Obscure Box

Many style guides for news organisations here in Australia are lax of the use of commas in numbers 1,000 t0 9,999. They prefer to drop the comma and opt for 1000 to 9999. Commas are fine higher numbers with digits grouped in threes so it’s 10,000 and 1,000,000 and so on. I think the commas [...]

Too often these days you call an organisation looking to speak to someone for a story only to be told you’ll be sent a media release. Sometimes the protesting works and you get to speak to a human being, sometimes it doesn’t and you are left with a statement that claims to be the words [...]

At last someone is talking up the future of the newspaper. It’s not always about changing what we write or the way we write it. Jacek Utko is truly inspirational and he’s found a way to increase newspaper sales. Have a look at what he told a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference earlier this year [...]

I will begin with a confession. My early years in journalism included working for one weekly newspaper where as a poorly-paid and overworked junior hack I would also have to file the odd piece for the advertising department. These advertorials usually began with a phone call to whoever was paying for the advertorial, where I [...]

A survey found its way to my inbox that makes interesting reading. “How the Press Uses and Values Public Relations and Other Media Resources” is the joint work of the George Washington University in the US and a company called Cision. The Swedish-based company company  (no idea how to pronounce its name) describes itself as [...]