Friday Reading S03E21
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam covering journalism, media and technology.
All hail King Claudio. The story of Leicester City has put a massive smile on my face this week.
And here is a view from a fan who is also a journalist on how their triumph illustrates the perfect story-telling narrative arc.
“I recently travelled to Iraq at my own expense to write a piece about war graves. Within five hours of the story’s publication by the Times, huge chunks of it appeared on Mail Online — under someone else’s byline
…
As the astute media blog SubScribe pointed out, on the same day that he ‘exposed’ the state of Iraq’s cemeteries McLelland also wrote stories about the junior doctors’ strike, British special forces fighting Isis in Iraq, a policeman’s killer enjoying supervised outings from prison, methods of teaching children to read, the development of odourless garlic, a book by Lee Rigby’s mother serialised in the rival Mirror, and Michael Gove’s warning of an immigration free-for-all if Britain brexits. That’s some workload.”
“What it’s like to fall victim to the Mail Online’s aggregation machine” — Martin Fletcher
All of which puts this piece into a bit of context: “Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here’s What Happened When It Hired Some”
This all sounds absolutely dreadful. If only as an industry we could take the moral high-ground by suggesting that entry level jobs in a lot of newsrooms were something more than churning out barely fact-checked copy for the #numbers.
Adam Tinworth followed that story up with a blog looking at how we can avoid becoming journalism algorithms ourselves.
Very sad to see The New Day closing for both personal and professional reasons. Some good friends worked on it. And to my mind, if you are going to take a bold leap, you’ve got to be prepared to back it up properly. It should have been free for longer to stand a chance of building up an audience, or at least to prove to the business what the numbers might look like if they did an Evening Standard gamble and made the Mirror free.
Strong final message from editor Alison Phillips…
Bob Nicholson writes that, looking at The New Day, in journalism it is better to try and fail, than not try at all. Maybe counter-balanced by this from Quartz: “We have developed a culture of celebrating failure, and it’s completely phony”
Got to be honest, it is always a little bit weird when somebody does a massive in-depth article looking intently at the thing you are supposed to be doing for your job, but this is a good read and also includes a strong inditement of those who say that social media engagement in necessarily a race to the bottom…
“The Guardian’s Books section seems to have attracted a significant audience on Facebook. In March, they broke the half million engagement mark. It’s joy to anyone skeptical about what people are really engaging with on Facebook — there were tens of thousands of interactions on stories about the power of poetry, and rankings of the best non-fiction books ever written.”
“Here’s What Makes The Guardian So Successful On Facebook” — Newswhip
“‘Do we stream just because we can when we have something potentially really shocking?’ The first instinct might be to stream from breaking news events, but journalists should be thinking about what could appear on the screen next, and if they are willing to show that to their audience.”
Excellent advice from Sue Llewellyn on a topic that has been vexing me over the last few weeks: “The spectre of streaming: 7 issues to consider before going live from your phone”
Talking of video ethics, Vice have headcam footage from an ISIS fighter.
“As aggregate data grows, those scraps publishers are feeding on from third parties will continue to get smaller and smaller, and may one day completely disappear — which means newsrooms will be on an even more problematic trajectory.”
More cheery journalism business model news: “When newsrooms don’t own their data, other companies profit” — Melody Kramer
Bots! Bots! Bots! They are going to save/become an expensive distraction to/destroy journalism [*DELETE IN TWO YEARS TIME ACCORDING TO HOW IT ALL PANS OUT]
In the meantime, this a very good reading list of things you might want to find out about bots.
Bots! Bots! Bots!
Now I might be sounding like a massive douchebag here, but I keep seeing people share this “Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously” post widely and I’ve read it and read it and read it and still keep coming back to “But dude, if like me, your music collection files are precious to you, why did you sign up to a service that explicitly promises to use different files from the mythical cloud instead?”
Racism, overt and covert has been a big part of the run-up to the UK’s elections this week. It looks like Londonistan®, the capital city of Britcuckistan™ is going to get a mayor that generates “a mix of curiosity and ignorance” in the global press for being a Not-We.
Shazia Awan writes about being “nothing more than a tick-box exercise” in diversity for the Conservative party.
Excellent from Andrew Rawnsley on “How the parties let the poison of racism seep back into our politics”
“Effective political parties must be good at telling stories. We follow politics like we follow soap-operas — driven by personalities and stories, not by numbers and policies. It is a very hard task to tell a story when you are a party with hundreds of MPs, many who disagree with the leadership, each of whom wants to tell it their way. But it is possible. It is a craft. A discipline. It is the business of telling stories. And when it works, your message cuts through.”
Can’t disagree with this — seems obvious after covering the election last night that in our currently fractured system all parties had something to be relatively cheery about, and that carrying that narrative out to the media was key.
“They didn’t win Bury — How to manage election expectations” — Theo Bertram
“Y’all wanna be oppressed so bad, and pretend you’re just as marginalized as Black women. You want to act like a Black woman calling you a Becky is just as bad as anti-Black racism? Or a woman of color is oppressing you by calling you a Becky on Twitter? Fine. You want the oppression? Take ALL of it. Not just getting called out your name, but living in a world where the name put on you becomes the only understood version of you.”
“I Hope ‘Becky’ Becomes a Slur” — Phoenix Calida
Fascinating account of trying to track down a childhood home in the Democratic Republic of Congo that never had an address.
It sounds like the opening line to a The Fall song: “Imposter manages to guest edit a scientific journal”
A coda to the Hillsborough coverage last week: An interview with the people behind a documentary about the disaster which will be shown on the BBC this week, and a powerful piece from a Hillsborough survivor which includes harrowing but important detail of what people faced that day.
“Now, as I feel my body for broken ribs or bones, a group of people in front of me — who’d had their backs to me throughout the crush, and who I thought were alive — simply keel over and hit the concrete. A heap of tangled corpses piles up off the ground, three feet high. After a few seconds, I see a limb move and realise someone is alive in there. One police officer who comes through the gate later says that the scene ‘was like Belsen’.”
And finally…it’s always fun to check the messages sent to Guardian Facebook pages
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.
