Converged Media/Cleft Stick is a resource used in journalism training and teaching. Journalists, students and others are welcome to use the material and exercises on this website. All material is copyright of Loose Wire Pte Ltd, unless otherwise stated.
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I’d like to thank the following who have contributed to Converged Media/Cleft Stick:
- Edward Yong, a contributor to Wikipedia
- Jon Petersen of SinGeo
- Olaf Lohmann of ComVu
- Darius Cheung of tencube
- Premesh Chandran of malaysiakini
And, for generously lending equipment and other resources:
- Nokia Singapore
- StarHub
- m1
- RIM
For those of you curious about the name, this is from World Wide Words
Things once held in a literal cleft stick included a candle (this appears in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: “He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft stick”) and an arrowhead attached to a cleft shaft, but the one that at once comes to mind for me is a letter. A typical example is in a famous work of travel writing, still in print, The Land of Footprints by the American author Stewart Edward White, a memoir he published in 1913 that recounted the year he spent in East Equatorial Africa early in the century:
About the middle of the morning we met a Government runner, a proud youth, young, lithe, with many ornaments and bangles; his red skin glistening; the long blade of his spear, bound around with a red strip to signify his office, slanting across his shoulder; his buffalo hide shield slung from it over his back; the letter he was bearing stuck in a cleft stick and carried proudly before him as a priest carries a cross to the heathen in the pictures.