I don’t normally read David de Ugarte, but this is strange:

A glittering prize for the person who, on being asked to select his channel’s best 10 programmes for veteran news broadcaster John Humphrys, “sent him tapes of programmes such as Banzai, Breasts Uncupped and Nip/Tuck.” There is, however, a glaring inconsistency in his criticism of reality telly and defence of news journalism: on the one [...]

John Pawlenko is tracking the Catalonia Toady saga. CT is a new free English-language daily which unfortunately seems to be being written by people who can’t speak English. Anecdotal evidence is that, despite excellent kiosk placement, it’s not being picked up in large numbers, and one’s got to wonder how long it will last in [...]

From DotJournalism:
Mr Kobré, author of the photojournalism bible ‘Photojournalism - The Professionals’ Approach’, says that even leading sites in the US and the UK such as the BBC and Guardian Unlimited have often ‘ghettoised’ and ’segregated’ pictures from text. He says that while there has been a revolution in the use of photojournalism in newspapers, [...]

The mini-site called Barcelona Chronicle - which someone presumably gets paid to produce - is an example of just how bad non-native translation can get. If you were to generate the page automatically then you’d probably have a similar percentage of incorrect words but the spelling would be better.

Max Weber is apparently alive, well, and recycling his thoughts on social stratification as differentiated market pitches for Ming Pao:

No, not Catalonia Today the magazine, nor Catalonia Today the Generalitat PR splurge, but the English-language daily to be launched on June 15th. Today a dummy run was enclosed in El Punt, and - barring some linguistic and factual howlers (Carod, the front page informs us, is “deputy president” of Catalonia) - it looks OK.

The story in El Punt about the priests who have warned that Alt Empordà, with its rich assortment of popular roadside establishments, is becoming Europe’s whorehouse is entitled Sense pèls a la llengua, which means figuratively that they didn’t mince their words and literarily that they didn’t have hair on their tongues. The sub responsible [...]

Check Wired’s Nick Denton piece. What with all due respect I think they haven’t understood is the way that targetted advertising is going to tip the scales away from the traditional media and their silly old ad sales teams. The problem in places like Barcelona tends to be the extreme conservatism of commercial advertisers and [...]

Check the front page of the Vilafranca weekly, el 3 de vuit, but be quick: they might publish something.

There are lots and lots of local and regional papers in Spain, many are propped up by the state (the Generalitat has been paying and presumably pulping almost 10% of La Vanguardia’s sales), and most of them have little or no competition. Most will disappear over the next few years because the state is losing [...]

How have Rafael Ramos, Josep Maria Casasús and other disgraces to journalism been able to survive so long at La Vanguardia? One reason is that the paper’s finely-tuned editorial line resulted in enough favours in cash and in kind from the old Pujol/CiU regional administration to free it from the pressures faced, and the standards [...]

We already knew from a footnote in Marx’s Capital that the Scottish industrialist Peter Fairbairn, who based his life and business in Leeds and was city mayor, “discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of machines as a result of strikes in his own factory.” Now Oxford has digitised a number of [...]

Someone pointed out last night that it has hardly stopped raining since Spain elected a leader with no experience in government. This would not come as a such a surprise if people here spent slightly more time sitting in filthy attics reading smelly old newspapers (specifically, La Vanguardia dated April 16th 1929) and slightly less [...]

PL just sent me what he believes is a made-up story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist moron in London, Rafael Ramos, the essence of which is that the City thinks that our new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is just wonderful. There are a number of problems with the article:

They’ve nailed Jack Kelley of USA Today, so when are we going to hear some news from Josep Maria Casasús on the fate of La Vanguardia’s plagiarising illiterate, Rafael Ramos? (Here he is with some more porkies in the Independent, full text on al-Jazeerah.)

La Granada is a village of about 1,400 people. It’s best known for its satellite dish park, but there’s also a local TV station which, from Central Studios, apparently reaches 5,000 viewers with several hours a day of homegrown material (including Sunday mass live) and a satellite feed:

According to this Expatica story, Newsweek has had to ask permission to start a French edition. Does that just mean filling in forms promising you’re not going to torture the workers nor give them burgers for lunch, or do you have to buy the minister dinner and give assurances re editorial attitudes?

Busy again with a whirl of things, probably till Monday, so here again is the lonely howl of Radio Tirhana from the 70s:

Franco Alemán over at HispaLibertas has very kindly passed on this article. In it Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff tells the sorry tale of how, following an alert from Tim Blair, they had to get rid of Uli Schmetzer. Schmetzer had been with the paper for 20 years, but when he was caught fabricating an [...]

The difficulty of interpreting intent in materials published in a different language and cultural context was one of the interesting facets of the case of the Fuengirola imam, convicted of publishing with malicious intent a manual on how to beat women without leaving scars. It’s not going to get any easier here once radio and [...]

