I rarely use this to just blog. I’m going to just blog now, so you can all just ignore this if it’s not to your liking.
Warning. Contents under pressure.
Now, if a book slots easily into its genre, it’s because it’s been designed that way by a writer who knows exactly what he or she is doing. That, I suggest, is an important difference between literary and genre fiction. Not that writers of literary fiction don’t know what they’re doing, but there is a difference in the level of planning. A genre novel is governed by limitations, and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel within those limitations. A literary novel is governed by nothing – nothing I can think of, not even the requirement to be comprehensible – and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel. This involves, at some point, a surrender to the unknown.
In Glasgow, just 75% of the boys born there and 85% of the girls would reach their 65th birthday. Boys born in east Dorset, the best performing area for males, could expect to live until 83, and girls who were born in the Purbeck area of Dorset could expect to reach 86.6 years.
The ONS said: “Life expectancy at birth has been used as a measure of the health status of the population since the 1840s. Glasgow city was consistently ranked as the area with the lowest male and female life expectancy between 2006-08 and 2010-12.”
Overall, life expectancy at birth in the UK increased between 2006-8 and 2010-12 from 77.5 to 78.9 years for males, and 81.7 to 82.7 years for females. It was higher in England than elsewhere in the UK .
No local areas in Scotland and Wales, and only one in Northern Ireland, featured in the top fifth of those regions with the highest life expectancy at birth.
I’m feeling such hometown nostalgia right now, you guys.
(Official, pedantic, note: Okay, I don’t come from Glasgow exactly; I actually come from Greenock, which, you know.)
I’ve very proud of The Newsroom. I have the time of my life working with the people that I work with, but there is a learning curve and unfortunately, those lessons are learned in front of several million people. Again, that’s what you sign up for. I wish that I could go back to the beginning of The Newsroom and start again and replicate what you have with a play, which is a preview period… But I’m feeling really good about how the third season is going. I’ll look back on it fondly and proudly and wish I could get every scene of every episode back so that I could do it all over again.
Aaron Sorkin apologizes for The Newsroom, a show that has a lot of problems – oh, so many – but which I really enjoy anyway. Admittedly, I’ve only seen season one so far, so the second season could take an astonishing nosedive, but still.
One of the biggest reasons why I am good at what I do is my lack of experience. I don’t know the rules, therefore I think there is no box, and push things beyond their limits. I do crazy things on various social networks all the time, to find loopholes and tricks. Some people call it “gaming the system,” I call it experimenting.
You may be shocked to discover that the person who wrote this works in marketing. “Think outside of the box? I don’t even know there is a box!”
“What works” on the web is not a mystery to publishers any more. The secrets of scaling are no longer confined to a sophomore’s sock drawer in a Harvard dorm. This new age of digital enlightenment means that when organisations are born they come with built-in expectation inflation. No recent journalism launches have attracted the same interest as last week’s Vox.com debut and the FiveThirtyEight’s that preceded it.
The Guardian’s Emily Bell on the future of web journalism and web-based writing in general.
In the same piece, she later makes a reference to Ev William’s Medium which is, she says, “devising ways for writers to publish without having to edit, or be paid.” Those last three words actually crystalized one of the reasons why I’ve been so ambivalent about Medium. I’ve wanted to be more onboard, but there’s something about the site that’s very “writers write for love, not money” that is the very opposite of appealing to me.
Ok I have a few left but I need to go do yoga, so I’ll clear those later. This was just enough to make graemem say oh-so-Scottishly ‘are you serious?’ and I enjoy the thought of that XD
Graeme, when I clear out the Aidan Turner queue you should just take the day off.
Please note, Tumblrs: What I actually said was “Oh, for the love of God.” And then I saw Amy’s coda post above.
The Toronto Star announced it will hire eight digital journalists who will be paid less than other journalists in the newsroom and it is considering another round of editorial buyouts. The newspaper also laid off 11 full-time page editors and eight staff in the circulation department.
The union said it is most concerned about the digital hires, which it said would result in a two-tiered pay system, with digital-only reporters paid approximately $200 less per week than an entry-level Star reporter.
“Some of these jobs, we don’t have a problem with… like the video assistant who will be responsible for cutting video,” said Dan Smith, vice-chair of the Star union. “But whether you’re writing for web or whether you’re writing for print, that’s the same journalism… and they should be paid the same.”
And then I find this story. Sometimes, the world just seems to want to remind you that it’s harder than it should be.