First rule of journalism-check your sources.

Though it seems that some of our top outfits failed to do this very thing as they were drawn into the Chris Grayling speech about parts of Britain being like Wired.

Blogger Alex Hilton launched a bogus site claiming to be that of the Major of Baltimore who was not particularly happy about the Conservative spokesman's comments.

(For those already confused-Baltimore is the setting of the fictional drama)

Amongst those falling for the ruse,despite as I understand some rather gigantic clues were the Guardian and the BBC,though the content has now been taken down.

Simon attacks newspaper owners and free content

There were some interesting comments from the creator of the Wire,David Simon being interviewed in the Guardian yesterday.

Besides launching an attack on newspaper owners whom he described as showing "contempt for their product" he said that

he fears a real-life explosion of rampant corruption in American political life if the newspaper industry, in which he worked for more than a decade, is allowed to collapse.

His solution for the industry is to start charging for the product

"If you don't have a product that you're charging for, you don't have a product," he says. "If you think that free is going to produce something that's as much of a cost centre as good journalism – because it costs money to do good journalism – you're out of your mind."

Press Gazette launches new aggregator blog

Press Gazette have this morning launched a news blog,the Wire which attempts to aggregate in the words of Dominic Ponsford

a new cross-media service aimed at providing a comprehensive, intelligent aggregation of every story we can find about journalism

Dominic continues

The Wire will provide a highly-searchable index of journalism stories culled from a plethora of sources across the internet and other media

. adding that

Online is where the action is for news, and The Wire is our attempt create a sort of mega-blog which keeps us and our readers on top of all the big stories about journalism all the time - without diverting limited editorial resources away from the print edition.
And it provides us with the material for a handy page of digested news in the magazine which should become essential reading for anyone who needs to keep up with the fast-changing world of journalism.