Friday Reading S02E08

It’s that time of the week when I list some things that I’ve enjoyed reading on the internet and then hope that you’ll read and enjoy them too…

Simon Ricketts tells the Labour Party “You’re already dead”, while Gary Bainbridge makes a decent fist of “Defending the Indefensible” when it comes to the party abstaining on the welfare vote in Parliament.

So. Much. This.

“Imagine a Prime Minister, during the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, announcing in a speech that he intended to tackle terrorism head on. To do this, he would crack down on the churches which ‘quietly condone’ the IRA, and criminalise opposition to ‘British values’ and the ‘rule of law’ amongst dissidents.

Forget about pursuing a political resolution to the conflict over Northern Ireland, says the PM – this is about ideology and a misplaced sense of ‘grievance’ by the IRA. As part of a raft of new policies, ‘non-violent extremists’ – such as late Ian Paisley perhaps – would be shut out of any political dialogue, since clearly they were a ‘gateway’ to loyalist terrorism, and certainly in no way able to contribute towards a peaceful future.”

“It’s scary just how much David Cameron doesn’t seem to understand extremism” – Abdul-Azim Ahmed

“Time to fight for the BBC” – Peter Oborne

I don’t agree with all of this – and LOLd at Oborne moaning that everybody thinks the BBC is against them and then suddenly going “Oh but of course they were simply beastly during the 70s referendum on the EU” – but a good read nonetheless. Read.

This is glorious from Tom Chivers and Buzzfeed – turns out Tory-voting London-based 25-to-39-year-olds are the worst. AS PROVED BY SCIENCE.

It’s 2015 and newspaper websites are still writing pieces about whether articles should include hyperlinks or not.

Classic Chris Moran quote in this…

“There are a lot of people that say that if you use pageviews [as a metric] then you encourage clickbait, [but] I don’t accept or recognise that argument. I think that’s really weak. If you honestly think that using pageviews is going to change your editorial standards, then you’ll need to toughen up your editorial standards.”

Read: “Trends in Newsrooms: Analytics, audience development and the newsroom”

Plus a bit of self-promotion. I’ve contributed a couple of pieces to this collection of stories celebrating 30 years of the .UK internet – “The vital resilience of the UK internet” and “The unlikely success story of putting the British Government online”