Monthly Archives: June 2004

D-Day 1944 Front Page

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Taking a page from their coverage of the current war in Iraq, CBC News has produced a commemorative
online news version of D-Day.

Research for the series yielded a “find” — Katharine Hepburn’s June 1944 bi-lingual CBC radio broadcast for the Sixth Victory Loan. Two weeks before her appearance, she discovered that she was to deliver the broadcast in both French and English. (Real Audio file available.) The special also includes “a soldiers letters” and a “photographs from the front” slide show.

This is a beautiful series. What’s missing is an easily found backgrounder on the series; details on inspiration and process would be appreciated.

AJR on political blogging

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

“When political bloggers bay in the blogosphere, do political reporters hear them?”

So begins an essay in the June/July issue of American Journalism Review.

The article explores the relationship between political blogs and “Big Jouralism” that I began examining earlier this spring for WWW2004. It also explores political campaign movements, such as the Dean “Adopt-a-Journalist effort” demonstrated by Wilgoren Watch.
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UK sites flunk accessibility

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

According to an article in the Guardian today, “almost two thirds of the UK’s top 100 firms fail to meet even the most basic recognised standard of accessibility to disabled people.”

I don’t get it — basic accessibility is reasonably easy to build-in (ALT text) but only 41% of the sites even did that!

The UK has laws not unlike the US, like the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. The disabled community is not small and not necessarily impoverished. It seems in companies’ best interests to make the “storefront” as open as possible.