Xinhua, China’s state news agency, announced this week what was claimed to be the world’s first AI news anchor. It presented to a conference in Wuzhen two virtual anchors, each derived from human newsreaders working for Xinhua. There was a Chinese-speaking anchor, based on Qiu Hao, and an English-speaking anchor, based on Zhang Zhao. BothRead More
Below is the text of a paper I gave recently at ‘Language Matters‘, the 5th Transfopress Encounter in Paris. Transfopress is an international network of archivists, librarians and scholars interested in the study of foreign language press. The subject of this conference was printed news in English abroad and foreign-language publishing in the English-speaking world.Read More
Ink is a new play running at the Almeida Theatre in London, written by James Graham, author of the very successful drama about 1970s politics, This House. Its subject is the relaunch of The Sun newspaper under owner Rupert Murdoch (played by Bertie Carvel) and editor Larry Lamb (Richard Coyle). It’s a clever and entertainingRead More
This is the text of a talk I gave to a research event on newsreels at CIAC research centre, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal, on 9 February 2017. I’ve also published it as a PDF, with footnotes instead of hyperlinks. In the original talk I ended with eight reasons for using newsreels to study history,Read More
There are exciting changes happening in how we use newspapers to study the past. After decades in which the use of newspapers in research meant leafing through volumes or scrolling through microfilms, digitisation made millions of newspapers more readily searchable and far more widely available. But now that digitisation that taken us to the nextRead More
Newspapers may be in decline, but that isn’t stopping publishers coming up with fresh ways in which to produce the news in print.Over the past two years we have seen four new ‘national’ newspapers appear in the UK: The National, The New Day, 24 – The North’s National and The New European. Each presents aRead More
Returning (a little later than planned) to this occasional series on useful online resources, here’s a listing of newspaper archives. I happen to work at one of the world’s largest newspaper archives, where we have digitised some 14 million pages on the British Newspaper Archive, with many more millions to come. But this is aRead More
The screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) wrote one of the essential books on Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Among its many words of wisdom about how movies actually work, the most celebrated are those that express what he calls “the single most importantRead More
I went to the cinema this afternoon to see Spotlight, and I was very impressed. It is fully deserving of its Academy Award. It is not only a gripping, sobering account of priestly child abuse in Boston, but champions the noble practice of investigative journalism, highlighting the best of newspapers at a time when theRead More
This is the text of a blog post on the archiving of news which I wrote recently for the British Library’s Newsroom blog. Wherever possible – or wherever it interests me – I’m reproducing texts here which have been written on other platforms. The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are toRead More