Archive for the ‘The Irish Times’ tag
Journalism’s not dead – just newspapers
I’ve got some time off this week while UCD’s on a mid-term break so in my lazy bedridden mornings, I’ve been catching up on reading, watching, and generally consuming things that I’ve had on the long finger for a bit.
One of the big things on the list – well, not that I considered it a major point, but ‘big’ in the sense that it was 90 minutes long and substantially larger than I’d anticipated – was Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote address.
This brought me nicely to a post on MediaGuardian’s PDA blog featuring five videos on how different magazine or newspaper publishers might use the touch-screen platform that the iPad will offer.
There’s a few varying approaches but these two are my favourites, showing exactly how phenomenal the power of a versatile large, touch-screen interface when combined with the fluidity of omnipresent online connectivity.
The Tale of Two Corks
Maybe it’s because I was in Kilkenny again for the last couple of nights, but Tom Humphries – as he tends to – struck a note with me as I read his Locker Room column from today‘s Irish Times while on the bus back to Dublin.
Let me start by making it very clear – I am a massive fan of Tom Humphries. Back in 1995 when Santa didn’t have any copies of the Buster annual left, he substituted me his book on The Legend of Jack Charlton, ably filling the void left behind by a nine year old’s intoxication from World Cup USA 1994 and his country’s failure to make the next European Championships. In 2003 the family holiday was supplemented by a copy of Laptop Dancing and the Nanny-Goat Mambo – one of the best examples of sports journalism I’ve ever had the privilege to read, unique in its ability to make me want the lifestyle of a sporting hack, even as bleak as the Irish Times‘ existence was in 2002 – even if the book was my Dad’s. His ghostwriting on Niall Quinn’s autobiography wasn’t bad either. All this, and the man one ran for sabbatical election in UCD Students’ Union. You can’t not like him.
There was something today that unsettled me, though. Tom is a staunch lover of gaelic games – you can tell from his writing that he hails the sports more than any other. His work is dripping with the staunch tribalism of GAA life – he even wrote a book on the Dublin/Kerry rivalry of the late 70’s-early 80’s. Today, though, in writing an otherwise illuminating metacolumn – 1,000 words about writing 1,000 words – on how sport is an escape from the real world (a quality I attest to it more than others; I like the thrill of going to Old Trafford but if United lose, I don’t exactly turn suicidal). In doing so, he consciously trivialised sporting institutions from all codes, including the currently striking Cork hurlers: