Friday Reading S03E14

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.

I wrote an article for the Guardian about the technical and design history of Comment Is Free which was founded ten years ago under the wonderful Georgina Henry’s editorship. I expected about 500 people to read it and I was not wrong. But I knew it would be 500 people who really care about the site. I miss Georgina’s presence in the Guardian office every single day.

And speaking of bereavement, it is worth reading this because all these things will happen or will have happened to you at some point

“Saying goodbye is incredibly hard, excruciatingly so, but it’s so much better than the alternative.”

“I See Dead People. 5 Things I Learned From Being Bereaved” — Alice Bell

Alice’s piece is from a great Storythings project called 5 things I learned, which is a collection of essays of people explaining things they learned from things like throwing parties in Ibiza or being a short-order chef.

I’ve done one too: “5 Things I learned Working in Second-Hand Record Shops” and it features a picture of my 90’s haircut and one of the better anecdotes you will ever read about The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album . Who could resist a click?

“The Mail is often criticized, rightly, for purveying clickbait of one sort or another. Clickbait is a bad story masquerading as a good one to trick people into reading it. But this is not that. This is a jaw-dropping story — masquerading, in the stone hands of the outlets that first reported it, as a straightforward one.”

Or as Ryan Broderick put it on Twitter: “It’s 2016. Why are newspapers still putting boring headlines on amazing stories?”

“Traditional, Owned, Online, and Social media are places where people create and publish content and information. Search engines aren’t. They just show us what we’re looking for. And we trust them. More than we trust the other four sources of information.

The upshot of this is crazy. If you find a news article through an online search, you’re more likely to trust it than you would be if you just went straight to the news organization’s homepage and found the same article there. How can this be true?”

Really interesting essay by Phil Trippenback of Edelman about changes in information flow, who is choosing to produce content, and how people are consuming it.

“If Red Bull stopped making cool videos, they’d still be a drinks manufacturer, but if the BBC stopped making media content, they’d essentially cease to exist.”

I’m unconvinced by some of the argument that x million Twitter followers automatically means something, but the second half of this article, where the suggestion is that social media is stripping away some of the protection that journalists used to get from violent groups makes for worrying reading: “Why journalists should be afraid of Trump’s media strategy”

The FT joins the ranks of publishers who have built their own analytics dashboard aimed specifically at the newsroom and for helping to make editorial decisions.

Rob Hammond from Trinity Mirror explaining the process by which they migrated most of their many sites to having a Google AMP version.

Two points stand out. One the idea that “in Apple News and AMP, our charts, polls and quizzes are replaced by placeholder links. These allow the user to click through to the full site if they’re interested.”

Secondly a chart of the speed performance improvements they’ve got from the move.

It’s not a criticism specifically of Trinity Mirror, but it strikes me as utterly bizarre that as an industry we’ve collectively got ourselves in a place where Google are explaining that we can reduce the web footprint of our pages by some sum of magnitude just by essentially not filling our pages full of crud and data consumption heavy adverts.

Come for the heart-warming stories of how reading Harry Potter changed people’s lives for the better when they were grieving or self-harming or suffering from dyslexia. Stay for the charming animated illustrations.

This is beautifully written, and even more impactful for the fact that it has been published by The Spectator: “How my disabled son has changed my mind about political correctness”

It’s also the only decent article on The Spectator’s political correctness tag page which is an absolute shitshow of bad opinions.

I found the way he was rather self-deprecating towards the end of his career rather endearing, and I regret not quite making enough effort to go and see him in recent years. This is an excellent on Paul Daniels.

“I’ve seen Daniels die countless times. He was shackled in a wooden box on Silverstone racetrack when a car smashed into him. He gave a chilling yell as he was burned at the stake. He was torn apart by speedboats on Windermere. Each time, of course, he somehow magically cheated death. When I was a child, I watched these illusions, these apparent resurrections, incessantly; perhaps as a result, I find his actual death hard to countenance.”

And here’s a compilation of his best clips. Go on. Watch them and put a smile on your face.