media – The revolution will be streamed

Media silence over Freedom firebombing – imagine if it was Waterstones

Apart from a few notable exceptions, there’s been an indefensible level of silence about the firebombing of Freedom Bookshop on Friday morning. Only one TV channel, Press TV, bothered to send a camera crew to East London. ITV, the Evening Standard and the Guardian did write stories about it, even if the latter did use the bizarre phrase about the shop that “[i]t claims to stock thousands of books, newspapers, pamphlets…” It’s a bookshop, what exactly makes a statement of easily verifiable fact a claim?

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Two meetings on reclaiming the media

Update: Following these two successful meetings – and also raising the issue at tonight’s NUJ Claudia Jones lecture, I’ve set up a new mailing list and will discuss setting up a follow-up discussion and planning meeting with NUJ colleagues. Stay tuned for further details.

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The truth about anarchism

Event: Busting the Myths – learn the truth about anarchism, 7pm, Thursday 11 August, University of London Union, Malet Street, London.

Speakers: Donnacha DeLong (chair), Chetna Yuvraj, student occupier, Andy Littlechild, RMT activist,Zoe Stavri, activist with UK Uncut and Andy Meinke, activist in the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group and Freedom Press worker.

Find it on Facebook.

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Will work for – a reasonable sum based on my skills and experience

I thought this would be a little bit easier, to be honest. Having taken redundancy last year and returning to university to do a Masters, I didn’t think I’d still be sitting here, nearly August a year later, without work.

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My Open Democracy piece

Before I go to bed, here’s another plug for my piece on Open Democracy – Unions, why not harness the power of the media? It’s got everything, a bit of syndicalist history, a look ahead to J30, slagging off Labour as well as the Condems and a call to arms to the media to improve their communications to the public. Enjoy!

A few notes to the media re: Tunisia

As a sub-editor for more than a decade, I’ve lots of experience reworking copy into a readable form. Sometimes it takes a bit more than fixing the typos and adding proper punctuation, sometimes journalists get things wrong and you have to fix them.

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