Friday Reading S03E16

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 about the disparity between the coverage we give to events like Brussels and Lahore, and the disparity between the audience interest in them. And over 50,000 people read it.

Lengthy essay on the success of the dickweeds running Islamic State in using digital tools and social media.

“That message, like so many other pieces of Islamic State propaganda, was crafted not just to stir the hearts of potential recruits but also to boost the organization’s ghastly brand — to reinforce Westerners’ perception of the Islamic State and its devotees as ruthless beyond comprehension. All terrorist groups seek to cultivate this kind of image, of course, because their power derives from their ability to inspire dread out of proportion to the threats they actually pose. But the Islamic State has been singularly successful at that task, thanks to its mastery of modern digital tools, which have transformed the dark arts of making and disseminating propaganda. Never before in history have terrorists had such easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions”

and

“Its brand has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it has transformed into something akin to an open source operating system for the desperate and deluded — a vague ideological platform upon which people can construct elaborate personal narratives of persecution or rage.”

Here are the Telegraph talking about how they built their new CMS based on simplicity.

And here’s a screenshot of the system they used to use, which we also employed at Trinity Mirror when I worked there. Look at it. Look at the absolute fucking state of the idea that this is a fucking tool you would actually give to real people to publish web content in the year of our lord two thousand and sixteen. What a fucking unforgivable mess.

The Times and Sunday Times have also rejigged their website. Here’s a quite detailed techie look at building the UI from one of the developers, Pedro Duarte

And here’s a blog from Adam Tinworth looking a little bit at the editionalised digital publishing strategy the papers are adopting.

George Brock with a little antidote to the usual doom and gloom that surrounds the newspaper industry: “Journalism isn’t dying: there’s even room for optimism about print”

“Newspapers do fail and people lose their livelihoods. But papers are extraordinarily hard to kill. Millionaires, whose methods in any other business are unsentimental and ruthless, preserve them because they think they bring influence and prestige. Even if falling circulations and reputations dilute the influence, newspaper ownership guarantees political access. More newspapers died in the US around the early 1960s, when television was becoming a mass medium and seizing advertising, than have been extinguished by the arrival of the internet.”

And then I went to #CityNewsprint and watched Christian Broughton, (Editor Independent Digital), Sarah Baxter (Deputy Editor The Sunday Times) and Professor Jane Singer discuss horses and the future for print journalism and then a load of boring old men asked boring old questions and I got very cross about it and wrote it all down.

Then Sophie Warnes read that, and she got cross too at the boring old men and their boring old questions, so she wrote “Journalism is dead”

“One of the appeals for media companies has been a sense of regaining control of Facebook’s news feed, the primary source of information on the social network, where posts are sorted based on an opaque computer program. The lack of control has made reaching users — even those that follow media brands intentionally — more competitive. With Live, though, live broadcasts display higher in users’ feeds — a prioritization Facebook has acknowledged publicly. The service also notifies users through mobile apps when friends and pages they follow begin broadcasting.”

A whizz round a few media companies in the US and how they have been experimenting with Facebook Live video.

“Why hadn’t I tried to swim Tony back to shore along with Jake? Why didn’t I swim back to him after saving Jake? How could I not have panicked, even when he was drowning before my eyes? The others’ astonishment at my outburst only made me angry. Why wouldn’t they see — I could have saved him? Come to think of it, if I hadn’t booked this holiday in the first place, he would still be alive. For that matter, he would still be alive if I had never met him. Whichever way you looked at it, if it weren’t for me, Tony would not be dead.”

An amazing piece of writing from Decca Aitkenhead about watching the father of her kids drown.

Love letter to the place I grew up and where I now once again live: Dear Walthamstow, (a goodbye letter to E17…)

I enjoyed this exploration about how interpreting sexuality subtexts in literature, whether from the medieval period or as recently as the early 20th century, is fraught with problems and academic snobbishness. Although as we well know, everybody in history was white and straight and almost certainly a man.

Sweet tribute to Garry Shandling with a lovely punchline and just a little hint of how bloody weird and happenstance pop culture life was like before the internet.

If you have a soft spot for inadvertently hilarious articles written about a sport you don’t understand that takes place in a foreign country, then please let me introduce you to “King Richard III Is Miracle Soccer Team’s Most Valuable Player”

The bit where Chelsea and Manchester City are described as “traditional powerhouses” may be my favourite sentence written so far this year.

Ruby Tandoh. Eating at Wimpy. For Vice.

“I’m barely through the door before a waiter hurries over to ask if I’ve had a good morning, and so ingrained are my antisocial impulses that I nearly turn on my heels and walk straight out again. I was expecting, even hoping, that this would be just another faceless fast food experience, where I’d leave full of belly and devastated of spirit, just the way I like it.”

Joel Golby has killed me to death with his bantersaurus antics: “There Is No More Banter Left After the Hijacker Selfie Became a Thing”

“Sadly, though, banter is now over, because of this. All of the piss has been taken. This man. This man took all the remaining piss. There is no piss left to take. Our piss reservoirs have run dry. This town will die without piss. But someone took it. Someone took it all. Don’t bother looking in that well, Little Timmy. There’s no piss down there. And without it, your family is doomed to die. Because Ben Innes from Leeds took all the piss, took it all for himself”

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.