“At the centre of most of the discussion, however, is the fact that would-be journalists are now often required to do long stints of unpaid work experience. This is fine if your family lives within striking distance of your chosen publication, or you are sufficiently well-off to support yourself while your pay packet hovers around zero, or you know someone who can get you into a newsroom – or indeed all three – but a bit trickier if they don’t. And by a bit trickier, I mean pretty much impossible, given the level of student debt many candidates are likely to be carrying and the competition for work experience placements.”- ‘Making work experience count for aspiring journalists’

The article seems to suggest that doing unpaid work experience is more a barrier to entry, rather than a path to take for opening up new opportunities. The expectation of trainee journalists to work for free for extended periods of time results in a breeding of journalists who are from above average income families, as they can support the student whilst they work for nothing.

This angers me. Next month I will work 10-6, Monday to Friday, commuting to London for nothing. On Saturday’s I will work my day shift at a supermarket in order to pay for my rent and travel costs. And on Sunday I’ll hope to catch up on all the other voluntary, unpaid projects I participate in. Then maybe, maybe I’ll crack open a beer.

But I’m not complaining. Sure, I’m not looking forward to a gruelling schedule but I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity, and I’m hoping it will do me good.

Have I got the wrong perception though? One of the commenter’s certainly didn’t hold back their opinion:

“Working for free is slave labour and a fucking disgrace. It enrages me that the media is only too ready to get on its high horse about sweatshops in foreign countries but is quite content to abuse young men and women in its newsrooms and studios without even paying them the minimum wage. And very often promising them possible jobs that will never materialise.” - Wonderblog’s comment

I want to agree with Wonderblog, but I feel that if someone really wanted to get a foot in the door in the journalism industry, then they need to work hard for it. For me, this means funding these kind of opportunities, and making sure I stand out from the crowd throughout my internship. Does this make me a mug? Am I wrong for thinking that the places I intern at owe me nothing?

I’m not so sure, but I’ll have a clearer idea after I’ve finished my four week tenure at the magazine. Surely, whether at a financial cost or not, work experience is worth it all if you can prove to your peers that you have what it takes to work alongside them?

Google Chrome OS is, as the name suggests to those tech-savvy enough to get it, an extension on the Chrome browser that Google released last year. The new venture, being seen by many as a direct affront to Microsoft, was announced on the official Google blog:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.” – Sundar Pichai

The post certainly seems to have Windows’ reputation in its crosshairs, as Pichai explains why Google feel the OS market needs another competitor:

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.” – Sundar Pichai

So, Google are planning on making the Chrome browser the actual operating system it would seem, with their ventures in ‘cloud’ computing becoming the software that users use to do their work. That’s all very well and good, but what happens if you want to use a program that you can’t use on the web? What if you want to frag some 13 year old Germans in Counterstrike? What if you want to listen to some music that isn’t on Myspace? Will Chrome OS come with a structure that allows you to actually install ‘offline’ software?

It would be extremely foolish to jump shark into the world of online cloud computing without any consideration for these matters. After all, it’s this boundaryless expandability that’s probably the reason why Windows remains the most installed OS in the world, despite its rather annoying flaws and vulnerability to virii.

It’s too early to tell yet, but I certainly feel that Chrome OS isn’t really worth getting too excited over just yet. The browser itself wasn’t too great, and Google have been in danger of stretching themselves a bit thin in the past few years.

What did we get? Well…there was that old woman who did opera…forgotten her name now. And that utter reprobate of a chav. Erm, and a few more…I think.

Despite passing away of a cardiac arrest nearly two weeks ago in his Los Angeles mansion, Jackson has refused to come back to life, which has resulted in 24 hours a day blanket coverage of his life and music on television, radio shows, newspapers, glossy magazines, the internet, Parliament, Facebook, and every other orifice of life that Jackson blessed with his special touch.

Proving that a legal team can buy your way out of anything, it would seem that Jackson’s sudden death has made people completely forget that for the best part of twenty years his career was in tatters, whilst his reputation lay covered in blood on a disused rail track in Norfolk.

Meanwhile, fans have been left distraught as their prayers for the musician’s resurrection seemed to fall upon deaf ears. “This is clear proof that there is no God,’ said one of Jackson’s loyal followers. “We’ve been praying non-stop for nearly two weeks now, and there hasn’t been anything. Maybe Michael really was just a normal human being.”

