mikewhills

Beautiful cover design by Alvin Lustig. If his brother was Robin...

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:20:43 +0300

Beautiful cover design by Alvin Lustig. If his brother was Robin they’d be cool enough to rival the Snows.

Dudus who? As happens every so often in the news we’re...

Tue, 25 May 2010 20:00:46 +0300

Dudus who? As happens every so often in the news we’re confronted by someone we’ve never heard of before and this week it’s Jamaican drug baron Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke. As it stands, nearly 30 people have died on the streets of Kingston as the Caribbean country’s police force battle Coke’s loyal supports in their bid to capture and extradite him to the US. If he ends up in the US he faces a life sentence if convicted of the various drug-related charges filed against him. The BBC have a thorough profile of Coke here.

(Illustration: Kerry Hyndman)

Great series of ads from Reporters without Borders.

Tue, 25 May 2010 17:46:00 +0300

Great series of ads from Reporters without Borders.

If you’ve not already seen it, PaidContent has a few...

Wed, 19 May 2010 14:24:40 +0300

If you’ve not already seen it, PaidContent has a few pictures of the new Times website that I’ve been working on since the start of the year. @tomwhitwell has also posted some here.

Election night at The Times and the newsroom is buzzing. Which...

Fri, 07 May 2010 05:59:42 +0300

Election night at The Times and the newsroom is buzzing. Which is odd for 4am. Here’s a nice pic of the back bench, with James Harding in the middle, taken by @tomwhitwell.

Despite thinking of myself as a music fan I’ve never...

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:11:55 +0200

Despite thinking of myself as a music fan I’ve never actually heard a Beatles album from start to finish. This animation finally makes me want to. And the kid was 14? I wish I’d been that engaged when I was that age.

Just realised I haven’t posted here in over a month - you...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:14:00 +0200

Just realised I haven’t posted here in over a month - you can tell I’m back in a full-time job. I’ve returned to London from Beirut and I’m back at The Times working on the development of its new website. Yes, that’s right, the one that’s going to be behind a paywall. Can’t show or say much about it at the moment but I’ll hopefully post some pics and stuff at some point over the next couple of months. In the mean time, enjoy this odd Russian cartoon that I found via @spoonelli. Can anyone translate?

"If newspapers stop covering the world, I fear we will end up with a microscopic elite reading..."

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:08:11 +0200

““If newspapers stop covering the world, I fear we will end up with a microscopic elite reading Foreign Affairs and a numbed nation watching terrorist bombings flash briefly among a barrage of commentary, crawls and celebrity gossip.””

- Pamela Constable (Washington Post correspondent)

I’m back in Beirut this week and it’s stormy. You...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:50:54 +0200

I’m back in Beirut this week and it’s stormy. You won’t see me in my swimming trunks.

Interesting video about the experience of reading magazines on...

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:54:00 +0200

Interesting video about the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices.

“One of the things we’ve observed about the way the magazine works and something that emerged in the research that was very interesting, is that they can be completed – one can read through it and finish it and feel like they have consumed an editorial package, unlike an endless, infinitely expanding RSS feed, for example.”

And, since the iPad has just been ushered into the world, have a look at this video about how you’ll be able to read a magazine like Sports Illustrated on Apple’s new gizmo.

(h/t @dannythefink and @tomwhitwell - two of the brains behind digital strategy at The Times)

Natural disasters interest me much less than those created by...

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:50:00 +0200

Natural disasters interest me much less than those created by man, so I haven’t paid much attention to the earthquake in Haiti this week. But, as Patrick Cockburn points out in The Independent, the suffering the Haitians are currently experiencing has some man-made roots as well. I’ll pay more attention to the story this week. (Morten Morland/The Times)

Just stumbled across a blog on the Times site written by a...

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:09:00 +0200

Just stumbled across a blog on the Times site written by a friend-of-a-friend who is currently illustrating his way across Africa. George Butler is driving from London to Libreville in Gabon and sketching as he goes, with the image above kicking-off his journey. He’s done some great stuff in recent years from Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Morocco as well.

I think I’m probably the softest target the carpet sellers...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:26:31 +0200

I think I’m probably the softest target the carpet sellers of Damascus have ever had. $100 for a ‘jazz mate’ seemed like such a bargain at the time. What a mug.

On a seperate note, great to see a website with a good advertising campaign. If you want to see a bad one, click here.

"New media to me means “whatever’s next.” If that means having a Twitter account, I’ll get one. But..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:01:53 +0200

“New media to me means “whatever’s next.” If that means having a Twitter account, I’ll get one. But if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow and all we have left are wood and stone, I’ll be the first guy handing out chisels.”

- Ruminating on new media’s meaning - Paul Balcerak

Fantastic video by RIPO Visuals - 10 Days: a study of news...

