UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon will today unveil a memorial to casualties of war often ignored by the general public: reporters, journalists, photographers and their attendant translators killed whilst working. The memorial, a glass and steel cone atop the new wing of Broadcasting House in Portland Place, will shine a beacon of light into the sky at 10pm every evening. The International News Safety Institute estimates that two reporters are killed each week. Despite the......

. As Free Range 2007 moves into its second week, Londonist has a chat with Christopher Butt from University College for the Creative Arts in Epsom and finds out about his work and love of weird smells. Christopher, tell us a little bit about you and your work. Well, I'm big on coffee and kit kats. I love the smell of ink on paper. Strange as it sounds, I also get excited about Pantones and......

On entering Kinetica Museum's new Soundwaves exhibition, you're likely to first stumble upon a collaboration between Slade School of Fine Art graduates Lu Clarke and Jaye Ho. The aptly-named "Collaboration 1" is comprised of an array of speakers arranged on the floor, each containing a considerable amount of sand. White wires run everywhere, connecting to a mixer at one end and black foot pads at the other. While instructions given to us at the......

Our weekend roundup of all that's good in London blogs While most bloggers, us included, cocked a sarcastic snook at the Starbucks store locator, Diamond Geezer has, typically, been more inventive. He's put together a crude map of London showing the number of outlets per postal district. W1, naturally, has the most with 32, whereas poor/lucky RM1, BR1 and SM1 only have one each. Our old friend Brian, the blogging pigeon, did some investigative journalism......

This Day In London’s History 1911: Prolific film director Val Guest is born in Maida Vale. Although probably most renowned for directing (and co-writing) sci-fi classics The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II in the mid 1950s, the cinematic career of the man who was born Valmond Maurice Grossman on December 11th 1911 in Maida Vale was long and varied. Since his early twenties, he had tried his hand at acting, scriptwriting and even composing,......

If you're the type who would sleep better if you knew what to do in a hostage situation, then clear your diary for tonight. Aimed at journalists and anyone likely to be working in war zones, the Frontline Club is holding a talk titled Managing a Hostage Crisis, covering what to do if you find yourself taken hostage and what the rise of kidnapping situations in war zones means for war reporting. The panel......

There's no better way to kick off a Tuesday morning than with a headline like LL Cool J's Trouser Shame. Yes, according to this article, if you were at Brixton Academy last Friday to see 'Ladies Love' you might have got more than you bargained for after he took to the stage "only to realise his trousers were undone - revealing a cheeky flash of his manhood". LL's excuse: " I was in too......

This Day in London's History Best stay at home today. 16 October seems to be a date of doom and/or gloom for the capital. (And, incidentally, it's also Davina MaCall's birthday.) 1834: Disastrous fire at Westminster. What Guy Fawkes et al. had failed to do 200 years earlier, a bundle of old tally sticks managed in 1834. The outmoded accounting tools were set for disposal. Dickens sums up what happened next: It came to......

"What is it about us on this small island of ferocity?" asks Andy Marr in today's Telegraph, where no-one smiles or helps anyone else, engaging in a fist fight is necessary to get on the tube in the morning and "in supermarkets, people jostle and glare as if shopping were a deadly competition". It's not as though he thinks LA is perfect though: "They still can't do coffee, white wine, airports, motorway signs, irony......

More details have emerged today about Associated Newspapers' contender to thelondonpaper. It's described as a "new free London paper”, and the biggest disappointment is that they haven't chosen to call it thenewfreelondonpaper. In fact it's going to go under the monumentally boring name of London Lite, a ridiculous suffix that AN seem to have stolen from the diet drinks industry and got stuck on. For a start, it's spelled L I G H T.......

What's the best way to relieve stress, do you reckon? Ok, what's the best way for bankers to relieve stress? We know what you're thinking (because you're just like us) but it's got nothing to do with Mrs Palm and her five daughters. The answer, according to Karin Hochapfel, is singing lessons. Ms Hochapfel, you see, has just started running "stress-busting" classes in Canary Wharf (having run them for a year in the West......

A 29-year-old father of two has been shot dead in Chalk Hill, Wembley as he was taking his children to school. The man who climed the Eye yesterday was finally talked down after seven hours and promptly arrested. The winning image in the Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards 2006 is a shot of the No.30 bus in Tavistock Square taken just after the explosion on 7th July. Prince Charles opened the Jameel Gallery of Islamic......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Tuesday 27 June Is there such a thing as Women’s Journalism? Eleanor Mills, co-editor of Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs - 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women, argues that women have a special strength when they put themselves and their point of view into what they write, giving examples from the last century. 6.30pm......