These boys and girls are the real deal, taking some serious time and effort to make their own costumes almost perfect replicas. And the organisers even developed a storyline for everyone to play, adapting it to suit players reactions. It sounds like the most awesome, and yet incredibly depressing, thing I’ve ever heard about. Here’s some photos, where you’ll either take one look and shout “GAY”, or just let your jaw drop with a thud.

More here, plus some Russian narration – http://bit.ly/B7N38

In Soviet Russia, videogame become you.

Now, as a student of journalism, very little annoys me more than 24 hour news. It’s conception brought about the death knell for strong, authoritive journalism, instead ushering in an age of throwing shit at a window and seeing what sticks. Except, the shit has been laced with scaremongering headlines plucked straight from the red tops, and the window is decorated with pictures of people dying, or crying, or getting shot or whatever visceral imagery is powerful enough to keep you, the viewer, from getting bored.

Take this recent bird flu pandemic. I’ve done my best to take everything every news outlet says about the H1N1 story with a lethal dose of sodium chloride. Why? Well, firstly because similar stories in the past (MMR, bird flu, bluetongue, humans catching mad cow disease) have only dissipated once news organisations realise that the next disease that’s going to kill us isn’t that bad, and secondly because I recently finished reading Ben Goldacre‘s book Bad Science, and that taught me more about the world of scientific reporting than my £3,000 a year journalism course. But unfortunately, the rest of Britain doesn’t seem so intent on keeping a cool head about the situation, and the worst offenders are the news.

Annoyingly I’m not a doctor or a scientist, so I do not have the capability to find out, once and for all, if bird flu will eventually kill us all. The news however seems to have already decided that the end of the world may as well be tomorrow for all they care, (although I very much doubt they’ve asked a proper scientist) and just you try and stop them from making the whole nation quiver in it’s boots about the avian war on humans.

When did we let things get this bad? Well, I’d be happy to place a bet things started going like this the moment the people in charge of the news decided that the news had to be entertaining. Television lives and dies on its ratings (an utterly detestable method of running things, but let’s save that for another time) and somehow TV news has got caught up in all that kerfuffle, with suited executives demanding the most horrific breaking stories, the most shocking pictures, and the power to foresee the eventual collapse of Western civilisation just so that they can say to their bosses ‘Look Jim, I got there first. Am I worthy to lick your testicles now, dammit?’.

This prevalent attitude has therefore pushed out proper TV journalism. In Brooker’s dissemination of the rolling news he succinctly points out how often it all goes wrong, and it just begs the question – why does the news need to compete, not only with itself, but with the rest of the television schedule? Making the news entertaining is a dangerous game, completely at odds with what true journalism should be about. I don’t want the man in the TV to stand in front of a green screen heralding the end of the world, like some hi-tech drug-addled London street preacher. I want the journalists in television to tell me the facts, to research and analyse every single claim and utterance, and then simply tell it like it is.

Sure, it might take a bit more time and mean that the producers are no longer allowed to press the big red ‘BREAKING NEWS’ button, but people might just begin to trust the news more if they actually know what they’re talking about. Then again, maybe most of the population these days needs to see other people suffering to fulfill their lives – supply and demand, I suppose.

In an idea that should never have got past the drawing board, and should have probably resulted in the firing of someone, Ninty have joined forces with terrestrial television channel 5, stumping up the £2million to fund yet another quiz show that nobody is going to watch.

The program, named ‘Britain’s Best Brain’ is essentially an hour long advert for the DS and its Brain Training games, and it’s hard to see what the real benefit is here for anyone. Channel 5 has always been one of the poorest television stations in the UK, and it’s very difficult to see that reputation changing anytime soon. But Nintendo’s senior product manager James Honeywell seems very to be bubbling with excitement about the whole thing:

“We’re really excited to be working with Tiger Aspect, GroupM and Five on this ambitious new show and stepping into the realm of AFP (Advertiser Funded Programming) for the first time.”

This is a station known best for being the home of Neighbours, where most thirteen year old boys experience their first glimpse of a pornographic film and an ability to churn out celebrity documentaries in seconds. It’s just as will the idea is destined to fail, as the concept of advertisers making the program sounds like a terrible possibility. The majority of them haven’t even got the imagination to fill a thirty-second slot, let alone an hour.