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:33:05 +0200

Fantastic video by RIPO Visuals - 10 Days: a study of news headlines taken from the BBC News Online between May 6-15th, 2009. Not sure what the music is but it sounds a lot like The Books. (h/t @timesjoanna)

Really enjoyable piece in the FT by John Lloyd this weekend on...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:00:16 +0200

Really enjoyable piece in the FT by John Lloyd this weekend on Georgia - Tbilisi, a year after the war with Russia. As both the former East Europe Editor and Moscow Bureau Chief for the paper, Lloyd knows the region well and can articulate its intricacies better than most. He relays a particularly good anecdote from Kakha Bendukidze, a Georgian biochemist:

Bendukidze had been to Britain to kick-start his study of English, and he told me about an epiphany, when he finally understood the depth of British civil society. At a busy train station, he had seen groups of badly dressed men hanging about the platforms with notebooks, sometimes writing excitedly. He thought at first they were secret service men: later, he learnt they were train spotters. A country, he said, in which people log train numbers as a hobby and are not assumed to be spying on fellow citizens is a stable democracy.

(Pic: The VIew Over Tbilisi, Georgia by Luc Bolen / Flickr CC)

Middle East International, a ‘hard-hitting fortnightly...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:27:23 +0200

Middle East International, a ‘hard-hitting fortnightly political news publication’, has relaunched after closing in 2005. With a history that stretches back nearly 40 years, the magazine’s return is a welcome sign that there is still room for good quality, in-depth analysis of the world’s most troubled region. Once lauded as ‘the best fortnightly magazine on the Middle East’ [are there others..?] by Edward Said, MEI retains many of its former correspondents, including the BBC’s fantastic Jim Muir. You can download the first issue for free here and if you want to subscribe - either to the hardcopy or to the website - the information is here.

“Why read MEI when so much information is available free on the Internet? The answer is that people with an interest in the Middle East should read MEI precisely because there is so much information out there – so much of it random and inaccurate.”

Haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0300

Haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been working for @SMEXbeirut on a proposal about all of the stuff above. It’s been a lot of fun.

'Blog networks still need to follow journalism 101'

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:31:00 +0300

The well-respected technology website ZDNet fell over its own feet last week when one of its bloggers - Richard Koman, a lawyer and writer - wrote a post accusing Yahoo! of handing over the details of 200,000 of its Iranian users to the government in Tehran. The claim was based on a translation of a post in Farsi from the particularly unreliable-looking Iranian Students Solidarity blog - and despite Koman’s promise that he would provide more ‘proof’ as the story unfolded, no more sources were revealed and instead ZDNet issued a pretty embarrassing retraction.

Yahoo! was quick to issue a full rebuttal through their human rights blog saying: “The allegations in the story are false. Neither Yahoo! nor any Yahoo! representative has met with or communicated with Iranian officials regarding the matters referenced in the article, and Yahoo! has not disclosed user data to the Iranian government.”

But as well refuting the main allegation, Yahoo! also picked out a couple of other inaccuracies in the piece - namely, that the search engine has an Iran-specific website and that it also has employees in the country. These are the sort of mistakes that would have been easily corrected had Koman contacted Yahoo! before publishing the accusation - but despite this being a basic instinct for journalists, he failed to give the internet giant a chance to comment on the story before publishing it.

In the retraction, Larry Dignan, an editor at ZDNet, admitted that the website failed to call Yahoo! ‘to verify the report or get an appropriate response’, adding: “Blog networks still need to follow journalism 101 and Yahoo should have been called”. But even more astonishing, when the site pulled the article down it said that ‘short of second and third sourcing, ZDNet must consider this report unreliable.’ Surely the site’s staff should be ‘second and third sourcing’ before something is published, not afterwards?

In a great analysis of the cock-up over at Tech Crunch, Paul Carr describes the story as ‘a steaming pile of horseshit’ - and he’s spot on. Koman has done nothing to help improve the credibility of blogs as sources of news.

Oh, and let’s not forget that ZDNet is owned by CBS Interactive, which is part of the company that runs the American television network CBS. Let’s hope such irresponsible journalism doesn’t catch on at CBS Towers.

UPDATE: The Committee to Protect Bloggers makes a remarkably weak argument that mistakes like this one could happen to anyone: “It happens in some of the world’s biggest news rooms, and websites are at risk of doing it just as the New York Times or Washington Post could be. Bad information makes its way into the light of publication.” That’s all well and good, but there’s no chance that either the NYT or the WaPo would have run a story with only one source, especially not a single source that was as sketchy as the Iranian Students Solidarity post. I think the CPB need to realise that sometimes bloggers, just like journalists, need to be castigated not protected.

Noticed this billboard just round the corner from my apartment...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:57:24 +0300

Noticed this billboard just round the corner from my apartment today. Another example of tastefully using Michael Jackson to market your product, in this case it’s the king of ‘Academic Books, Stationary & Copy Centers’, Maliks. And although the Cadillac looks like it’s part of the ad, I can assure you it’s been there since before the billboard. Oh, and it’s not the only profiteering from MJ going on in Beirut.