Robert Forster, the surviving half of the truly great Brisbane band The Go-Betweens, was awarded a prize for critical writing last week. No big news there, but I did notice this:

When the musician Robert Forster was approached to become the music critic for a new magazine, The Monthly, last year, his writer’s resume consisted of one entry: a column on hair care he penned for a Manchester fanzine called Debris in the late 1980s.

This piqued my interest, especially when I found a BBC Manchester interview with John Cooper, who runs the Cerysmatic Factory website mentioned in the last post, that included this quote:

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Stephen Kingston over at The Salford Star magazine has been keeping me up-to-date:

The bumper 60 page Aug/Sept issue of Salford Star is out now featuring…

* Urban Cash - we take the roof off the Urban Splash `upside down’ terraced house `reinvention’ in Seedley/Langworthy to see where all the public money’s going…and residents tell of the Fight For Salford’s Future..

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I was a bit slow to notice but those clever monkeys over at The Guardian have done it again:

“The Guardian is launching a new service providing readers with a rapid overview of news that will be updated every 15 minutes.

“G24 will be a free service featuring news content from the Guardian Unlimited website across five areas: general news, international, economics, sport and media.”

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The News & Star - a “daily evening, and local, and paid-for, and tabloid” newspaper in Carlisle - has a blogging section.

And while it’s not particularly visually appealing, it does the job of creating a regular (or irregular), less formal flow of news, information and views from the paper’s staff to their readers.

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Via Journalism.co.uk:

Scoopt, which just 12 months ago started selling the general public’s newsworthy photographs, has launched a similar service for bloggers called ScooptWords.

In summary, you stick their logo on your blog and if a visiting editor believes your content is newsworthy, they can purchase one-off rights. Scoopt aims to provide a “one-stop shop for negotiation, licensing and billing” to monetise blogging. read more »