media | Steve Woods

Happy Easton

23/09/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Media

As a part of inner city Bristol, Easton tends to get into the papers for all the wrong reasons, such as fly-tipping (posts passim).

However, it’s a vibrant area where I’ve lived for nearly 4 decades and so it can’t be all that bad, as is shown by the fact that community campaigners Happy Easton have produced their own video version of the record-breaking Pharrell Williams hit “Happy” to show a more positive side of Easton.

The video was filmed at 18 sites around the area including Easton Community Centre, Trinity Community Arts, the soon to be shut Trinity Police Station and various local shops and takeaways.

Are the dancing cops and PCSOs as embarrassing as your relatives at a wedding? Answers in the comments below! 🙂
From rapper to ringgit

17/09/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

Some sub-editors in the Malaysian press are perhaps over-conscientious in their work, as shown in the image below, where US rapper 50 Cent (name on birth certificate: Curtis James Jackson III. Ed.) has been converted into the local currency, the ringgit!

Hat tip: Felicity Morse.
Project Fear revs up

11/09/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

The No campaign against Scottish independence has since the outset been playing on people’s uncertainties about the fate of an independent Scotland to such an extent that supporters of independence have dubbed it Project Fear.

In recent times, some of these have included some strange arguments, such as the one illustrated below.

That’s right! Project Fear has now put the idea in the minds of Caledonian petrolheads that they could lose the likes of Clarkson & Co.

I can think of nothing more that would make me vote yes were I a Scot and was eligible to partake in the referendum.
Bristol’s Bitcoin machine handles £38K per month

10/09/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Tech

The Bristol Post is not renowned locally for its in-depth coverage of technology, let alone such exotic areas as crytocurrencies, but today proved an exception as it reported on the fortunes of Bristol’s only Bitcoin cash machine, which is located in Superfoods in St Stephen’s Street (review here) in the centre.

SatoshiPoint, the machine’s owners have hailed it a success after the machine processed 250 transactions and the equivalent of £38,000 in Bitcoins in the month of August alone.

SatoshiPoint’s Hassan Khoshtaghaza said: “Bristol is doing very well, in fact better than our London ATMs because there are now six of them in London so the use gets spread out. We are getting users from as far as Cardiff and Bath coming to use the machine in Bristol and our volume is increasing each month on buy and sell transactions.”

The company recently installed a Bitcoin machine in Brighton and further cities under consideration are Cardiff, Manchester and Edinburgh, plus Newcastle Airport, according to Khoshtaghaza.

SatoshiPoint’s Bitcoin machines accept £10 and £20 notes, but not debit or credit cards and users can buy anything from £10 to £1,500 worth of Bitcoins a day, at the live price plus 7% commission.

Originally posted on Bristol Wireless.
Bristol invents the bup

25/08/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Bristol likes to regard itself as a place of innovation.

Bearing this inventive spirit in mind, contractors working in Old Market Street for Bristol City Council have invented a new public conveyance vehicle – the bup.

A spokesperson for Bristol City Council said: “We take the misspelling of road marking very seriously and will soon be appointing an expensive CONsultant to advise us of the best possible solution.” (That quotation was made up, wasn’t it? Ed.)

Hat tip: Bristol Post.

Update 27/08/14: the orthographical gaffe was corrected yesterday, according to the Bristol Post.
West Country confusion

17/08/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities
The Western Daily Press is a stablemate of the Bristol Post and seems to share many of the latter’s afflictions – the same ugly Brutalist building on Bristol’s Temple Way, poor English, dodgy photo captions and the like.

It was therefore no surprise to encounter a prime example of confused reporting this morning, as illustrated by the screenshot below.

If one examines the article to which the news page above relates, three disparate elements seem to have been combined by reporter Geoff Bennett (who also writes for the Bristol Post. Ed.) and his associates, i.e.:
- a headline referring to widespread outbreaks of salmonella food poisoning in hospitals in England;
- a cuddly kittens picture and apposite caption; and
- a report on the court case of the alleged groping barber (who was cleared by the court. Ed.) which gave rise to Friday’s sexist Bristol Post front page (posts passim).
There is nothing like good, unambiguous reporting of the news – and the Western Daily Press is capable of nothing like it!
Bristol Post Balls – bad punning and sexism

15/08/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Regular readers will be aware that the Bristol Post is not renowned for the quality of its journalism.

However, the dreadful pun and sexism of today’s front page of the dead tree edition marked a new low in the paper’s already woeful standards.

Bad puns are annoying in headlines at the best of times and sexism is tolerated far less than when the fifty-something males in charge of producing Bristol’s daily work of fiction first started out in what was then called journalism.

There has been a steady stream of criticism of the Bristol Post on Twitter throughout the day.

However, the paper has not sought to respond to any of its critics, presumably because the person in charge of the Twitter account has yet to notice the ‘reply’ button.

In addition, some of Bristol’s Twitterati have also been alerting the national media to The Post’s disgraceful front page seeking to trivialise a sexual assault.

With front pages like the one above, is it any surprise that the Post’s circulation figures (as measured by ABC) are falling by nearly 11% per year? Not to me it isn’t!

Update 18/08/14: Bristol 24-7 is reporting today that Bristol City councillor Naomi Rylatt has written to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) over the above front page headline, describing it as a “disgusting attempt at humour“.
Telegraph on prolonged peace mission

01/08/2014 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities

A typographical error in a headline on the Telegraph’s website envisaged a long lull in the present conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and the state Israel which has now been raging for more than 3 weeks.

The error has since been corrected to read Gaza conflict: 72-hour ceasefire agreed by both sides.
Cricket explained

30/07/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

The second Test series between England and India is currently taking place in Southampton (it’ll be day 3 today. Ed.) and my radio is tuned to the epic poem that is the BBC’s Test Match Special from 10.25 until the close of play each day, with the likes of Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and Geoffrey Boycott (posts passim) filling the air with their wise words and wit.

Cricket is a complex game that can take a long time to understand fully and I’m still occasionally baffled by the commentators. For the uninitiated, the many different laws and the strange names for positions on the field can seem overwhelming. For instance, which other game has a position on the field called ‘cow corner’*?.

Below is a simple explanation for the uninitiated, which I originally heard at school decades ago as a brief summary of the game for foreigners.

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

For those who need help with fielding positions, Wikimedia Commons has helpfully provided the following graphic.

Note that the fielding positions would be reversed for a left-handed batsman.

* Cow corner = the area of the field (roughly) between deep mid-wicket and wide long-on. So called because few ‘legitimate’ shots are aimed to this part of the field, so fielders are rarely placed there – leading to the concept that cows could happily graze in that area.
Swansea news exclusive

28/07/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Over in Swansea, Bristol Post owners Local World have a local news title – the South Wales Evening Post, which describes itself as “Wales’ largest selling newspaper“.

As such, one would have thought that such a boast was based upon hard-hitting stories and investigative journalism.

However, this is not so.

Just like its Bristol counterpart, the South Wales Evening Post also has an approach to what constitutes news and headlines which could be described as parochial, i.e. narrow in outlook or scope.

Hat tip: Marjory Smith

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