{"id":28755,"date":"2013-04-10T10:22:55","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T09:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=28755"},"modified":"2013-04-10T10:22:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T10:22:55","slug":"journalist-spotlight-rhodri-marsden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/journalist-spotlight-rhodri-marsden\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalist Spotlight: Rhodri Marsden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RhodriRhodri Marsden writes a weekly lifestyle column and monthly technology column for The Independent, a weekly column about Twitter for Shortlist.com and technology features for other publications. Rhodri spoke to Cision about David Bowie\u2019s vegetable juicer, a crackpot inventor and working in a bubble.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

How did your career develop?<\/span>
<\/b>Originally I worked in the music business, doing logistics for bands playing in Eastern Europe. I remember failing to find David Bowie an industrial strength vegetable juicer in Budapest on a Sunday. In 2001 I started writing comedy content for websites for the BBC, E4 and others; when I realised that comedy was fiercely competitive and soul-destroying I started writing features and regulars. First for Time Out<\/a>, then The Independent<\/a>, the Observer Music Monthly<\/a>, radiotimes.com<\/a>, The Guardian<\/a>, Olive<\/a> and many others.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the balance between technology and your Life on Marsden column?<\/span>
<\/b>As you say, I do a preposterously self-indulgent weekly column about myself for The Independent called Life On Marsden<\/a>, a monthly tech column for the same paper called Cyberculture<\/a>, a weekly column about Twitter<\/a> for Shortlist.com, and technology features here and there.<\/p>\n

The balance? Well, I spent 20% of the week panicking about and writing the column about myself, 60% of the week working on tech-related work and ideas, and 20% of the week staring into space. It might look like I\u2019m doing nothing, but thinking is an important part of the creative process. Apparently.<\/p>\n

How does playing in a band fit in with being a journalist?<\/span>
<\/b>Playing in a band fits in perfectly with journalism, except when you\u2019re on tour and you have a stack of deadlines and you\u2019re typing with your laptop on your knee in the lobby of a Premier Inn outside Coventry. That\u2019s harrowing.<\/p>\n

How significant are columnists to digital media?<\/span>
<\/b>Opinion drives digital media, cos argument and disagreement equals traffic equals revenue. So the opinionated are hugely significant… Columnists, in the traditional sense of the word, are obviously less important than they used to be \u2013 just because their written content when transferred to the web only forms a minuscule percentage of the great writing that\u2019s out there.<\/p>\n

What is the future of print?<\/span>
<\/b>I don\u2019t know. I like newspapers. I like getting a balance of news that\u2019s decided by a talented editorial team, and I vastly prefer that to getting my news filtered through whoever I\u2019m friends with or following on social media. I\u2019d hope that newspapers will soldier on for a while, but to be honest I\u2019m a bit head-in-the-sand about it.<\/p>\n

How will the new press regulations affect your role, if at all?<\/span>
<\/b>Barely. I\u2019ve only ever had one legal threat in thirteen years, and that was from an inventor who I described as \u2018crackpot\u2019. He insisted that he wasn\u2019t a crackpot, but fortunately I had a minidisc recording which proved that he was.<\/p>\n

How do you use social media?<\/span>
<\/b>Heavily. I follow a lot of people, I\u2019ve created a complex array of Twitter lists and Facebook groups to try and keep the signal to noise level high. When my self-esteem dips at around 2pm each day I\u2019ll post a lot of stuff online to try and reassure myself that people like me.<\/p>\n

How important are journalist-to-journalist relationships?<\/span>
<\/b>I pretty much work in a bubble. Not an actual bubble. A room, in my house. I\u2019ve probably visited The Independent\u2019s offices less than ten times in a decade \u2013 so I don\u2019t work alongside journalists and generally don\u2019t socialise with them either. Not because I don\u2019t like them. They\u2019re lovely. I just kind of get on with it.<\/p>\n

How do you work with PRs?<\/span>
<\/b>They relentlessly send me things, and when they send me something interesting I\u2019ll reply to it.<\/p>\n

What do PRs do that\u2019s good?<\/span>
<\/b>Presenting news from their clients in a way that can form part of a bigger story, be part of a balanced piece, and understanding that it can\u2019t be an advertorial.<\/p>\n

What do PRs do that\u2019s bad?<\/span>
<\/b>Doing the opposite of the above.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/a>Take Five<\/b><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>What\u2019s the next big area in the technology industry?<\/b><\/span>\u00a0
Wearable tech, the integration of computing power with the body… We\u2019re seeing the beginnings of it with RFID wristbands, Google Glass and so on, and it\u2019s only going to grow and grow.<\/span><\/p>\n

What would your super power be?<\/b><\/span>
Pre-empting and preventing the tantrums of others by deploying soothing chat.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>What\u2019s your motto in life?\u00a0<\/b><\/span>\u00a0
Let other people make bad choices with impunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>Who would play you in a film?<\/b><\/span>\u00a0
W C Fields, if he wasn\u2019t dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>What one thing could you not live without?<\/b><\/span>\u00a0
Fingers.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Editorial information on Rhodri Marsden, The Independent and thousands of other media contacts and outlets, can be found in the CisionPoint<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Media Database<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rhodri Marsden writes a weekly lifestyle column and monthly technology column for The Independent, a weekly column about Twitter for Shortlist.com and technology features for other publications. Rhodri spoke to Cision about David Bowie\u2019s vegetable …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":322,"featured_media":28779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[248,350,7272,3532,5741],"tags":[2882,3291,4347,4348,4349,4350],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/322"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}