Did the Times of Israel say genocide was permissible? Spoiler: NO

…he genocide question post expresses a horrible view. But pretending it actually reflects the opinion of the Times Of Israel is like saying any newspaper with a post-moderation policy is racist/sexist/votes Ukip because of the comments left underneath their articles….

SEOing the death of Robin Williams isn’t evil. It’s the equivalent of shouting “READ ALL ABAHT IT”

…SEO is a misguided reaction. As I’ve said many times, there is no robot or computer in the world compelling people in news organisations to make decisions. All decisions about SEO are taken by humans. And all the decisions you take in a news organisation reflect your editorial values. “Buzzy” may have been a horrible phrase to use in an internal memo about the recent death of a star, but the reason those words and phrases are “buzzy” is not becaus…

An open letter to the Independent about reporting the royal baby news

…If your schtick is that you don’t make a big fuss about reporting news about the royal family, then tweeting out that that you didn’t make a big fuss about it with a #RoyalBaby hashtag appears to be self-defeating How the @Independent newspaper reported the #RoyalBaby news pic.twitter.com/FRHP8ipQhD — The Independent (@Independent) September 9, 2014 You used to do this… Go back to doing that….

Friday Reading S02E06

…emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.” Read. “Stop Acting So Surprised: How Microaggressions Enforce Stereotypes in Tech” – Livio De La Cruz “We’ve been excluding all sorts of people from our field, not just women. For instance, according to the stereotype, if you learned to program at a young age, then that’s indicative of…

Friday Reading is now a publication on Medium

…enting with publishing Friday Reading on Medium rather than on martinbelam.com – cue massive debate about hosting your own content vs better distribution etc etc. Anyway, I’ve been pleased with how that has worked out so far, and so I have now turned Friday Reading into a publication on Medium. That means, if you have a Medium account, you can follow it to get updates when I publish, and–fingers crossed–it will get delivered to you in an email as…

I’m Martin Belam! You might know me from such internet projects as…

…to struggle because reasons. And of course, if you work with something day-to-day, you end up having strong feelings about it. Here are my 9 pet peeves from running the UsVsTh3m social media brand accounts. I get really annoyed when people ask is blogging journalism and if journalists should learn to code. When I was the Guardian last time around I worked on a fascinating though ultimately doomed “Facebook Social Reader app”, which delivered huge…

Friday Reading S05E03

…Zimdars who has been compiling a public list of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources” which is yet to name and shame martinbelam dot com but there’s still time I guess But then disappear down a wormhole as Dan Barker explains how some stats on the fake news Facebook problem were themselves fake news. *screaming forever gif goes here* Hashtag Awkward. Facebook has calculated some of its metrics wrong again, leading to a bi…

‘Little c’ christmas is fine – it is ‘Big C’ Christmas that people fear disappearing

…t to change; a promise to defend overcooked sprouts and snowball fights, O Come All Ye Faithful and grandchildren being forced to write proper thankyou cards rather than beastly emails.” “The War on Christmas” is maybe an area that smug metropolitan liberals might consider that we are again talking at cross-purposes to many of the people that we are poking fun of. I think the two groups are talking about entirely different Christmases. It’s self-e…

“Humans are the secret weapon” – Cassie Werber talks about Quartz at #ijf17

…day. The eventual app’s style owes a little to the heritage of choose-your-own-adventure, although Cassie Werber pointed out that the newspaper has pretty much always been a choose your own adventure – you are given a package and you get to pick the order you scan the sections in, which things you pick to read, which supplements on a Sunday go straight in the recycling bin. We got a brief glimpse at the CMS – which is obviously bliss to nerds lik…

Friday Reading S08E08

…remy Allen, Huck “The problem is artists will never be able to quit their 9-to-5 jobs if they were to rely solely on streaming payouts. If that’s the future, we all need to start swapping our press kits for professional resumes.” “The rise and rise of Bandcamp” – Kieran Devlin, DJ Mag @beesesteeses was asking people on Twitter to guess how many solo studio albums Ringo Starr had made, which made me vaguely recall that someone had made track-listin…