As regular readers of Londonist will know we're big fans of local newspapers and their coverage of the obscure and the exquisitely dull. But today we stumbled across this article from the Epsom Guardian which manages to encapsulate so beautifully every element of bad local journalism (and therefore everything that we love about it) that we initially thought it had to be a wind-up. Kevin Barnes' article is headlined One man and his dog:......

With the London Line a distant memory save for a few battered bins now collecting McDonalds wrappers there's still room for a real alternative to that vile sack of swine swill, The Evening Standard. Let's hope then that the about to be launched Penny can finally give us a decent publication in the vein of New York's Village Voice and San Francisco's double whammy of free weeklies. Jemima over at journalism.co.uk has an interesting......

The Adjudication Panel for England were told today by Ken's solicitor, Tony Child, that when the mayor compared Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold to a concentration camp guard he damged his own reputation but not that of his office. Child also compared Ken to the likes of Profumo, Blunkett and Jeffrey Archer. Not to say that Ken is a blind, womanising criminal with a penchant for showgirls and sideline in bloody awful novels, but......

Londonist was in Mile End last Thursday, attending Alan Rusbridger's inaugral lecture as the new Hugo Young Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London. The subject of The Guardian editor's lecture, organised by a group of history postgraduate students, was 'Weblogs vs Journalism: The Future of Newspapers' and as you would perhaps expect, the delivery was sharp, erudite and at times, rather funny. Rusbridger's premise was that in an era where newspapers across......

There's a good little article in one of today's papers about a couple of members of the Metropolitan Police who took a trip to Olympia yesterday to view the striptease act which forms the centrepiece of the Erotica 2005 convention. Of course Inspector Chris Bedwell and Sergeant Jez Hirst weren't their purely for entertainment value, they were there "to make sure it's a decent show and that the organisers obey by the terms of......

A couple of weeks ago we ran a couple of stories about BBC's London news reporter Matt Barbet and what seemed to be a growing legion of 'Barbettes' - Barbet groupies who were watching Matt on the telly for more than his incisive reporting skills. At the end of one of those posts we suggested that maybe we should interview Matt to try and get to the bottom of this phenomenon. Well it seems......

That headline may sound like the title of one of Richard Desmond's more 'downmarket' publications, but we're actually talking about his impending free London paper: the London-i, which seems to have been 'impending' for quite a while now. To be fair Des' does have a pretty good excuse: he's been awaiting the result of the Office of Fair Trading's investigation into Metro's distribution on the tube. But it seems he's got bored of waiting......

The BBC is today reporting that the London Eye is no longer under imminent danger. However, this may prove to be weasel words if we look at the detail of what has transpired. In short, the South Bank Centre has said that it is not proposing the absurd and extortionate increase in rent it was reported to have wanted - up from £65,000 to £1 million. It adds that it will be seeking a......

Londonist was pleased to see yet another smooth and faultless launch of an -ist site, this time in Austin Texas, a city we initially heard about due to it being the setting for Richard Linklaters engrossing low-fi indie debut, Slacker, but is now firmly on our places to visit (or mooch off people and overstay our welcome) list. Austin, at least if Ben is to be believed (and we're not sure that he is)......

This article by Max Carlish, from today's Guardian, is one of the most obnoxious pieces of 'journalism' we have ever had the misfortune to read. If it's worth reading at all then it is only to understand what the rot at the very heart of this country's music industry looks and smells like. That's it.......

It's good to see that the whole Ken Livingstone furore hasn't deterred the Evening Standard from it's everyday crusade towards pioneering journalism...as these thermal images of Buckingham Palace clearly show. Why are we looking at thermal images of Buckingham Palace, you may ask. Well, it's part of a Standard campaign to reveal which London landmarks are losing the heat insulation battle. Both the Palace and the Houses of Parliament faired badly with "huge amounts......

Londonist has just received its first Christmas present of the year: Jon Ronson's Blog. Ronson is a firm Londonist favourite. Yes his books and his TV programmes are all very good and interesting. But we love him simply because he's just such a weird bloke. We love his Guardian column in which he slags off his neighbours and reports what happens when he types his own name into Google. And we love his journalism,......