In a surprising twist company spokesman Hans Pandeya told the BBC that they plan to pay the file sharers themselves, as well as the content providers, copyright holders and the various other costs that internet distribution incurs:

“Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.” – BBC

If you’re wondering just how this is going to work, then you’ve got every right to. Recently the Guardian spoke to Daniel Ek from Spotify, and asked the question whether the part subscription/advertising revenue streams have been enough to keep the company’s finances above water, and Ek’s response suggested that Spotify is struggling:

“I’ve never understood how Spotify, that Alexandrian library of free music streaming on the net, can make money. It turns out, it can’t. Yet. ‘It’s taken a bit longer to get up to speed,’ Ek says, ‘but I consider that we’ve only just started [in February], and you can’t build up the numbers in that time. Month by month, our figures are doubling.’” – The Guardian

Spotify only has to worry about reimbursing the music labels and artists that it features in its catalogue. Spotify users certainly don’t get paid to listen to the music on the service, which is really what the new owners of The Pirate Bay seem to be proposing. There is talk about using P2P technology to aid ISP’s with bandwidth heavy downloads, but once again this just seems like another burden on a company that are going to really struggle to find any money out of the Pirate Bay.

It will be interesting to see where the company takes this proposed idea, and if there is a future in it.

As part of the Digital Britain report the government announced a few weeks ago it had decided to embrace the PEGI (Pan European Game Information) rating system, joining most of Europe in one standard for age ratings. The system determines an age rating for any game submitted to PEGI, which is then supported with extra description images to help consumers determine how suitable the game may be for themselves, or most importantly, their children.

The PEGI ratings and descriptors; self explanatory?

This is in no way a bad thing. It’s a positive step from both the videogame industry and the government to embrace videogames as a serious market, instead of treating them as toys for the kids. Games have long been the scapegoat of the British press, often laughably so from a gamers perspective, but the true issue prevalent in our society is parents and guardians purchasing games not suitable for their children. Whether it’s on purpose or because they just aren’t educated enough to realise that a huge 18+ sticker on the front of a videogame box means that it’s for eighteen year olds and over only, it’s an issue that has plagued games for years and played into the hands of those hailing the likes of Grand Theft Auto as murder simulators.

But is it really going to make a difference? We’ve had the film equivalent of PEGI since 1912 (British Board of Film Classification) and everyone, from parents to retailers, have always understood that system. So will another variation of classification be enough to instil in parents how important videogame ratings are? On its website PEGI’s statistics page have an interesting graph that suggests there is still a lot more to do in order to help the consumer. Quoting results from a 2008 survey by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe, which asked 6000 gamers across fifteen European countries, only 50% recognised the PEGI content descriptors. Even more concerning is that only 49% of parents actually found the system useful, which begs the question – why? It’s a concerning statistic given that the people asked were considered ‘gamers’ by the ISFE, a market that should really have the common sense and knowledge to know what these ratings mean. If they don’t, then how is a stressed out, busy parent meant to understand?

From a personal perspective it annoys me quite a lot that such a system seems so difficult for parents to understand. The images and age ratings speak for themselves, and I can’t help but feel that a lot of parents are deliberately ignoring the help that they’ve been given in keeping harmful material out of the reach of their children. But it’s not a problem that is going to go away easily, so now that PEGI has been accepted it is up to the videogames industry, and to a lesser extent the government, to tell parents (and younger consumers) just how important these ratings are, and treat them with the respect they deserve. If people don’t know the difference then those ratings will continue to be ignored, and videogamers will constantly have to defend themselves to the likes of the Daily Mail every time some psycho goes trigger happy at school.

“To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release.”

What was most difficult however was stopping the news from being published on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. In a joint collaboration that involved the NY Times, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia editor Michael Moss, the article on David Rohde was guarded in order to prevent the information of his kidnapping leaking out, despite the resilient efforts of anonymous Wiki-contributors trying to reveal the truth.

Rohde was kidnapped on November 10th, along with his translator Tahir Ludin and their unnamed driver. Interestingly, whilst the former two escaped by climbing over a wall, the driver is reported to have stayed and joined the Taliban group that had held them captive for seven months.

It might seem like fuel to feed the conspiacy theorists’ fire, but in this instance it looks like holding back information from the internet had an agreeable purpose. It’s interesting to see the power that services such as Wikipedia can weild in circumstances like these. As the internet has grown, so has our ability to know everything all the time, but sometimes things are better left in the dark. Or are they?

The NY Times report can be found here.