Bloggers should have rights and privileges as well as responsibilities, argues David Maeztu.

Patricia Metola is a fine illustrator who’s had enough of people ripping off her work for profit or not. This contempt for intellectual property is an overwhelming concern for designers unable to afford lawyers, and is a major factor in limiting the availability of products online, where ripping is easy as plum pie.
I’m particularly [...]

I don’t normally read David de Ugarte, but this is strange:
Las asociaciones de periodistas declaran como objetivo “luchar contra el intrusismo profesional”, conocidos comunicadores braman contra “los que pretenden hacerse pasar por periodistas” en la web y nuestras saturadas facultades alertan a sus estudiantes de que sus futuros puestos de trabajo están en peligro no [...]

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?