⌘ The treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, is a disgusting. It’s a travesty that Barack Obama — who made such a noise about treating prisoners properly while running for office — is complicit in this.
⌘ In 1989, 2 million people joined hands all the way from Tallinn, through Riga, to Vilnius.
This past week was a strange one, all tides and comings and goings.
It started with ebullience and an unexpected £60 victory in a local pub quiz. That winningness fed into the energy I’ve been feeling over the last few weeks, something that’s building up as I spend more time running. I’m still doing it all in the gym, of course — let’s not pretend that when I exercise I’m anything other than a heaving behemoth of a man trapped in a pair of sweaty and possibly inappropriate shorts. But I feel like I’m starting to get a hold on my fitness and running three or four kilometers every day. My utterly Imperial mind has no idea how far a kilometer is, of course, but it feels good.
Along the way, I did a few bits of writing for GigaOM and started thrashing out some ambitious magazine feature pitches (they are almost all a work in progress). And I spent time thinking a lot about what I’m trying to do overall. I feel like I’m drawing in on something that might succeed.
On Thursday I popped into London for a few hours, which is an increasingly odd experience for me. The city was home for such a long time, and really had a formative role in moulding the way I look at the world — both in fantasy (as a child, living in the sticks) and in reality (when left home and moved there for university). After all that, when we moved to the coast, it became much more about a place of business: the place where I went to spend a day in the office so that I could jump back on the train for the fifty mile trip to the sea each evening.
Those three versions of the city are all still there in my mind but now, however, I see another one, a different city, when I go there. It’s the same one, I suppose, that outsiders notice. It’s frantically busy, overpopulated, under-resourced and confusing, but is at the same time brimming with ideas and energy and chaos. I’ve spent the last couple of months holed up in Brighton, getting my head back in the game — and now, every time I head into London, I have the most eclectic range of interesting conversations. It’s invigorating.
Next week: more of the same, and hopefully some significant progress on a couple of schemes I want to get off the ground. First, I really owe somebody a book proposal. Second, I’m getting closer to the next step in a substantial editorial project that I want to build.
But for now, I’m going to celebrate the week past in the most traditionally British way I can think of: eating a curry and then going down the pub with friends.
⌘ Journalists, enabled by the web, are increasingly defining success according to exposure, and news organizations are increasingly defining success according to the limitation of exposure.
⌘ One of the buildings I pass on my way into London is an asylum for idiots.
⌘ Very few ideas are unique - many great inventions were produced by several people, separately, at the same time. Here’s what I realised the real question is, though: working out whether the fact that several people have similar ideas to yours means you’re on the right track or merely participating in a shared delusion.
⌘ There is a definite reason you should slice meat against the grain.
⌘ Twitter is at its best when unexpected news happens. It is at its worst when pre-orchestrated events take place. After a few weeks of watching so many interesting messages cross my stream about Egypt and, the torrent of brainfarts depicting every single second of the iPad 2 launch or the TED conference were a huge disappointment.
⌘ Jure Robič, the amazing endurance cyclist who was famous for taking himself to physical extremes died last year after being hit by a car while on a training ride. (via IfYouOnly)
My nephew Josh.
⌘ Germans buy more Ikea furniture than anyone else.
⌘ A single city block in New York can change drastically over the course of a few generations, as this piece — from wilderness to brothels to the Apple store — shows. (via Phil)
⌘ While I wouldn’t go as far as suggesting that any readers with impaired vision should suddenly start running solo, but it’s amazing what technology can do. (via Hammersley)
You may or may not be familiar with Adam Curtis, the award-winning British documentary maker who was behind great films like The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.
His films are usually dissections of power and control, watching the way our attitudes are manipulated or changed over time. I like to think of him as a sort of epidemiological historian who works through the medium of TV.
Two years ago Curtis was given a blog on the BBC website. And if you aren’t reading it, you should be.
He doesn’t post very often — once a month maybe. But when he does, the posts are usually long deconstructions of current news events. A look at the West’s attitude to Arab leaders through history, or a detailed examination of the relations between the BBC and Rupert Murdoch.
His blog is great for a few reasons. First, it’s great for getting behind the headlines and encouraging us to think about why what’s happening is happening, and why it’s being reported in a particular way.
Second, it’s unusual among the BBC’s blogs because it’s unashamed, editorial and avoids sitting on the fence.
But perhaps most importantly — and highly appropriate for somebody who stuffs his films with archive footage — he trawls through the BBC’s enormous catalogues of material to dig out interesting bits of video for his posts that explain more about the subject in question. This means it’s not just telling us what happened in the past: it’s actually showing us.
All in all, brilliant.
⌘ The world needs more outlets like Haaretz, and perhaps more owners like Amos Schocken.
⌘ Amanda Hocking is a self-published writer who sells by the bucketload. Amazon’s only going to make this trend more viable for more people, surely.
⌘ I thought I was the only one who found Mad Men empty and devoid of the depth that everyone else seemed to see. Not so!
⌘ Where you read affects how and what you read. Sort of obvious I suppose, but worth saying.
⌘ For anyone who wonders whether the Foursquare-style checkin can ever reach the mainstream, I offer a tidbit of evidence: I discovered today that my mum’s house has been registered as a Facebook place. My family were all checked in: that means my 50 year old mother and two sisters aged 28 and 14, none of them geeks.
