The Crucial Blog

THE tragic and untimely end to Marie Colvin's brilliant and courageous career has come as a powerful antidote to the tide of sleaze which seemed to seep out and stain the  reputation of all journalists in the wake of the Leveson inquiry. She believed passionately in uncovering the truth wherever she found it and the example she set now reminds us of the very highest standards that can be achieved in the profession. The role of the war...

Q. How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb? A1. We just report the facts, we don't change them. A2. Three. One to report it as an inspired government programme to bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot to deprive the poor of darkness and one to win a Pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb assassin to break the bulb in the...

My name's Juliette and I am a journalist. There - in these current climes it sounds like an admission of something shameful. Well, the evidence coming out of the Levenson Inquiry into press ethics has indeed been shocking, disturbing and downright shameful. Only today Alistair Campbell is being reported as saying in his written evidence that the press is "frankly putrid in many of its elements" and that a very small number of people have "besmirched...

Life's full of coincidences isn't it. There I was in my last blog musing about the skill and wit of The Sun's headline writers and then, hey presto, find myself perusing an array of info from Copyblogger founder Brian Clark on the writing of great headlines and why they're so critical. And, by the way, the subs at The Sun show no signs of flagging. Only yesterday Lucky Heather was applied to a single column five...

Who care's about apostrophe's? I do, and those slips were intentional, by the way. I also care about all punctuation, and spelling and grammar, so no doubt this blog will peppered with errors that you'll be pleased to point out. And quite right too. There is a school of thought that all those rules we learnt at our English master's knee are no longer relevant in this fast-moving world ruled by txt spk and foreshortened tweets....