Kate Griffin freelance journalism and editing

Possibly the worst advert ever made?

I’ve criticised e-consultancy.com here and here for their chillingly inaccurate view on what journalists want from a website.

Earlier I criticised e-consultancy.com about an article purporting to explain what journalists look for when they come to a website. I'm going to post some constructive advice soon, but first I want to highlight the assumptions behind the article and why they're wrong.

This online guide to what journalists want sent a shiver down my spine.

It reads as if the writer has enrolled in a Victorian object lesson about journalism, but never actually met a real live journalist. It represents the newsgathering process about as well as What Women Want mapped the depths of female consciousness.

At the time of writing, Google is returning 1,160,000 results for the search term “community newspaper”, as opposed to 192,000 for “regional newspaper”.  On that basis, you could be forgiven for thinking that community journalism has become the most prevalent form of print media in the world today.