Friday Reading eats big dinners S10E15

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things. It is also available as an email newsletter and eats big dinners. Sign up here.

John Crowley ran a survey of journalists in the UK in March and April to ask them how they were coping with lockdown. Here’s an extract: Journalism in time of Covid – Newsroom leaders have ignored wellbeing impact of remote-working switch

Quite densely-packed report here from Pew on Measuring News Consumption in a Digital Era, which starts with the premise that as news outlets morph and multiply, both surveys and passive data collection tools face challenges.

The job of a media reporter or critic is to tell us about journalism’s status quo, what’s wrong with it, and what journalism could be if things were tweaked. With this in mind, it’s hard not to notice: most media reporters, critics, and editors are white.

On a blind spot in US media criticism: US newsrooms are very white. So are the critics and the journalists that cover them – Gabe Schneider – The Objective

Before the pandemic, Facebook had had a strict no-work-from-home policy. For the thousands of knowledge workers who are no longer forced to confront the Bay Area’s absurd housing costs or endure daily commutes of hours per day – highly unpleasant even on a Wi-Fi-enabled luxury shuttle – this is a massive win. But what about the workers who cleaned the offices, prepared the meals and drove the shuttles?

What Facebook’s empty campus says about the post-Covid world – Allison Arieff, New Statesman

This has been ubiquitous in my social feeds this week but it is another cracking job by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s specialist disinformation reporter: ‘How a picture of my foot became anti-vaccine propaganda’

Konnikova’s psychology expertise tells her that most people have a hard time thinking through the uncertainty and probabilities posed by the pandemic. People tend to learn through experience, and we’ve never lived through anything like COVID-19. Every day, people face unpleasant and uncertain risks associated with their behavior, and that ambiguity goes against how we tend to think.

How your brain tricks you into taking risks during the pandemic – Marshall Allen and Meg Marco, ProPublica

As an experienced hospital doctor who has looked after dozens of sick patients who clearly died from Covid-19, who has supervised or completed hundreds of death certificates over three decades, I just want to walk you through how things really work and why the conspiracy theories are real ‘fake news’.

Covid consultant confronts claims of a conspiracy on the death numbers – and blames ‘keyboard warriors’ for spreading fake news – David Oliver, Manchester Evening News

Matt Muir caught my eye with this tweet: You know all those GAN-generated faces used to create ‘thispersondoesnotexist’ and similar repositories of fake people? Ever wondered who the actual people were whose images were used to create those sets? You can see them here. Uncomfortable: thispersonexists.net

For random reasons I came across this – my colleague Paul Owen looking at how the Guardian had a sort of print version of the live blog back in the 1920s. Very curious. When was the first live blog? 1923, it seems

Leyton Orient very simply and clearly explained why they are taking the knee before games in a post that I was very proud to see.

Questions have been directed to the club, including whether taking the knee is supporting the political organisation Black Live Matters, and their ideologies.

The club would like to make it clear that this is not an endorsement of any political party or views, and is instead intended as a show of unity against racial discrimination of all kinds.

Leyton Orient is proud of our diverse history, and indeed our diverse present, and discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated – and that is why we kneel.

This simple statement hasn’t half turned up the racists in our midst though.

Exeter City’s media officer Craig Bratt opens up about the importance of the Stonewall #RainbowLaces campaign and why there is still work to do to make football a game for all – Why rainbow laces matters to me

It’s 50 years since former Newcastle United FA Cup winner, the Chilean Ted Robledo, was reported missing at sea on a ship sailing out of Dubai.

The Newcastle United FA Cup winner who mysteriously vanished overboard on a ship – David Morton, Chronicle Live

Amazingly not from Clickhole: Nick Cave Says He’s Sold “Zero Rolls” of His Erotic Wallpaper

Netflix doco on the Miami Showband Massacre, a tragic story I’ve found grimly fascinating for some time.

Ed Jeff is back on his amazing bullshit trying to use Nick Cage movies to see if he can win the lottery. Read it. Or maybe send him some money and perhaps he will stop.

You are the dungeon. You exist on the margins of what they call civilization. You are brooding, tempting, and insatiable. You call to those brave or foolhardy enough to explore your blasphemous depths. They leave with your treasure, yes, but they also leave with a hook buried inside of their souls. They will never forget you, never be free of you, never be clean again.

I haven’t played this cos I don’t have a pack of Tarot cards handy, but it looks great: You are the Dungeon

Huge massive internet archive of scanned weird stuff like Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine
from the 1970s. Luminist archives – science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction. A real plus point being that it looks like it was hand-coded in an HTML4 <TABLE> layout sometime in 1997.

In the early eighties, the BBC Children’s Department had a go at producing their own Ghost Stories For Christmas, which in all honesty were only slightly less disturbing than their adult counterparts.

Tim Worthington has the tale of The Bells Of Astercote and Ghost In The Water.