Marc Hindley

X Factor – Awesome? epic? No, it was Ruthless!

Ruth was conspicuous by her absence, Jamie was conspicuous by his afro!There’s an urban myth that haunts critics around the globe. It exists to ensure they stay the distance at even the most dullest of shows. The myth tells the tale of a newspaper reviewer who filed his review of the full show and it goes to print on the same night. But by the interval, the reviewer had seen enough of this...

Marc Hindley

Email – too good to replace?

And so it was not to be. The Highland Council’s bid to end its system of emailing press releases to its list of media contacts presented such an uproar that it was forced to rethink its decision to replace the service with a Twitter feed. And, despite my passion and support of social media, particularly Twitter, I think it was a bit of a badly thought out decision in the first place. The council,...

Marc Hindley

Council’s bold move on social media

On 29 June, Highland Council announced it was going to stop sending press releases by email from 12 July and start using Twitter as its core method of distributing its news. This came as a bit of a surprise, since most of the weekly newspapers that operate in the area it serves make no apparent use of Twitter, either for newsgathering or news distribution. Although news releases will still be available...

Marc Hindley

Are weekly newspapers becoming once-a-week dailies?

Weekly newspapers are in danger of becoming once-a-week dailies if they continue to hang on to old news for up to six days before publishing it. News at all levels is filtering down to the masses through the internet and social media, leaving a situation where many weeklies are only serving up fresh news from the day before publication, and struggling to fill the back pages with readable...

Marc Hindley

The new Caledonian

Today heralds the arrival of a new news product in Scotland. The Caledonian Mercury is being called a daily newspaper, but there’s no queue at the checkout to buy it and it doesn’t have traditional deadlines. Two things separate it from ordinary dailies. One, it’s free, and two, it’s only available on the internet. It’s the brainchild of Stewart Kirkpatrick, who formerly...