Digital Journalism

I did a post-graduate diploma in journalism in 2006.

At that time, I’d already been online at that point for over a decade and could be found by name using all of the existing search engines: Mosaic, Mozilla, AOL, or Yahoo, back before Google was even invented. Oh yes, I have been online, designing websites and doing AI before Google was even an idea firing and wiring the synapses of its founders.

So for me, traditional journalism long seemed a bit old fashioned and struggling to keep up, despite the warnings that the halcyon days of blogging were already over back in the early 00s.

The course was lots of fun. I’d already been a university lecturer so getting to be a carefree student again was great. We did reporting by sitting in court, chasing ambulances, and pitching articles based on the anniversaries of things, or on similar articles already in the newspapers, which we had to buy everyday and read to get ideas. I often thought that the media would consume itself with its self-referential writing and noticed that even back then the Guardian had a penchant for writing articles assuming that the reader had read all the red tops so that they could analyse the analysis already given in those places.

At the same time we were advised to get web-savvy and get online but never to give anything away for free as it would put other journalists out of business. Even though the Huffington Post was expecting journalists to do exactly that, founded, as it was, in 2005. And though, we were advised to not put anything online for free, at the same time if it was a reputable paper putting our stuff online, we should have been happy to write for next to nothing and get treated badly, in order to get our names into print. Many editors were really horrible to young journalists for no apparent reason apart from, I guess, that’s how they’d been treated when they had begun. It was all very confusing and conflicted, a bit like traditional journalism itself.

Once I finished the course, I set up this website, ostensibly as a digital portfolio as I put up some of the articles I wrote as part of the course. Other articles are not here as some people I interviewed for them (you always had to get a quote from an ‘expert’) didn’t mind doing it for fun but didn’t want to published online when they realised how far a digital footprint can reach.

Soon I began blogging for blogging’s sake and have done so ever since. When I reviewed the first iPhone, shortly before it came out. Companies started emailing me to buy links on here to direct traffic to their websites. Something they still do today.

As I’ve often said, I like to write a well-researched blogpost that can be quite long, and though I began this site as a new journalist, who couldn’t help but blog about human-computer interaction (HCI) and AI in design, storytelling and social media, information visualization and big data, it soon became clear that these fields and blog posts were all linked to digital journalism.

I often ask if this is ‘progress‘ and what about privacy and trust, and our data? Especially when it is used to train the LLMs which are the backbone of generative AI.

Society pays lip service to change and to equity but the practical day-to-day of our lives is very different, guided and steeped as it is in traditional journalism and the media, which is so obvious from all the blogs I have written about the role of women in society, technology, storytelling and media. Invariably the media is the message in that they don’t care what content they serve up as long as it get eyes on it.

So below I have collected a list of blogs, about and related to, the field of digital journalism though I’m sure I’ve missed some and added in others that are not technically that relevant.

The overall theme if I had to suggest one, is that designing technology and implementing it changes the way we work, rest and play, which is a political act. Often, we allow it to do so without even contemplating the consequences and politics around it because we are driven by our fundamental humans needs for connection and our fear of being left behind, which allows old-fashioned ideas to keep propagating. We should be asking how we should be shaping technology for good rather than leaving our digital culture depressingly reflect what we have been doing since the 1400s when journalism began.

The list of blogs

1. AI at the movies: Dark fate and dead reckonings , January 16, 2025
2. Women in STEM, women in society , January 9, 2025
3. Ruth Stalker-Fascinating , November 21, 2024
4. Eat, Pray, Artificial Love: The world of digital anthropology , November 4, 2024
5. Digital Anthropology , October 25, 2024
6. Social media: The persuasion and pervasion of branding , September 17, 2021
7. Social media as theatre , September 30, 2020
8. Ways to look at social media , September 11, 2020
9. A Gacha guide to social anxiety on social media , May 28, 2020
10. Social anxiety and emotional resonance on social media , October 11, 2019
11. The accidental techie (5): Shadowing , July 5, 2019
12. Social anxiety on social media , February 18, 2019
13. Alone Together three years on: Is social media changing us? , December 5, 2018
14. Privacy , October 14, 2018
15. Sociability amongst strangers , September 14, 2018
16. Social computing: Tribes and tribulations , July 19, 2018
17. Thou shalt not: The Ten Commandments of Social Media (2) , May 9, 2018
18. Virtual Presence: Where do we go when we go online? , May 8, 2018
19. Thou shalt not: The Ten Commandments of Social Media , May 3, 2018
20. Women and girls on social media: Society, Storytelling, Technology (8) , of (9) December 7, 2017
21. Creating space (4): Invasion, expansion and girls , July 9, 2017
22. When the Internet becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it , May 29, 2017
23. Trusting technology, ourselves, and others , May 9, 2017
24. Is this progress? Humans, computers and stories , March 29, 2017
25. Game theory & social media (3): What are you playing at? , January 10, 2017
26. Game theory in social media marketing (2): Customers and competitors , January 7, 2017
27. The Connection Economy: Memail, mixtapes and fortune cookies , December 13, 2016
28. Stories, Semantics and the Web of Data , December 11, 2016
29. Carpe diem: Travels without my phone , December 1, 2016
30. Semiotics: Finding meaning in storytelling , November 14, 2016
31. Moments in modern technology , November 11, 2016
32. Storytelling: Intimacy, privacy and social media , October 24, 2016
33. Designing design: Style and standards , October 13, 2016
34. Designing design: The medium is the message of (12), September 29, 2016
35. Web design (2): Get the picture , of (7) July 29, 2016
36. Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data , April 14, 2016
37. Propaganda and Persuasion: The Social Animal on Social Media (3) of (9), February 11, 2016
38. Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on , January 18, 2016
39. Storytelling in technology: The myth of progress , January 8, 2016
40. Women in Storytelling: Saint, Spy, Suffragette , December 3, 2015
41. How stories matter , November 14, 2015
42. Web design (6): Sharing and caring on social media , October 9, 2015
43. Digital Culture , September 12, 2015
44. Feeding the machine: The embodied human in a social media world , August 23, 2015
45. Alone together: Is social media changing us? , April 22, 2015
46. Katie Hopkins’s #myfatstory is a story of vulnerability , January 5, 2015
47. Web design (0): The science of communication , December 12, 2013
48. Emerging Technologies: What’s the story? , August 6, 2013
49. Emerging technologies: New ways for shared experiences , July 28, 2013
50. Emerging Technologies: OWN the technology , July 13, 2013
51. Storytelling and embodiment: The stories we tell ourselves , December 18, 2012
52. The power of the written word , July 23, 2011
53. Get stuffed Stuff Magazine , July 15, 2011
54. Getting your hands on Apple’s iPhone , November 8, 2007
55. Stalkers in space and Facebook in your face , February 20, 2007
56. WordPress , January 14, 2007
57. Card sort analysis using a spreadsheet , December 23, 2006
58. My Sony NW-E002 MP3 Player , December 11, 2006
59. Apple TV , December 3, 2006
60. Humax PVR-9200T Freeview recorder , November 21, 2006
61. I love LaTeX , November 14, 2006