I am a sound engineer by profession and so I get asked pretty frequently why on earth I’m still recording things with a titchy Sony minidisc machine rather than one of the fancy new Flash recorders. For those of you who don’t do recording, Flash recorders, or more correctly solid-state recorders, are the next big thing in portable recording equipment. They store the sound onto a memory card and you can then import that audio into your computer extremely quickly, much faster than real-time. The reason why I still use a minidisc is that although I’ve looked at loads of Flash recorders I still haven’t found one that is better than what I’m using at the moment once you consider size, cost, quality and convenience.
However, minidisc is dead as a format, thanks to Sony’s insane money-grabbing policies, so I know that I’ll have to get a Flash recorder eventually. Since I’m sure that there are plenty of other people with the same dilemma, I’ve put together a collection of my thoughts on all the Flash recorders that I know about. You’ll find it on the Flash Recorders page. If you have any opinions or facts to add, please tell me so that I can incorporate them into the article.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
“Whispering” Alan Johnston has gone missing in Gaza, he may have been kidnapped. He’s the BBC correspondent there but before that he was an editor on a World Service News programme, the World Today. When I was working as a producer he was my editor and he was one of the most kind and helpful people I have ever worked for. He is also a careful and principled journalist and full of enthusiasm for his job. I once met him in Clapham High Street, on his way to interview someone for a documentary, and he told me how lucky he thought he was to be able to do something he loved so much and get paid for it. I really hope he’s OK.
I just got this great spam: “Did you know obesity kills more and more people every year? We know you hate the extra pounds, the ugly look and the social stigmata attached to fat people.”
So this is the blogosphere’s big chance. Big media has been muzzled by the courts and only the free press, the plucky political bloggers, are free to tell us the whole story. (I’m talking about the Cash for Honours story, but of course you knew that!)
As soon as the BBC was prevented from running last night’s story about an embarrassing email, possibly involving “two members of Tony Blair’s inner circle” I knew that the the baton would be taken up by Media 2.0. Free from the shackles of partisan proprietors and government interference they would be able to tell the story that the mainstream media cannot.
How wrong I was. They have nothing to say at all. It’s not just because they’re too chicken, it’s also because those bloggers who take an interest in this sort of story don’t want to do anything that might weaken any eventual prosecution of a member of the government.
It’s tactical reporting, they only report things that they hope will lead to an outcome that they desire. In other words it’s not journalism at all. Journalists, even quite bad ones, all realise that they have a responsibility to do stories whether or not the reporting of a story will lead to a happy (or a sad) ending. The point is that you just report the facts, you don’t try to decide the outcome.
This is why bloggers will never replace journalists, or at least, I hope they never do.
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