La Vanguardia’s incompetent in London, Rafael Ramos, used to file stories that - apart from his appalling spelling - bore remarkable resemblances to articles in The Guardian and The Times. When I caught him out the paper refused to take an interest and he started using The Times more, presumably secure in the knowledge that [...]

“A creamy dessert and espresso? Puff, puff.”

The Peckham chapter of the Taliban and a horde of Yorkshire lesbians are going to be fighting it out here for the next few days so , to remind you of how good life was before Reagan, is Radio Tirana’s old call sign.

Shanghai Daily:
“Els estrangers no compraran un periòdic xinès per a llegir la pàgina anglesa,” va dir Huang Hu, professor de periodisme en l’Universitat de Fudan. “Aquestes pàgines angleses tenen clarament un problema de col·locació.”

The Daily Mirror had at least two hacks in Barcelona at the weekend to cover a mildly alcoholic trip to the disco by honorary Brits Thierry Henry, Freddie Ljungberg, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Mikael Silvestre and Rio Ferdinand, but none of them seems to have managed to follow the players to Danzatori (which I’ve never heard [...]

AP: Amb el llançament de la seva edició a La Coruña, Metro tindrà una tirada nacional de 600.000, 50.000 més que El País.

Rafael Ramos, corresponsal de La Vanguardia a Londres, continua sorprenent per la seva incapacitat d’expressar de manera satisfactòria la seva profunda ignorància del seu país adoptiu en particular i del món en general. Com vaig assenyalar a La Vanguardia fa sis mesos, no sap escriure anglès, plagia el treball d’altres periodistes, i inventa material que [...]

Net gezien. Waar hebben ze hun eigen systeem begraven? (Via eCuaderno.)

Caspa diu que periodistadigital.com es un blog.

New York heeft er 300, en de druk is zo moordend dat sommige Chinese verslaggevers een dagelijkse quota van 2000 karakters krijgen.

Geen van de zes belangrijke partijen in de regionale verkiezingen volgende week zondag heeft een functionele website in het Spaans, zegt Libertad Digital vandaag. Dit ondanks het feit dat de moedertaal van meer dan de helft van de bevolking van Catalunya Spaans is. Het zeer amateuristische Españoles Bajo el Separatismo (Spanjaarden Onder het Separatisme) wil [...]

Crec que hi ha poca gent aquí que sap que a Berlín es va apagar la televisió anàloga a principis d’agost. Jo tampoc sabia fins avui. Aquestes pantalles són d’una època en la qual la qualitat de recepció i de reproducció era realment dolenta:

Apparently the culture section of La Vanguardia has been submitting articles to an automatic correction tool and then publishing them unchecked. So Evgeni Primakov => Vagina Permisivo and catalanista => estalinista. Does that mean that incompetent La Vanguardia ombudsman, Josep Maria Casasús, is going to blame the woes of his colleague, Rafael Ramos, on a [...]

Donald Luskin is trying to find out who Atrios is so he can sue him for defamation, says this post on Slashdot. So why’s Rafael Ramos not going to sue me?
Via JWdB, who also has a weblog and who recently agreed to figure as kaleboel’s cosmic consultant. It was he who pointed out that there [...]

Tony just sent me a slightly weird press release from an entity that calls itself the European Association for Sure & Secure Identification, or IDtrack for short. Things that bother us both:

It calls itself European, which tends to lead one to assume some European component. Not so: the advisory board is completely Spanish (with what [...]

A couple of profs up north have just published a book, Manual de Redacción Ciberperiodística, that explains useful things like … er … what a hyperlink is. Books like this have been remaindered for years in other countries, so how come lecturers here still get away with inflicting them on their students? Any currently blog-less [...]

Rafael Ramos, periodista d’aspecte mandrós, estúpid, i plagiari, ho fa altra vegada. No, senyor Ramos, Kennedy va dir “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I el defensor del lector, Josep Maria Casasús? Sembla que encara no ha acabat la seva “investigació”…

It sounds like Josep Maria Casasús, alleged ombudsman for La Vanguardia, is going around telling folks that I’m an American secret agent for asking him four months ago to do something about the paper’s plagiarising, fictionalising, semi-literate London correspondent, Rafael Ramos. John Chappell - who bravely reads the paper on Sunday - has the details [...]

Please ignore this if you believe that it doesn’t matter if a reputable newspaper publishes contributions by a journalist apparently prone to plagiarism, invention, and illiteracy. Otherwise it’s curtains up on the latest episode in the saga of the scribbler (Rafael Ramos), the ombudsman (Josep Maria Casasús), and their publisher (La Vanguardia). (You will find [...]