This is the news

'Old News' by Jason de Villa, https://flic.kr/p/98jLH
‘Old News’ by Jason de Villa, https://flic.kr/p/98jLH

I wear several hats. Some hats I have worn and now discarded; some hats I have tried to discard but they just won’t slip away. I have found this in my online life, where I have produced blogs on silent films, Shakespeare, poetry, film and media, and the moving image work I do at the British Library. I decided I’d had enough of this about a year and discarded some sites, deciding instead to bring all of my interests in the one blog, this one.

It hasn’t quite worked out as I’d planned, chiefly because what I really wanted was a rest from so much writing, hence the infrequency of the posts here, not to mention their varied and sometimes eccentric content. I’ll continue with this site as planned, but may start up one or two new ones, as the mood takes me – and once the weather stops being quite so hot. I do have one site now in development, of which I’ll have more to say soon.

Meanwhile, you may notice a few more posts appearing here on the theme of news. There have been one or two already, and it’s a subject that interests me greatly, but I recently took on a curatorial role for news at the BL (as well as moving image), and I want to air some ideas here (as I have before now). The BL has its own blogs which I ought to make more use of, but somehow the institutional blog feels like a contradiction in terms – being ever so pally with your audience when all you are really doing is selling a product. Of course the British Library is a good and noble product, a credit to the nation and a world’s treasure. But blogs are only diaries, and are consequently individual matters.

Here is the place to think.

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