links for 2010-04-15

Chris Thorpe and Michael Brunton-Spall have been using Twitter's @anywhere 'thing' to prototype some ways it could be used across guardian.co.uk.

Well, firstly respect to the Express for doing something so modern. "They [Pagesuite, who developed the app] also visited Press Gazette and let us try out the Express Newspapers iPad app first hand. And the results are pretty impressive. The user experience is much more natural and fluid than with reading the digital version of a newspaper online using page-turning software. And the iPad screen does seem to lend itself particularly well to displaying tabloid news pages...It perfectly mimics, and probably even improves, on the casual browsing experience of reading a real newspaper". Although, when the Press Gazette says 'perfectly mimics', they seem to have forgotten some of the other important properties of paper, like folding and battery life...

"[I] saw this extract from a paper by senior lecturer in journalism at Kingston University, James Morrison...'The main journalism recruitment sites, among them www.journalism.co.uk and www.gorkana.com, regularly carry job ads for journalists posted by local authorities willing to offer upwards of £30,000 per annum...By contrast, as of September 2009, a typical starting salary for a local newspaper reporter was around £12,000"

"What is it that makes a journalist “professional”? If I set up a Scottish football site, start selling advertising, perhaps do some content deals and make that site my main source of income – fooball journalism my profession. The only difference is that these “amateurs” aren’t part of the same journalistic culture that the NUJ exists to preserve. The NUJ wants to save jobs. That’s what it does. But it’s a losing battle to hope that the tide of talented, independent journalism that is evolving across the country will suddenly disappear."