links for 2009-09-29

Mmmm, Flip-mod

"There’s no need to flesh it out fully or get every fact or angle nailed down. You’re not writing an article. You can always follow up more later". Whilst I agree with the main thrust of the article - after all most of the content on this blog is a by-product of stuff I'm already interested in doing anyway - I was a bit concerned by the idea of not having to get the facts nailed down. That seems to be a bit of a minimum requirement to me. [via Sarah Hartley]

"So no proof and a Downing Street denial, but an educated guess backed up by a verbal tip off from a 'very senior civil servant'. It’s probably enough to legitimise it as a story out in the blogosphere. But at the post-Gilligan BBC? I’m not so sure."

"Last week, amid chaotic scenes, hundreds of migrants demonstrated against 'inhuman conditions' in a detention camp on Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, in a protest that saw hunger-striking minors setting fire to mattresses and attacking guards. The clashes highlighted the rising anger on island outposts that are being overwhelmed by a double influx of holidaymakers and illegal migrants".

"Picture living in a country where your most serious immigration debate will soon be about how to rid your lands of an annual million matron march of squealing, drunken hen party coach tours". Maybe I'm being a bit po-faced about it, but given the real situation actually facing immigrants in greece, and the scandalous way the country deals with them, I just didn't find the punchline of this article funny

"Meanwhile, all of us need to get over this pious notion about the sanctity of the newspaper. I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading."

One of my Flickr photos from our travels leads off this article about the bizarre human bone chapel we visited in the Czech Republic - Sedlec Ossuary