Being Taxation’s web editor is not kind on one’s shirts. There’s stubborn, inky grime on each of my cuffs for the seven months of the year that demand long sleeves – and Vanish isn’t cheap, you know.
Such is the dirty price I pay for the responsibility I bear: I read the newspapers so that you don’t have to.
Poring over the national dailies every weekday morning is, on the face of it, a pleasant distraction, albeit one that make one’s wrists terrible inky. There are worse tasks for which to be paid, you might suggest. Indeed, but try flicking through those printed pages day after day, week after week, month after month, year … well, you get the picture.
You’ll soon be left exhausted by each title’s main foible, be it impotent aggression, smugness and self-involvement, frustrating presumptions, or cack-handed bigotry – to target but a few mastheads.
It all works out for the best, mind. The end result is a distillation of tax news that my colleague and I present as the Taxation news briefing, our weekly e-newsletter that sorts the tax wheat from the chaff.
Its purpose: a client reads his or her rag of choice, becomes concerned/alarmed by some report or other, and then later contacts you to discuss the matter… of which you are already aware because – hey! – you subscribe to Taxation’s free mail-out.
It’s delivered to inboxes every Friday afternoon, complete with item-by-item commentary from our in-house tax experts, links to the online versions of the newspapers’ stories, and a run-down of the latest news and tax cases from this website. For your copy, email us here.
Of course, it’s not the only way in which we digitally disseminate news. We have an RSS feed, too. Any good, web-based reader – such as the ones provided by Google, Yahoo! and Netvibes – will keep you up to date with our syndicated news content.
Then there’s Twitter, which you can read about in last week’s column, Tweet treat. There’s also our Facebook page, and our blog.
The blog is for fun – a dog is one of the writers, for goodness sake – but it has a serious intent: to share, discuss and joke about current affairs and opinions on tax and tax-related subjects that wouldn’t make it into the magazine proper. We take our cues from the same laundry-provoking pages that give us our news briefing material. See the Box for a taster of our blogging.
Recent highlights from our editorial team:
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Finally, there’s another weekly mail-out. This one features not news from out there but news from within: Wednesday morning’s Taxation in Three Minutes allows readers to digest the contents of the latest issue as quickly as possible, with the option to read the articles in full. To subscribe, see the foot of this site's middle column.
This is just the second appearance of my new, weekly web column, but it will be the last navel-gazing effort for a while. There’ll be no more selling my digital wares for a while – although if anything exciting crops up on Taxation.co.uk, I’ll let you know, you can be sure.
From the next issue, I’ll shade my eyes with my grubby hand and dare to squint down the information superhighway (not that anyone uses that phrase anymore). Then I’ll let you know what I see at the turnoff sign-posted tax.
If there’s anything appropriate you’d like to share or that you’d like me to look into, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email.
