Friday Reading S08E09
…obile newsfeed than does landscape video”. It doesn’t help me sell my retro-VHS-looking 4:3 aspect music videos on social, but it might help you. “The report also recommends that the Electoral Commission should keep a database of political campaigners’ social media accounts to keep track of the material they are posting. This would mean that, for example, Boris Johnson’s Twitter account and the Facebook page of the People’s Vote campaign would be…
Friday Reading S10E03
…ecard is a smouldering wreck. The ex-chief executive, Markus Braun, is in jail, awaiting trial along with other colleagues, while the company’s former chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, is on the run. This is the tale of what it was like to unravel and expose the reality of a criminal enterprise that relied on a network of professional enablers to keep in motion one of the biggest corporate frauds of the modern era. Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum…
Friday Reading S10E05
…gether during lockdown and “more adults than ever before” buying its harder-to-build sets. Lego to switch to eco-friendly paper bags in its packaging NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling…
Friday Reading Still Eats Big Dinners S10E12
…ployed tens and hundreds of developers. Plus it also forced businesses to maintain extra templates, and artificially restricted the amount of interactivity they could use and display. Nothing says 2020 like the fact that – AT LAST! – you can buy racist tea. Well, I say that. Someone has launched a website for a new brand of British tea (lovely climate to grow the stuff) that is anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-woke and anti-virtual signalling, and…
m-orchestra – More Ghost Stories EP and live shows
…ing some archive live footage and playing out all the tracks from the EP and more. You can find that here. There will, hopefully, be some more stuff later in the month, TBD etc. Thanks very much for your time, and it would be lovely to see some of you in the comments at these events. Having said that, as I always say to my daughter when she compares my livestream numbers to Ariana Grande’s number of Spotify plays and mocks me relentlessly, a few p…
Friday Reading S11E06
…vital local journalism than an endless and expensive game of comment whack-a-mole. Is this a violation of the First Amendment? No. The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish. Why we’re removing comments on…
Friday Reading S12E06
…ble to speak. Then he would escape into the garden, pacing furiously and chain-smoking.” This is a really important and incredible read but also CONTENT WARNING I found it and the subject matter really quite distressing: “‘Daddy isn’t coming back’: surviving my partner’s suicide” – Manuela Saragosa, FT +++ JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES KLAXON +++ We’ve got a Deputy Audience Editor role going at the Guardian. It’s a great team. The key bits of the job: Mo…
Happy 20th anniversary to my blog – and a merry Xmas to you
…is going to bring some more m-orchestra gigs, more Thursday quizzes at the Guardian, and a return of the Friday reading weekly newsletter for season 14. Take care, and I will be posting again here soon. I mean, twenty years. Why would you stop? (From L-R): Martin, Willow, Emma, James. Only one of these things existed when this blog began….
About Martin Belam
…writing for years on currybet.net, at the BBC and the Guardian and on this site about journalism, digital media and design. You can mail me at martin.belam@theguardian.com….