and tortured, frustrated artist turned up on BBC Breakfast this morning to talk about snobbery.

He was [...]

Life immitating art

The BBC’s psuedo-news output on BBC1 this morning had an item on the search for the best football chant.
The item, brought to us in the usual superficial style we expect from the Beeb’s various info-tainment programmes, was by sports news hound Mike Bushell.
There were various renditions of witty (sic) terrace chants.
But it got me thinking [...]

Say bye to Y Byd

Ambitious plans to launch a Welsh language daily newspapers have been abandoned after the company behind the publication failed to secure sufficient funding.
Y Byd (The World) was originally due to be launched on March 1, St David’s Day, but after the Welsh assembly government offered just £200,000 a year in funding the decision was taken [...]

“Churnalism” has a familiar ring

A new book claims that national newspapers mainly recycle newswire copy and PR puff for their home news sections.
Describing this trend as “churnalism”, the book’s author says research shows that around 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers is not original copy generated by in-house journalists.
Nick Davies, a journalist with [...]