Simple Pound

With preparations complete I can proudly unveil Kirsten’s new blog, Simple Pound. It aims to share insights into finance and investment at a graduate level, making the most of your starting salary. This is likely to be very relevant for a lot of readers here and Kirsten decided to start this after finding a distinct lack of such information targeted at a UK audience. Aside from her course, she’ll also have first-hand advice from the professionals at Merrill Lynch once she starts working. To begin with she has set out her basic goals — in fact goals seem to be a recurring theme throughout all the posts so far. I am currently hosting the site here, but address you’ll want to bookmark is simplepound.co.uk. We’ll be looking at ways to expand the resources offered beyond the blog itself, but as a personal guide to investment early on in your career it should prove an interesting and informative read.

As if to prove correct my description of the EMI/Apple DRM announcement as a smokescreen, my dad arrived home informing me that EMI and Apple are now selling DRM-free MP3s at the same price as before. None of which is true. Reading the Metro article he had seen it is not difficult to see why he was confused. Although it did not actually state this, it certainly seemed to imply it because the journalist had simply reproduced the Apple/EMI line without actually engaging their brain. That article is by no means an anomaly with virtually every media outlet regurgitating the same press release like faithful lapdogs. When did it become okay for media journalists not to do their job? There are a few exceptions. Engadget, despite being obvious Apple fans, did critique the announcement more astutely, while The Inquirer said something about baseball bats. If this comes up in conversation please clue people up about it. Remember friends don’t let friends buy crippled music. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber.