Dave Lee: Cunning stunt targets BBC webcam

Some juvenile humour on the BBC Nottingham webcam, just to lighten the mood.

Full story at this link…

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Overheard something humorous in your newsroom?

They say the first few weeks after Christmas are the most depressing days of the entire year. So as you sit hunched over your keyboard nursing a steaming mug of mud-like coffee, you might welcome the odd spot of workplace banter.

If your office fails to bring such joy, then check out ‘Overheard In the Newsroom’ (thanks to Sports Designer for pointing this out).

It does exactly what it says on the tin, bringing interesting and humorous comments made by newsroom colleagues direct to your desktop. Stunners like number 70: “Sure wish we knew what the hell we’re talking about” are sure to resound with every demotivated reporter in a mid-Monday slump.

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US elections: CNN’s ‘magic map’ gets spoofed on Saturday Night Live

While reviewing the best online coverage of election day, CNN’s press office dropped us a line about the ‘magic board’ – a map of the states which will be used by presenter John King to show the results and forecasts as they come in.

For anyone who loves/loathes a good swing-o-meter, here’s Saturday Night Live’s take on it:

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‘Making light of a bad situation’ – CNN report gets pranked by kissing couple

A CNN report from outside collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers was on the receiving end of a prank from the Howard Stern show yesterday.

In an unlikely segue, the channel’s anchor said the two men kissing in the background of the live report were ‘obviously trying to make light of a bad situation, pretending to “console each other” out there’.

According to the New York Observer, the pair ‘making out’ were in fact Stern Show employees Richard Christy and Sal Governale.

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Bloomberg runs false obituary for Apple’s Steve Jobs

The death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs was prematurely announced yesterday afternoon by Bloomberg.

A pre-prepared stock obituary was accidentally posted to Bloomberg’s corporate client wire service, even through the story was marked ‘Hold for release – Do not use’.

It was quickly spotted by a user, and sent to Gawker.com, where the obituary can still be read in full.

Bloomberg was quick to retract the story, and yesterday published a message on its wire saying: “An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.New York time today.”

At Telegraph.co.uk Matthew Moore reports: “The stock obituary was published ‘momentarily’ after a routine update by a reporter, and was ‘immediately deleted’, Bloomberg said.”

According to Moore, ‘Jobs has been reluctant to publicly discuss his health, but recently denied claims that his cancer [from which he has previously suffered] had returned’.

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Sky News on Georgia – let’s start with a geography lesson…

Sky News’ online section ‘Georgia In Depth’ is an aggregation of pictures, articles and info about the eastern European country, which borders with Russia, as part of coverage of the current conflict in the region

So that’s the Georgia between sandwiched between Europe and Asia and not the US state then?

If you’re going to use Wikipedia, at least get the right entry. Thank goodness for the disclaimer… it’s no one’s fault!

(Also, why does the site publish Wikipedia excerpts at all if, as the disclaimer suggests, Sky News has little faith in their accuracy?)

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An aggregation of aggregators: Journalism.me and Crowdstatus.com

Two new aggregation sites have been set up: Kiyoshi Martinez’s Journalism.me and Darren Stuart’s CrowdStatus.com.

Martinez, who is also responsible for Angy Journalist, is using the site to aggregate feeds from a host of bloggers, news sources, journalism job sites and training centres.

CrowdStatus.com lets a user specify a group or ‘crowd’ of Twitter users and then aggregates their updates on one page. It only works with Twitter at the moment, but Stuart plans to add Facebook updates and Seesmic vids.

On a completely different note (boom,boom!) for anyone who hasn’t come across JournalRhythm, it needs no more explanation than – it’s news to a beat…

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Giles Coren moves his rant onto Twitter…

First it was fellow reviewer Feargus O’Sullivan, then it was The Times’ subbing team that felt the wrath of food critic Giles Coren (thanks to MediaMonkey for the links).

Now someone doing a good impression of the writer has popped up on Twitter to bring Coren’s unique brand of swearing to the microblogging masses.

(For those of you who don’t like bad language, look away now)

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A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker

Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.

To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).

As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on – at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:

Jokes aside – Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.

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The dangers of automated subbing…

I’m late coming to this posting on Regret the Error (which I found through Dave Lee’s blog), but it’s too good not to post.

Site OneNewsNow – part of the American Family News network – has a filter set up that automatically substitutes the word ‘gay’ in copy for ‘homosexual’.

When some Associated Press copy came in about US Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay it was all a bit much:

“Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday. . . Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued’.”

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