This story has been widely reported in the UK. It’s about a journalist who got a job in a prison and took some photographs. He was charged under the 1952 Prison Act, with conveying a digital camera into the jail and conveying the camera and “digital information” – the photographs – out again. The trial…

The Reader’s Digest survey quoted by Conrad (below) is just another example of one of the most common ways that PR people manage to get stories into newspapers. I guess they’re cheap – according to the SCMP, only 200 people in Hong Kong were questioned for this survey, which hardly makes it scientific. The journalist…

p6 of Spike – “Expat TV”: a list of made-up TV programs, having fun at the expense of local TV and whingeing gweilos.p8 of Spike – regular column by whingeing gweilo Liam Fitzpatrick.  Past subjects have included pollution, the state of the harbour shoreline, Chinese New Year, rudeness, queues, shotcrete and film censorship.  You get the idea.This week’s is a classic, though,…

As promised, I did subscribe to Spike magazine. What has happened since has hardly inspired confidence. I used their website to subscribe. This re-directs you to Quamnet which has a secure site that will accept credit cards, and it appeared to work but I didn’t receive any confirmation, and neither did I get the ‘instant’…

An interesting follow-up to the furore about the Hutton Inquiry. It seems that, according to The Guardian Lord Hutton is surprised that Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke felt the need to resign in reponse to his criticism. He apparently did not mean the following passage to be taken as a general criticism of the BBC:…

I hope I don’t regret this, but I have changed my mind about NTSCMP. Perhaps it was George’s holiday in Switzerland that did the trick, because he seems to have got over the compulsion to be rude to everyone and slimmed down the site somewhat. Even Blogwatch is a shadow of its former self, reduced…

One of the stranger features of our English language terrestrial TV channels (TVB Pearl and ATV World) is that they serve up current affairs programmes from the US and UK, but several weeks or months later. Last night, I caught part of “60 Minutes” on ATV World, and they had an interview with ‘Democratic front-runner…

Spike is still trying to “add value” to the articles it reprints from The Spectator magazine. The current issue contains a piece about Will Self which will probably make little sense to most people in Hong Kong given that it is largely about how many magazines articles he writes and TV programmes he appears on:…

I’m getting rather annoyed with a lot of the nonsense that is being written in various blogs in reponse to the report of the Hutton Inquiry. People who know next to nothing about the background to the story sound off about Tony Blair or the BBC, based mainly on their own prejudices and second-hand information…

Hemlock recently noted that Spike was ideal for anyone who wanted to re-read articles they had already read in The Spectator or on Quamnet.com. This week’s edition of the magazine is true to form, but with a subtle alteration to at least one of the articles. Petronella Wyatt’s piece about Cape Town (as originally published)…