Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates- What you see if you hit a forbidden site
The full list of prohibited content is here. Removal requests for the UAE firewall can be submitted here.
Daily Star bombs The Sun newspaper (but is an in-joke really a good campaign strategy?)
With bingo bringing in high revenue streams for online newspaper editions, it is little wonder that the Daily Star chose to hit The Sun where it hurts with its bingo advertising campaign - but bombing The Sun's Wapping HQ with Bingo balls?
I'm sure the Sun's staff in Wapping will see the hilarity. After all, James Murdoch has recently decided to postpone the move from the Wapping site to a new venue, at least until financial conditions improve.
Whether any Daily Star readers will understand the in-joke is quite another matter.
SEO and Journalism: “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it”
I wanted to highlight an excellent article by Charlie Brooker about the impact of SEO requirements and the pressures of web-traffic-oriented journalism on the quality of news.
The article sets out to demonstrate its premise with the first paragraph and then explains it:
"Miley Cyrus, Angelina, Israel vs Palestine, iPhone, 9/11 conspiracy, Facebook, MySpace, and Britney Spears nude. And not forgetting Second Life, Paris Hilton, YouTube, Lindsay Lohan, World of Warcraft, The Dark Knight, Radiohead and Barack Obama. Oh, and great big naked tits. In 3D.
Let me explain. Last week, I wrote a piece on 9/11 conspiracy theories which virtually broke the Guardian website as thousands of "truthers" (painfully earnest online types who sincerely believe 9/11 was an inside job) poured through the walls to unfurl their two pence worth. Some outlined alternative "theories". Some mistakenly equated dismissing the conspiracy theories with endorsing the Bush administration. Some simply wailed, occasionally in CAPITALS. Others, correctly, identified me as a paid-off establishment shill acting under instructions from the CIA."
And its conclusion:
"...your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That's an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it's just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed."
The full article can be found here.
Pregnant Man Thomas Beatie Gives Birth to New Lengths of Ratings Spin
Here's a story you would only dwell on briefly if it were on Jerry Springer: a woman who wanted to become a man had her breasts removed and took hormones to make her look more masculine, but still kept all the original plumbing. Then she gets pregnant - not all that surprising, as she's still biologically a woman.
And then someone has a slow news day, and "Pregnant Man" is born. Yes, it is a human interest story, but repeating the words "pregnant" and "man" in close proximity makes it into much, much, more: a miracle, a mystery, a freak show event.
And the interviews continue - ABC alone shows him four times in less than three months, Oprah puts her hands on his growing belly. A miracle! A pregnant man! A story we will now have to follow to its conclusion and the birth (for which I wish them well, by the way).
Better still, to increase the excitement of the media circus - Pregnant Man announces he wants more kids after this one. "A sequel!" someone cries out in the news room. There will be Pregnant Man 2, and 3 and whole franchise to boot. The Filipino community points out that Pregnant Man, Thomas, was born Tracy Lagundino, to a Filipino father and a Caucasian mother. Someone is writing a book, someone else is writing the script. A man-made kitchen-sink story if ever there was one.
And a couple of trivia notes for your background files:
1. The Druze, a small secretive Islamic sect, believe that the messiah will be born to a man. This new arrival can come at any moment, so all Druze men walk around with baggy sack trousers, to catch the messiah when he pops out, and so that he doesn’t hit himself by falling on the ground.
2. Last year Neonode, a Swedish mobile phone company, also used the Pregnant Man headline to create a buzz - around their new product the N2 Phone. This was apparently because their chief product designer was expecting to "deliver" the new phone – after a long pregnancy. They had set up The Pregnant Man Blog, which I am sure now gets a lot of weird and wonderful traffic.
UPDATE on 4 July: Well "Pregnant Man" has now given birth. The full story is here.
This is a story waiting for a sequel, if ever there was one...
New York, Exploding? (Wall Street Journal, 28 May 2008)
It might just be linguistic sensitivity, or the difference between American and UK English (?), but the following struck me as an odd way to word a real estate ad, and specifically in a post 9/11 New York:
[The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, May 28, 2008, page 29]
Exploding area? In New York?
Or is it just me?