- Blog
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Carter gets it
How does 15 years working his way up the greasy pole in an ad agency followed by two years in the number two spot at a collapsing cable firm prepare Stephen Carter for the hot seat at Ofcom? Carter’s job now is to rope together 600 people from five utterly different agencies – including hundreds…
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How news is made
Matt Wells writes up last week’s Oxford Media Convention in The Guardian. He focuses on Tessa Jowell’s broad hint that Greg Dyke “can’t take the licence fee for granted” at charter renewal in 2006. For me, this is a fascinating insight into the political management of news. If you’d attended the conference (as I did)…
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Improving on Shannon
Kevin Werbach directs me to this article from the NY Times about a fascinating extension of Claude Shannon’s basic research to bust historic radio capacity limits.
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Hastings on war
Max Hastings, veteran war correspondent and editor – a thoughtful hawk – doesn’t want a war but doubts that we have a choice in The Sunday Telegraph. “I feel deeply uncomfortable about war against Iraq, but I now see no alternative to British participation. This is scarcely a dignified intellectual position. But the alternative, a…
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The Manolo Blahnik of computers
How does Apple sustain a business ? a business that even makes a profit occasionally ? on a market share of less than 3% (so low, in fact, that it just fell off the bottom of the list of the top five suppliers)? I’ve been thinking about this for ages. Consumer brands (and Apple is…
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I would like to buy a car
I really would. But the Ford UK web site doesn’t work on a Macintosh. At least it doesn’t work in Netscape, Mozilla, Safari or Explorer (all latest versions) on two different Macs, both running OS X. What I get is a sort of stub of Flash down near the bottom of the screen and that’s…
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STAND and entitlement cards
The cyber-gerrymanderers (I’m going to keep saying that until it catches on) at STAND have done an extraordinary thing. They’ve reversed the voting for entitlement cards in the UK Government’s consultation. What they haven’t done is shown that the general public is opposed to entitlement cards (the general public – at best – doesn’t care…
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The Oxford Media Convention
My day in Oxford at the handsomely endowed Said Business School was fascinating – I’ve written a comment piece about it for The Guardian. Although billed as a conference on ‘public service communications’ in general, the meat of the thing was television and its fate once the Communications Bill is law and Ofcom up and…