Friday Reading S03E09

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering media, technology and politics. And frequently Doctor Who and 80’s music too. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London.

Roy Greenslade on the millions of pounds spent by the media industry failing to find Lord Lucan, and how much journalists enjoyed failing to find him in increasingly exotic locations.

This article reinforces two of my major beliefs:

The general public (especially people my age and under) really don’t care about Lord Lucan, it’s just become a journalism “thing”.
Journalists pining for “the good old days” are often really pining for a time when they basically took the piss out of their employers. And readers.

The Independent is ceasing to have print editions. This is bobbins.

Absolutely A* response to receiving an email threatening that an advertiser might pull out from your paper because they didn’t like your column about their company’s boss:

“My piece was not biased and I fear you misunderstand our business model. It is my editors’ steadfast refusal to consider the impact of stories on advertisers that makes us the decent newspaper we are. It is why I want to go on working here. It is why the FT goes on paying me.”

Interview with Guardian US editor Lee Glendinning about The Counted and running a small interloping newsroom in the States:

“What we’ve tried to do in America is really focus on issues that can make us a distinct voice in this industry’s landscape, and look at things that are under-covered by the national press.”

The New York Times is using a Slackbot as part of their election coverage.

The Quartz iOS app is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen from a news organisation in the app space for a while. It chats the news to you with a conversational tone.

Like all these things, I’ve put it on the homescreen of my phone to test it out for a while. It will be interesting to see if it can keep its place. I get the feeling that the writing and tone will be the key to keeping it there. I’m intrigued to see if Quartz eventually roll this approach out to genuine chat platforms too.

My old pals at Trinity Mirror also have a new news app out too. Perspecs aggregates opposing views on stories from a range of media sources, and then presents them altogether. Digiday interviewed the product team about it.

Nick Duxbury writes up the recent London Hacks/Hackers Connect conference, with valuable lessons regardless of whether you consider yourself to be a hipster, a hack or a hustler.

“I’m mesmerized. What’s even the point of sending snaps to each other if you don’t look at them? Am I crazy? That seems so unnecessary. Still, this is adult-brain talking. If I wanted to be one of the teens, I needed to just accept it and press on.”

“My Little Sister Taught Me How To ‘Snapchat Like The Teens’” — Bitchamin Hoesen

“The forum administrators are VOLUNTEERS, doing their best to enforce the guidelines WE give them, please don’t blast them for giving their spare time, for free, to try and make the game forums a more pleasant place. Administering the forums of this game is like trying to bathe a house-cat: it’s a great way to get scratched and mauled without any personal benefit. Admins don’t even get free game accounts or anything else, they just get to deal with grumpy people all the time. Not super fun.”

Great set of forum community guidelines/forum code of conduct rules at Vendetta Online.

This makes for some miserable reading:

“My Cracked article was waved around in court by my ex’s lawyers, citing it as ‘the most disgusting thing that happened during GamerGate’ despite my almost one foot stack of threats and photos of me that people had printed out, jizzed on, and sent to my family.”

“Why I Just Dropped The Harassment Charges The Man Who Started GamerGate” — Zoe Quinn

Lengthy excerpt from Tom Lean’s new book on “How the ZX Spectrum Helped the 1980s Become Video Gaming’s Most Creative Decade” — a machine so awesomely great to program that even I managed to make a game for it…

“It includes but is not limited to: videos on YouTube that have never been viewed; Twitter accounts with hundreds of tweets and no followers; spam bots; blurry concert videos with blasted-out sound; Change.org petitions for lost causes; apps that nobody will ever download; and anonymous posts on 4chan that suddenly disappear, extinguishing like distant stars made of burning trash.”

Joe Veix tries to unpack “The Lonely Web” and “How the weird, unfiltered internet became a media goldmine”

Heart-felt , moving and informative: “7 Things That Happen When You’re The Child Of An Alcoholic”

Oh I know all these stories are bogus and probably don’t bear the slightest hint of scrutiny, but I love stuff like this. An essay looking at historical cases of “Mysterious People Who Appeared from Nowhere”

“7 Perpetual Motion Devices That Didn’t Work — Always fake, but not always hoaxes”

This is still one of my favourite web news articles of all time. I was reminded it of it by all the hoo-ha about possible changes to Twitter. The year is 2006, and half-a-million Facebook users are absolutely outraged at the introduction of the news feed…

Talking of Twitter changes hoo-ha, this is a former CTO of Facebook talking about why even though people generally interact with algorithmic feeds more, it might be problematic for Twitter:

“Aside from these issues, there is a larger strategic concern: moving into a space that is closer to Facebook and most other internet products is not necessarily good for Twitter even if it increases usage in the short term. Twitter has thrived despite all the management turnover, slow execution, and attempts at competition because it occupies a unique niche and has an almost total lock on that market. That lock comes from having a set of complementary product choices that are impossible for others to copy without throwing away their core strengths. This defensible position is valuable for them long term and that needs to be weighed against short term gains.”

And here Casey Newton at The Verge looks at what people have been seeing in testing of non-chronological Twitter, and how they have reacted to it.

Personally, I’ve gone there…

Amazing Reddit thread discussing the annoying things that men do, where each point is almost immediately followed by a mansplaining of why men do that thing, and how it isn’t so bad after all etc… #NotAllMen

Big thank you to the weekend NHS staff at Whipps Cross who diagnosed that I’ve just spent nearly three weeks walking around with a fractured ankle. No wonder it bloody hurt…