The Times reports today on the pros and cons of blogging for lawyers. The piece can be found by clicking here.
Likewise, Spada today publishes its latest White Paper. Entitled The Laity Bytes Back?, the White Paper notes the hesitant embrace of the Web 2.0 world by the UK professions but urges that they seize the opportunity to engage with blogs, wikis and social networking as soon as possible. Why? Because doing so will confer a competitive advantage, help promote the brand and, crucially, ensure that knowledge-based professionals become the elite, most influential group in the Web 2.0 space – one, to date, dominated by the laity.
You can find the Spada White Paper here, but don’t reflect for too long. There is some radical stuff in Spada’s analysis – not least the notion that Web 2.0 platforms can be viewed as analogous to the literary and arts-based salons of old, the difference being now that the cut and thrust of debate happens online – but, as the contract lawyers have it, this is an area where time is of the essence. Carpe diem – or be left behind.
‘The Birth of Hip Hop’ from Hey Okay is courtesy of the good folk at Limited Fun.
[...] Web 2.0 drum. That’s eight or nine months of drumming, though perhaps we made the most noise in August last year, in accompaniment to the melody occasioned by the publication of Spada’s White Paper, The [...]
Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.
Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?
Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.
But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?
We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.
What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.
Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?
We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.
So Farewell, then, Sir Fred Goodwin.
Now you are just Fred.
Not Right Said Fred, but plain Fred.
The Forfeiture Committee did for you.
No one had heard of it before,
But Dave said it had to act, and it did.
Trouble is that no one knows what to think.
Is it ‘Alas, poor Fred‘,
Or ‘Hurray! Sir Fred is dead!’?
We don’t know.
Do you?
By A. Mob, aged 1,378 and a half.
Is there a geek inside all of us?
Excellent Nike ad
Memo to would-be hacks: good writing is no longer a tool of your trade
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
This bank is so well designed that many of its staff never go home (allegedly)
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
After a raft of phone-hacking admissions and allegations, we are no longer seen as the gruff but dependable watchdog. Neville Thurlbeck, formerly of the News of the World (part of his Damascene conversion; to be continued).