Media Diet Week 31

Press: it was with something approaching alarm that I read Press Gazette's report on the magazine-sharing site, Mygazines.com (and I'm not linking to it). It's another route to infringing copyright of writers and I sincerely hope that it will, indeed, be taken off the internet asap. Bad enough that we have to google ourselves regularly to see who is stealing our work and not paying us for it, then serve DMCA notices, but I imagine copy theft on Mygazines.com won't show up so readily in the search engines. Incidentally, Charles Arthur of the Guardian regularly takes a pop at copyright infringers on his blog. It's top stuff.

Blogs: Daryl Wilcox, who runs the very useful ResponseSource resource for hacks has written a fantastic post on the transparency of his company's database. This was in response to Sally at Getting Ink, who noted that Cision are trawling again. I was among many (probably thousands) who received the email from Cision requesting my details. I've yet to respond as I fear receiving yet another deluge of unwanted PR spam. I get quite enough already. And I don't like being on databases where I have no control over the integrity of my entry. So I guess for now I'll be giving Cision a wide berth. The public discussion is really important, though, so thumbs up to Sally and Daryl for initiating it.

TV: programme of the week was, for me at least, House of Saddam. Critics were comparing it to The Sopranos in both the previews and reviews. I've never watched the Sopranos so can't compare, but this was fantastic telly - intelligent, well-scripted drama that was absolutely gripping, with quality acting and a sense of real insight (allowing for the fact that obviously artistic licence has been taken, although the Radio Times for this week carried a feature that noted the amount of serious background research that went into it). I was disappointed that Kelly won Missing Top Model as I'd really expected Sophie to triumph, but the judges never seemed sure whether they wanted a model who happened to have a disability or a disabled role model who could model. Whatever, it's been an intriguing look at notions of beauty and disability and raised a lot of important issues.

Books: it's been a slow week, so I'm still on Mark Billingham's Death Message. I had an Amazon splurge last weekend, though, so I have a nice, shiny stack of new books to keep me entertained over the summer, so I'll be reviewing them here as usual. When I finish Death Message, anyway...

Media Diet week 29

Ten shocking weeks since I last did this. Ok, ok, I have the excuse of a house move and a mountain of work, but...

Press: here we go. Not much has changed on my reading front. My daily newspaper round is still the Guardian, the Sun and BBC News Online. I hate the Sun's online revamp - you can tell it's been tweaked yet it doesn't look radically different. In fact, the left-hand menu makes it even harder to locate sections now and the whole site remains frustratingly slow when it comes to loading pages. Methinks they wasted a lot of money for nowt. Elsewhere, I have a pile of unread Press Gazettes building up. I simply haven't had time. Will try to blitz them this weekend.

Blogs: I'm enjoying Neil Baker's return to form after a long silence. He always has interesting things to say (see his post on why he never reads his work after it's been published, for example. I've also discovered the blog of a colleague who, like me, both writes and edits for a living. Check out Ms_Well.Words for her take on the news.

TV/radio: so, no more Doctor Who, the Nancys are finished, the Apprentice has been picked and the evenings are looking decidely quiet. If it wasn't for EastEnders, I'd be down the pub 7 nights a week. I toyed with watching Bonekickers, but managed to miss both the first two episodes. On the other hand, I stumbled into Britain's Missing Top Model and am really enjoying it. Usually, I find BBC3 irritating and dumbed down but for once it is screening an intelligent insight into the reality of living with a disability and the prejudices the disabled face on a daily basis. We could do with more telly like this. (I want Sophie to win, btw.)

Books: as with the press, there's not been a lot of spare reading time for books. Suffice to say I've just finished a crime novel so bad I contemplated lining the cat tray with the pages. I vaguely recall reading a review of In Cold Daylight somewhere, that insisted it was unputdownable. Au contraire. It was clichéd, badly copy-edited (I was endlessly distracted by shit punctuation) and the plot was based on conjecture in the protagonist's head. Thank gawd I have the latest Mark Billingham to get stuck into...