Friday Reading S04E06
Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam covering journalism, media and technology.
I’ve spent a lot of the day thinking about Aberfan. As a parent it’s horrifying to imagine what it must have been like to see your children’s lives ended that way. I urge you to take the time to read this in-depth report by WalesOnline which is beautifully put together, and includes testimony from some survivors and rescue workers that day who have spoken in public about what happened to them for the very first time. I was struck by this line, from Melvyn Walker, who was 8 when the tragedy happened. He survived, but says that afterwards: “I couldn’t go to school for two years. Nobody knew, I couldn’t tell anybody. I used to go out and then head up to the mountainside in my uniform and sit there on my own all day.”
That WalesOnline piece will, I believe, deservedly win awards. It was a year in the making — here’s a bit from Press Gazette on the making of it.
This is a wonderfully thoughtful post about dealing with death and bereavement and, astonishingly, trolling about death and bereavement, in a close-knit online community.
“Death and MetaFilter” — Josh Millard
A long listen rather than a long read — Anna Leach, former colleague at Ampp3d, has switched from journalism to becoming a web developer. This GeekGirl podcast finds her talking about how she went about that.
“This is the Doctor Who theory of print — it’s not dead, it’s just regenerating. And much like the new series of Doctor Who that came back in the mid-2000s, it has much higher production values than its predecessor.”
“Print’s not dead — it’s regenerating” — Adam Tinworth
An interview with Jasmine Probst, who is a content strategy manager at Facebook, about creating content with compassion.
A round-up of how some publishers, including the Guardian, have been using desktop notifications.
An oldie but goodie: “We Stopped Publishing New Blog Posts for One Month. Here’s What Happened.”
Turns out that maybe we don’t all need to be on the treadmill of #content all the time.
The level of anti-semitism directed at journalists during the US election campaign has been staggering.
And this has been a factor in making this campaign so hostile and toxic: “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate”
Former Guardian colleague Michael Brunton-Spall on “What I mean when I say ‘Digital Transformation’” — he’s been working at GDS for three years.
“What’s going on with VGCWs is a version of epistemic closure: If you take what they say online at face value, it appears that many of them sincerely believe they are trapped in a 1984-esque dystopia in which crack SJW squadrons are ever-poised to swoop down and tattoo RACIST on their foreheads if they refuse to call Virginia a stunning and brave work of intersectional justice-art — and no amount of evidence is going to jolt them out of that imaginary reality. It must feel pretty oppressive.”
This is a good but long overview from Jesse Singal on “Why the Video-Game Culture Wars Won’t Die”
Jesse also unlocks a trophy for writing at this length on this topic without using the phrase whiny man-babies.
Tauriq Moosa on racism in Mafia III.
“Instead of trying to win the game, he found himself just getting more lost in the labyrinth. In effect, Burr created an artificial infinite dungeon — a lair where your character falls into an endless cycle of death. There is no end, and sometimes there is no goal other than to stay alive. Players continue to enter the new randomly generated space, and die ceaselessly.”
“The Extremely Strange World of Infinite Dungeon Video Games” — Lauren Young
“Take three 80s TV stars, a generous dash of Dungeons & Dragons and a healthy sprinkling of brain-numbing tasks and you have a game show recipe that left guests mystified, mortified and all-too-often vaporised, thanks to transmorphic dragons, green cheese rolls and the Vortex. Yep, we’ve finally got around to talking about The Adventure Game.”
“Looking back at The Adventure Game” — Simon Brew and Dean Shepherd
Here’s a story you didn’t get to see this week. After Kumbuka reportedly drank five litres of undiluted blackcurrant squash I though “A-ha! There’s definitely got to be some slightly spurious data-journalism related angle on this story” and so I went and bought some [BRAND REDACTED] blackcurrant juice and then set out with science, maths and the aid of some toxicologists to find out what would happen to a human being who drank five litres of undiluted blackcurrant squash. It turns out the answer is…you’d be a bit sick. And that’s about it. That seemed too slight a story even for me to publish.
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.
