Friday Reading S03E13
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. And frequently Doctor Who. And 80’s music. And anything else that grabbed his eye. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London. And this is unlucky edition 13 of this season.
“George Martin: the man who changed pop forever (with a little help from his friends)” — Alexis Petridis
I know it is boring having to read stuff from Emily Bell every week in this email, but she is so spot on at the moment that it feels everything she writes is essential reading:
“With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this. In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.”
“Facebook is eating the world” — Emily Bell
Really good interview with Alison Phillips who is editor of new national Trinity Mirror print title “The New Day”
“One of the starting points of this project was the number of women who told me they couldn’t face newspapers any more because they were too distressing. The truth is most people in Britain think their life is, in general, all right, and they want a paper that both reflects and shares that reality. I must stress that I’m not talking about producing a newspaper with a diet of good news. It’s hard to articulate to other journalists. Through balance in editorial choices, controlling the menu, I want the end result to leave readers with a positive outlook, the one they already have.”
Such a fascinating project — I really hope they can make a success of it.
Interesting, especially in the light of Alison’s insistence that The New Day is for “normal” people:
“Today, most remaining journalists live in metropolitan enclaves such as Brooklyn, north London and central Paris, and look like the elites they cover. ‘Elitist Britain’, the 2014 report of a government-appointed commission, found that 54 of the country’s ‘top 100 media professionals’ attended private schools. Journalists, politicians, senior civil servants and business people meet as classmates, then marry each other or become neighbours.”
“Journalists need to get out more” — Simon Kuper
“I really hope this doesn’t become the future of journalism.”
“The Most Dangerous Writing App deletes all your work if you stop typing” — Thomas McMullan
I love me a good bit of crossword community gossip, I do. And this is ace.
“Despite Parker’s denial, many in the crossword world see willful plagiarism in Parker’s puzzles, and they see the database that revealed the repetition as a tool of justice. ‘It’s like a murder mystery solved 50 years later with DNA evidence,’ Matt Gaffney, a professional crossword constructor, told me.”
And how many articles get to have a paragraph this cool…
“To confirm the database was accurate, I went to the library and pulled spool after spool of microfilm. Sure enough, there were the replications in black and white.”
“A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World” — Oliver Roeder
Loads of data on when people actually read stuff on Medium which suggests “Friday Reading” at lunchtime is exactly the wrong time to publish :-)
Liam Fox said that the UK didn’t need to bury its past unlike some other EU nations and I found that unlikely so we asked our readers and then I produced a list of injustices perpetuated by the UK during the 20th century and then over a 1,000 comments happened in a couple of hours and I posted this sum-up of what I learned and also if you ever need 1,000 comments from Guardian readers in the space of a couple of hours I am your man. *hi-five emoji*
“And that is the kernel of pragmatic relations between academics and policymakers: to find productive common ground that serves the public good; to offer help if it’s wanted; and to be pushy if you think it’s worth it. Should this activity be banned?”
Fighting talk from Ben Goldacre on the government’s apparent move to ban academics who receive grant funding from being able to talk to ministers about it.
“Pickering, who was seen as a liberal progressive, thought hiring Fleming as a ‘computer,’ to catalogue the data and do all the tedious work the men couldn’t be bothered to do, seemed like a good bet. Hired at a mere 25 to 50 cents an hour, not only were women like Fleming getting the job done, but they were saving the observatory a fair bit of money. As archaic as that sounds now, at the time Harvard Observatory was one of the only options in the area for a female mathematician to apply her skills. Women’s colleges existed, but assumed graduates would get married rather than start a career; female graduates were eager to use their mathematical knowledge for real-world use.”
“How Female Computers Mapped the Universe and Brought America to the Moon” — Natalie Zarrelli
This is astonishing: “An inappropriate interview question”
“So these days it’s the song, and the scale of the event surrounding it. One song, one digestible thing, with millions of people standing in a circle around it, pointing and shouting and writing about it, conducting one gigantic online undergraduate seminar about it, metabolizing it on roughly the same level that cable-news debate shows metabolize a political speech. This is an ever-greater share of the public life of music. A song like ‘Formation’ isn’t set up as a story, or an interior monologue — it’s set up as Beyoncé, the public celebrity whose biography you already know, addressing the world, like an op-ed with drums.”
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. And frequently Doctor Who. And 80’s music. And anything else that grabbed his eye. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London.
