Friday Reading S04E04
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam covering journalism, media and technology. Which this week is on a Wednesday because reasons…
“Going into these newsrooms was enlightening, to say the least. I don’t use this word lightly, but I would call it an organizational depression that’s occurring. There has been so much loss in those newsrooms. Journalists don’t necessarily just lose jobs, they lose careers and some real self-identity. I had many journalists who broke down and cried, who were so genuinely upset about what had happened to the profession they loved so dearly. It was really troubling.”
“What a Kansas professor learned after interviewing a ‘lost generation’ of journalists” — Deron Lee
“Anything you make should be a nice surprise, like a cherry on the cake, nothing more. If you make it a core part of your revenue makeup, you’re submitting to the will of Facebook.”
“UK publishers are mixed on performance of Facebook Instant Articles” — Jessica Davies, Digiday
“In the early days of social media, community building and user participation roles were seen as unimportant, [Carrie Brown] explained. People working in the trenches were some of the first to pick up social in newsrooms. Combine that reality with those soft skills, and voilà — you’ve got a lot of women working in audience engagement”
“Why are there so many women in audience engagement?” — Katie Hawkins-Gaar
“Fast Response to Niche News: A Pop-Up Paper Finds Success in Britain” — Nicola Clark looks at The New European for the New York Times.
How We Get To Next is two. Here are five things they’ve learned publishing it…
“I remember literally telling him, ‘It should be an easy day.’ Those were the words. ‘It should be an easy day.’”
Already much shared but this oral history of what 9/11 was like on Air Force One is compelling stuff.
Astonishing long read this about a man who is driven to want to squeeze muscles…
“[Purpler] Aki had surely been conjured up somewhere in the deepest recesses of the Scouse id. Plenty of people assumed he was an urban legend, a bit like the Candyman in Liverpool-born author Clive Barker’s short story. But there were plenty of people who’d swear blind they knew a cousin or a neighbour who’d been squeezed by him, or who’d had to run away from him. And a select few would assure you there really was a man, and they’d met him. His name was Akinwale Arobieke.”
“This vessel looks like it was buttoned down tight for winter and it sank,” he said. “Everything was shut. Even the windows are still intact. If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float.”
HMS Terror wreck found in the Arctic, 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt
Oh internet you are wonderful. Here’s a PDF of the instruction manual for the IBM 305 RAMAC , the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive, with a wonderful description of what “random access memory” actually means…
These weirdos sound like a Clickbait Robot headline: “We Replaced 68 Tube Adverts with Cats”
Good analysis of why West Ham fans keep fighting each other in the Olympic Stadium.
“Estimates on the population of Sasquatch across the US and Canada varies widely from 2,000 to 6,000 according to some ‘experts’. I personally think that there’s many more, but that’s just my opinion. The main reasons I believe they exist is the video evidence, along with the wide variety of people who have encountered this creature. There are basically witnesses from every walk of life: poor, rich, lawyers, doctors, teachers, farmers, hillbilly, yuppies, fisherman, hunters, you name it.”
I just love the relentlessly upbeat cheeriness of this: “The search for Bigfoot continues”
“The Last Days of London’s Dog-Racing Scene” — as a Walthamstow resident I sympathise with this familiar tale of the impending loss of a dog racing stadium.
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London.