⌘ When I don’t have internet access — this time thanks to a rare outage from our provider, Zen — the whole thing starts to fall apart.
One of the great chasms between traditional journalism and the startup world is money. Since editorial and commercial operations at most major news organisations are sharply divided (and for understandable reasons), there’s not a lot of crossover between the two worlds. So when it comes to talking money — or, god forbid, making quite a lot of it — well, for many journalists there’s just something terribly distasteful about the whole thing.
Of course, that doesn’t mean journalists aren’t obsessed with money at the same time. Hang out in the bar after a bunch of hacks finish their shift and you’re bound to find someone moaning about how little they get paid, how much more the star columnist gets or some other complaint.
To explain what I mean, here’s a quote from a New York Observer piece about the Huffington Post that just about sums it up:
“Think about it,” groused a magazine veteran not connected with the deal. “Anyone who’s been at HuffPo that long probably has zero creative fire, talent or editorial ambition. Now these people are cashing seven-figure checks?”
The big winners are “the most boring, non-personality people,” according to a former Huffington Post employee who turned down a big job early on.
Let’s step aside from a couple of things. One, it doesn’t really matter how much AOL paid to buy HuffPo; the fact it was bought is enough. Second, whoever gave that second quote (that boring people were rewarded) is seriously kidding themselves if they ever thought that they were part of a high quality journalistic endeavour.
What we’re really talking about the fact that journalists are griping because other journalists made money doing something they think they could have done better.
It’s a natural human condition. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it. So why don’t we go and do something better instead of moaning?
Aside from all the normal reasons people don’t strike out on their own — fear, risk, capital and so on — I think there are other problems more particular to journalism.
There’s an in-built bias towards larger companies (being freelance is easier and potentially more glamorous than being the publisher and editor of your own small but self-sufficient title). Partially it’s because journalists aren’t trained to understand how to run businesses (no surprise: most news organisations think that turning a good reporter into a manager is a promotion, for christ’s sake). And it’s partially because we don’t treat journalism as a product (I’ve banged on about that before).
But over and above everything, I think because journalists like to think they’re creative people. And, as we all know, most creative people hate to think that they’re in business — when really what they mean is that they hate the idea of being business people, and most of all they hate the terribly distasteful business of money.
⌘ The people behind Bloom are doing exciting things, but on top of that, they also do a great line in parallax. Must use it.
⌘ Pravda hasn’t changed much from its notorious Soviet days. I read a piece today in which my former colleague Luke Harding — who it expelled from the country after he wrote about Wikileaks cables that were unflattering to Moscow — was called “a specialist for the informational war against Russia”.
⌘ If you plan a day with your family, it will always be the one which suddenly erupts with the worst weather for weeks.
I’m led to believe that my profile of Jan Chipchase and exploration of the art of shanzhai is going to be featured in a forthcoming edition of Wired Italia. Lovely!
While I’m at it, Wired.it is about to hit its second birthday: anyone in Milan on March 1 is invited to go along and join the festivities.
⌘ Pitching is still the toughest part of the process for me.
⌘ It’s hard to make something extremely beautiful and entrancing with data. It’s harder to make it actually mean something.
⌘ There is no end to the amount of silliness inside the US military. (via stml
⌘ The idea of “good taste” is a peculiar construction that often collapses under the weight of history. Well, that’s the only way I can explain this mushroom cloud cake being constructed to celebrate successful US atomic testing (via Aaron)
⌘ Having an idea is worth nothing if you can’t make it work, as Adam Greenfield’s blunt and insightful post on Nokia’s failings shows us. When Apple launches NFC support for the iPhone (perhaps as soon as this summer) it will be hailed as a revolution - not because it’s a new technology but because it will almost certainly make it viable for ordinary people to use.
⌘ Given the choice, Google Maps will always lie to you at crucial moments.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months looking at various media outlets, critiquing ideas, trying to understand what’s missing and thinking about how we can reinvigorate intelligent media and make features work for the web.
I started thinking about what I want from my media, particularly the press. Here’s a list I jotted down that’s mainly aimed at magazines, newspapers and editorial websites.
I want:
- Something that doesn’t have to take very long to read, but that I can sink some serious time into — if I choose to.
- Something that’s intelligent and deep but not tedious or pretentious.
- Something that’s engagingly designed and doesn’t simply use templates (I’m looking at you, interweb).
- Something that’s eclectic enough to keep me on my toes. I don’t want to know what to expect, and I want it tells me things that are beyond my normal sphere.
- At the same time, however, it has to be relatable, with a voice and a view of the world that I can relate to. I don’t want to be super-aspirational.
- So I want the makers to feel like a near-future version of me, not some alien being from a world where piles of money and untold influence are the norm.
- Something I can read in print, online or on my phone. Without paying extra, preferably.
- Something that uses multimedia but doesn’t force it.
- Something that degrades beautifully, with stories that should be as entertaining and meaningful in 10 years as they are today.
- Something that doesn’t try to do too much.
That’s a start.
I realise these things may not be entirely compatible or possible. However, I’d love to make something that hits these marks, and I’ve got a few ideas on how to do it. But how do you start building a high-end editorial product?
(feel free to add suggestions of your own)