currybetdotnet Children and Teenagers archive
"My first term" - a seventies pull-out in a noughties local paper?
I'm the kind of person who still buys a local paper, and this week in the Waltham Forest Guardian I noticed a feature I found distinctly odd. "My First Term" is an 8 page pull-out compiling school classroom pictures from a variety of nearby local authorities. The geographical range covered is quite wide, including Walthamstow, Woodford Green, Loughton and Waltham Abbey. Initially, I couldn't help but be surprised that, in these days of media paedosteria, the paper was trying to...
The Guardian's children's comics: Part 2 - Roy of the Rovers
Last week The Guardian and The Observer published a series of reproduction comics from the 1970s and 1980s, and yesterday I blogged about some of the transformations they illustrated in the relationship between reader and publisher. Today I want to focus on examples from the 19th December 1981 issue of Roy Of The Rovers. The 'team chart' One of the weekly features of Roy Of The Rovers was a chart for you to fill in to track your team's progress....
"Breakfast with the Voicebot"
On Tuesday morning I visited Sidekick Studios near London Bridge to have 'Breakfast with the Voicebot'. The robot looked somewhat less human than the illustration on the invite. To be honest, it didn't look like it was capable of wrenching itself free from its base and going on a strangling and mangling rampage, which I always find slightly disappointing when I've been promised a robot. It is the type of machine usually used on car production lines to perform menial...
A monkey could also write the annual stories knocking A-Level students
This week is one of my least favourite weeks of the year, as the annual media game begins of knocking the achievements of our children at school. Rather than write another whole rant on the topic, here are links to a few I made earlier. Is Britain's brightest A-Level student a boy or an anonymous photogenic teenage girl? - August 2007 Do boys even take A-Levels these days? - August 2006 It must be nearly A-Level time again - August...
Baby P killer images lose their impact online
As the clock turned midnight on Monday night, the anonymity order preventing the publication of the names of Baby P's killers expired, and it was obvious which images were gong to dominate the press front pages the next morning. The chance to vilify Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker by name was something hitherto denied our newspapers, even though the public could find them out with just the briefest of Google searches. Since the deadline was in the middle of the...
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 3
Last week I was lucky enough to go to The Guardian's first Activate summit - a one day conference at Kings Place which brought together politicians, economists and technologists to discuss the future shape of the world. Today I wanted to pick up another thread that ran through the day - data and story-telling. Arianna Huffington described story-telling as "mankind's greatest gift". Personally I reckon fire is probably up there as well, but let's not quibble. She was responding...
Sale Water Park making audience research fun for kids
One of the things I advocate when trying to do user-centred web application design is to take every possible opportunity to talk to real users to get their input into the process. That can range from running focus groups, carrying out online surveys, undertaking controlled testing in lab conditions, or just plonking myself down next to people in cafes and 'ambush' user-testing them with Silverback. I'm always on the look-out for ways that other organisations carry out this kind of...
Isn't teenage social networking just the new rock'n'roll?
I was alerted - via Twitter, where else? - to the fact that Nicky Campbell's "The Big Questions" show on Sunday morning had a section on teenagers and social networking. You can watch it on iPlayer for the next 6 days. [1] The consensus amongst the audience seemed to be that social networking was damaging the social development of teenagers. I happen to believe that this is an area where an astonishingly wide generation gap has rapidly opened up. Put...
Protecting the identity of Baby P's killers: The courts vs the people vs the Internet
Update 11th August 2009: The court order preventing publication of the identities of Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker has now been lifted. Update 1st May 2009: This story, that one of Baby P's killers was facing additional charges of abuse against a second child, explains why the names had to be kept out of the public domain back in November 2008. Original article from 17th November 2008:The last few days have shown how very difficult it is to keep information...
The evil of searching for 'Gary Glitter'
Personally I remain unconvinced of the power of 70's music to reach out through time and corrupt the youth of today via the medium of guidance notes for exams, but that hasn't stopped the Gary Glitter GCSE 'scandal' being one of the main media storms of the day. For me perhaps the most unintentionally funny bit of it is the quote from the anonymous headmaster in The Sun about his fears when teenagers go online: "He's a convicted paedophile jailed...
More on the Daily Mail and my comments about their 'suicidal five year olds' article
If you are interested in newspapers, the Internet and blogging, you can't have missed the growing blogstorm around the Daily Mail, following an article by Julie Moult that was rather ill-informed about the web. I don't need to pick over the bones of the story itself, as it has been covered in plenty of other places, but I did want to pass comment because my name has been mentioned a couple of times in the course of it. The piece...
