Times journalist takes 'first person' risk

I plucked this quote from an article about Manchester United's top 50 players in The Times Online late last night:

"One of the rules of writing for The Times is that you avoid referring to yourself in the first person unless you have been on the newspaper for about 20 years, but, for once, I'm going to let my hair down."

You could see why the confessional nature of (some) blogging might not fit with The Times' institutional culure can't you?

I hope the author, Kaveh Solhekol, got away with it.

(More fuel for Rod Liddle's raging fire)

Pressing the button: once it's published, it's published

Ruth Gledhill, the Times religion correspondent, publishes a blog post, then deletes it, finds it has been republished on another blog and then asks for it to be removed. Which it was. But it's still there of course in Google cache. (Via Adrian Monck).

Which is interesting because these 'ooops-I-probably-shouldn't-have-published-that' moments potentially make great news stories for journalists. You'd think journalists might realise this and take a little care over pressing the 'publish' button, but apparently they're still learning.

British blogger inside Kenya

The Times has tracked down a British housewife blogging in Kenya. Frances Woodhams, 35, and mother of three children, started blogging in 2006. She says that all the "mundane" matters she used to write about on her blog have "gone out of the window". In a post on 2nd January, she describes being "sick with worry", and New Year's day as "truly a black day for Kenyans".