Female journalists between 18 and 25, and living in the UK and Ireland, might like to think about entering the Catherine Packenham Award.
The award is for a non-fiction article of between 750 and 2000 words, which must be submitted by May 30, 2003. The first prize is £1,000 and publication in a Daily Telegraph group publication. Previous winners include Tina Brown and Polly Toynbee. This year's judges include Joanna Trollope.
Details and entry forms from Emma Gilbert-Harris at the Sunday Telegraph, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DT.
State of CollapseA useful little article on Gary Price's excellent ResourceShelf concerning a phenomenon known as result 'collapsing' or 'clustering'.
In essence what this means is that when a search engine brings in multiple results from the same site, you are only likely to be shown a fraction of them.
Google, for instance, shows only two results from any given site, even if there are hundreds in its database. If you want the rest, you must click the link that says 'repeat the search with the omitted results included'.
Google does not allow you to turn off this bit of assistance, but you can remove it in AllTheWeb and AltaVista through the Advanced Settings and Advanced Search facility respectively.
Great excitement in Silicon Valley, where one computer journalist hoaxed several others by posing as an Islamic fundamentalist and claiming to be responsible for the recent 'Slammer' worm.
This virus-like bit of nonsense (the worm, not the hoax) did a lot of damage around the world. You can read all about the hoax in Mercury News. The error the hoaxed reporter made was in interviewing by email where, as we know, anyone can claim to be anyone.
This might be a good time to take a look at How To Read an Email Header, Genie Tyburski's short and sweet account of how to tell where an email has really come from. She has a number of other useful links there too.
One useful thing you can discover in email headers is the source of spam. Or rather, you sometimes can. When you do, you need somewhere to complain to. Try the Network Abuse Clearinghouse. It won't stop it, but at least you'll have tried.
Now this is a very good idea. For years I have wondered why no-one ever put together a comprehensive online list of forthcoming events of interest to journalists. Well, newsnext.com isn't quite there yet, but in principle it does the job.
On its front page there's clickable calendar, a list of types of events and a search box. When you go to the page for a date, events on that day should appear. I say should, because as of today there are precisely five events listed, all of them dodgy 'theme' days of the National Corn-Plaster Day variety.
The idea is that the PR industry will cough up the information. Personally I'm not sure that will happen. The only thing PR people like more than attracting people to their events is making sure only the right people turn up.
They do that by targetting individuals. The newsnext.com site very sensibly throws no obstacles in the way of casual browsers, but without the whole tedious registration process the site may find it hard to get genuinely useful information from the PR world.
The other point about news diaries is that they are a big earner for a couple of companies. Even the dear old Press Gazette has closed its diary to non-subscribers. If newsnext.com really wants to provide a service, it will have to actively create content, listing forthcoming court cases and other things it can't get from PR people.
But it is a good idea and I do wish it a great deal of luck. The site owners also operate a couple of site for and about PR people: prposts.com and prfinder.com
Posted by morrish at 09:53 PM
Posted by: Paul Tyrrell on February 17, 2003 01:37 PM
You're quite right, Paul. I should have mentioned the FENS list. It does a good job. Unfortunately it has always been out of my price range as a lone freelance -- but for a magazine with a newsroom full of reporters it would soon pay its way.
Posted by: John Morrish on February 17, 2003 09:48 PM
There already is a "comprehensive online list of forthcoming events of interest to journalists". It has been around for years, but you'll have to pay for it - subscriptions start at about £500 a year. It's called the Future Events News Service, and you can find it at http://www.fensap.com/ I'm a freelance, and for people like me it offers a slightly cheaper monthly update, which I can tailor to things like industry sector / the entertainments business / general politics, etc.