Understanding young children and the commercial Internet
"There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is hungry for information. It has latched on to an electronic tube as its main source of nourishment." No, not the Internet, but television in the 1960s according to Joan Ganz Cooney. This is one of those blog posts you can probably file under "I've read it so you don't have to", as I've been ploughing my way through the recently published 58 pages of the 'Like Taking Candy From...
Game for a laugh - Anne Diamond on games in the Daily Mail
I still haven't had a chance to read the recent "Safer Children in a Digital World" Byron Report in full, although from what I've skimmed through so far I'm still sticking by my original opinion when I bookmarked it - that I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't framed in the hysterical tabloid tone that usually accompanies any debate about child safety and new media. The analogies about how we teach our children to swim and cross the road despite...
Sky News give up on the hunt for Madeleine McCann
Well, after over 8 months, it seems that Sky News have given up on the hunt Madeleine McCann. Since May 2007, the single word Madeleine has been the third item on their main navigation - above Politics, World News, above Business and the Weather. That has all changed with today's redesigned homepage. Editor Steve Bennedik has even been moved to blog about it: There's one other change you may already have noticed. We've removed the heading "Madeleine" from the navigation...
Trust me, the Child Benefit data loss risk to children isn't from paedophiles
One thing I noticed in the press coverage of the British Government's abject but predictable failure to protect personal data was this preposterous line of argument in an editorial in the Daily Mail: "The missing discs contain the names, addresses and dates of birth of every child in the country...Wouldn't fraudsters and child abusers give anything to get their hands on them?" Seriously, what are child abusers going to do with this information? Surely, and call me old-fashioned, if paedophiles...
There's only been one unforgettable dinner in Portugal this year
I spotted this advert for tourism in Portugal at Queensway station on my way to work yesterday. Is it just me? Or do you think that, given that the biggest media story in the UK this year has been about a dinner in Portugal that turned out to be unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, promoting the country with the strapline "To be continued...at an unforgettable dinner" is a little ill thought out?...
Is Britain's brightest A-Level student a boy or an anonymous photogenic teenage girl?
This one is as regular as clockwork on the currybet.net site - the A-Level results come out, and I start moaning about the depressing and sexist coverage of it - here's one I made earlier in 2003. Who'd think that boys even took A-Levels these days? And if teenagers do manage to perform well in the exams, well, then they are obviously worthless bits of paper anyway. And everybody wonders why teenagers in Britain appear to suffer from low self-esteem...
Who benefits financially from the Madeleine McCann publicity juggernaut?
I noticed towards the end of this week that, alongside the rumours of journalist frolics in Portugal whilst following the Madeleine McCann case, a couple of columnists have broken rank with the default position of their newspaper. Today on The Time's site Stefanie Marsh has been called "a very lonely, sad, selfish person" for her piece "I confess: I have not been agonising about Madeleine". There has been disquiet expressed in the Telegraph, and yesterday it was Amanda Platell...
Madeleine McCann and Alex Meschisvili - a culture contrast
The disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal hasn't made the TV news bulletins or English language press here in Greece, but as I still follow a lot of what goes on in the media in the UK, I have seen the acres of coverage devoted to the story at the other end of the continent. One trend that seems to be emerging in these high profile media scrum "Diana moments" in recent years is the intimate involvement of suspects or...
Games and Social Networking driving more young Greeks to use the internet?
I merited a brief mention in this post on the UrbanGreeks blog about internet activity in Greece - "Internet: The Nerdy Kid That Nobody Wants to Play With". I get quoted about my ordeal trying to get even a basic phone-line from OTE, the state monopoly provider here. "My experience of trying to get a connection set up here didn't do much to counter theory [that OTE are a major bottleneck to internet access]. Once the paperwork is done it...
The Sun using blogs to solicit amateur Page 3 Girl style photos
BBC Jam closes today - how far will the repercussions be felt?
Blue Peter fakes competition result - in the Middle East?
Now the Daily Mail is twisting MY words about ChildLine
The Daily Mail distorts Childline's report on youth mental health in the UK
Media coverage of a shocking sex attack in Greece
Nostalgia for Airfix ain't what it used to be
Writing headlines to whip up a frenzy of comments about kids
Some six year olds are not very good at geography
MySpace's teenage audience - up or down?
Exposing children in the press to protect them from online harm
Keeping the North West safe and sound
What do you remember about the news when you were nine?
There's just no messin' with the kids
Do boys even take A-Levels these days?
It must be nearly A-Level time again
ID Cards making the net a more dangerous place for kids
Today is European Safer Internet Day
Children, the Internet, and media sensationalism
MSN will protect your children
MSN ditches chat - Gillian Kent urges everybody to adopt Instant Messenger
The English media's A-Level summer ritual
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Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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