Pinboard (coldbrain)

The political meddling that led to BBC crisis – and how to stop it in the future

coldbrain — 2026-01-03T11:35:40+00:00

This peculiar arrangement of political appointments therefore effectively gave partisan appointees a veto over a crucial senior management decision.

The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker

coldbrain — 2026-01-01T21:33:53+00:00

The magazine has three golden rules: never write about writers, editors, or the magazine. On the occasion of our hundredth anniversary, we’re breaking them all.

Dropout CEO Sam Reich has been here the whole time

coldbrain — 2025-10-27T17:33:28+00:00

“Basically, I run a comedy SaaS.”

WTF with Marc Maron and the End of the First Age of Podcasting

coldbrain — 2025-06-23T08:00:07+00:00

Alphabetical Order: Beastie Boys - 'Ill Communication'

coldbrain — 2025-02-22T19:02:12+00:00

How the first CD I ever bought mapped out the next 20 years of my music collection.

The BBC asked marginalized groups how it could do better. They didn’t hold back.

coldbrain — 2025-02-08T07:07:19+00:00

"They're going to the shop for sense-making, I think. And there's nothing on the shelf."

The Oral History of Pitchfork, From the Careers It Made to the Bands It Killed

coldbrain — 2024-07-07T15:52:22+00:00

‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today

coldbrain — 2024-05-19T10:00:36+00:00

The long read: Idealising the past is nothing new, but there is something peculiarly revealing about the way a certain generation of Facebook users look back fondly on tougher times

The pirate preservationists

coldbrain — 2024-03-10T07:14:31+00:00

When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law

Why Every App Now Feels Like TikTok, But Worse

coldbrain — 2024-01-26T19:43:08+00:00

Why I think GOTY lists are silly

coldbrain — 2023-01-09T12:38:13+00:00

Welcome to hell, Elon

coldbrain — 2022-10-28T22:32:07+00:00

Owning Twitter means owning a host of impossible political problems. Is Elon ready?

Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter

coldbrain — 2022-10-21T20:51:30+00:00

‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive

coldbrain — 2022-10-08T21:12:22+00:00

The Quietus | Features | Anniversary | Into The Pre-Gap: Forty Years Of The CD

coldbrain — 2022-10-08T15:02:04+00:00

40 years since the first album was released on CD, Daryl Worthington pays tribute to the unique experimental potential of the format, explores how it changed the parameters of the album itself, and wonders why it’s still not thought of as fondly as cassettes and LPs

Wikipedia’s Fox News Problem

coldbrain — 2022-10-02T21:08:29+00:00

Wikipedia just finished another round of debate on whether Fox News should be a permitted source for science and politics.

“It’s Gotta Grow to Stay Alive”: Inside Noah Shachtman’s Raucous Reinvention of ‘Rolling Stone’

coldbrain — 2022-10-01T03:58:09+00:00

The scoop-hungry, Twitter-happy editor has turbocharged the magazineâs digital metabolismââback in the game,â says Gus Wennerâand chafed some staff along the way, who wonder if the new Rolling Stone is becoming the old Daily Beast.

How platforms turn boring

coldbrain — 2022-09-23T23:40:05+00:00

How to tell when a platform is going bad.

Podcasting Is Just Radio Now

coldbrain — 2022-09-22T21:39:07+00:00

It’s been ages since the last blockbuster narrative show. What does that mean for the medium as an art form?

Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly

coldbrain — 2022-05-16T13:45:07+00:00

A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?

Go Deeper, Not Wider

coldbrain — 2022-05-15T13:13:19+00:00

I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need. No new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to

Trolling Is Taking a Toll on Science Journalism

coldbrain — 2022-05-10T19:12:32+00:00

Opinion | Science journalists say they face threats of online harassment — and that newsrooms are doing little to protect them.

The BBC commissions a study to show what life without the BBC would be like

coldbrain — 2022-05-03T19:03:19+00:00

After just nine days of living without any BBC services, 70% of the households hostile to paying the full license fee had changed their minds. "I was quite surprised at how much I missed it."

How the 1990s saved English football

coldbrain — 2022-02-16T13:56:42+00:00

In the 1980s, football was at an all-time low – but Gazza's tears helped to usher in an era that saw the game return to its place at the heart of British popular culture. Gary Parkinson remembers the renaissance...

Of platforms, publishers, and responsibility

coldbrain — 2022-02-06T22:54:34+00:00

Last week, criticism of Spotify for hosting the Joe Rogan Experience—a popular podcast that has on multiple occasions aired misinformation about COVID-19, among other things—accelerated after music legend Neil Young chose to remove all of his work from the streaming service. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death […]

How to Save the BBC

coldbrain — 2022-01-23T21:49:01+00:00

The BBC's news output has earned it many critics on the Left, but the solution isn't privatisation – it's a campaign to build a genuine public broadcaster.

How two BBC journalists risked their jobs to reveal the truth about Jimmy Savile

coldbrain — 2021-11-02T21:45:28+00:00

Skip the Intro? - by Justin E. H. Smith

coldbrain — 2021-07-20T20:13:33+00:00

The Rise of Elevated Stupidity

coldbrain — 2021-06-26T13:36:02+00:00

Curation Essay

coldbrain — 2021-06-10T20:18:37+00:00

What’s the healthiest news diet? Probably traditional media, but don’t gorge yourself: Too much can leave you less informed

coldbrain — 2021-05-18T19:07:30+00:00

A new study finds that reading, watching, and breathing news all day can actually leave you less informed about politics and government than being more selective — with the right sources.

Nearly Half of Digital Subscribers Are ‘Zombies,’ Medill Analysis Finds

coldbrain — 2021-03-03T23:15:22+00:00

Britain's right-wing tabloids have turned to 'green nationalism' to sell climate action

coldbrain — 2021-02-18T11:45:02+00:00

Media Preservation | Museum of Obsolete Media

coldbrain — 2020-04-07T14:20:18+00:00

There are a range of factors to consider when prioritising conservation or migration of media, and these include the risk of degradation of the media…

Does monoculture still exist on the internet?

coldbrain — 2020-01-01T21:58:48+00:00

monochromology

coldbrain — 2019-12-04T11:16:27+00:00

Unlocking the commons

coldbrain — 2019-01-03T20:58:49+00:00

"The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don't just permit but insist that the product be given away for free."

World Power Systems:Dead Media Project:A modest proposal

coldbrain — 2018-09-11T15:59:20+00:00

How To Suck At Social Media: A Helpful Guide For Businesses

coldbrain — 2015-11-05T16:54:30+00:00

Netflix's War on Mass Culture | New Republic

coldbrain — 2013-12-09T12:35:07+00:00

The opportunity for Slow Media | PandoDaily

coldbrain — 2013-11-03T21:25:48+00:00

The best magazine on the Internet? | PandoDaily

coldbrain — 2013-11-03T20:59:04+00:00

The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub | Txt Post

coldbrain — 2013-03-17T18:00:45+00:00

Pay attention to what Nick Denton is doing with comments » Nieman Journalism Lab

coldbrain — 2012-06-26T10:55:16+00:00

Will future generations understand "The Simpsons"? - The Simpsons - Salon.com

coldbrain — 2011-03-09T22:36:38+00:00

Do all or even most of these gags connect with a viewer under 25 who isn't a 20th century pop culture junkie? I doubt it. Granted, some of the jokes were inside even for 1992-93 -- "The Great Gabbo" and the Eastern bloc cartoon "Worker and Parasite," for instance. But most weren't. They referred to things that were current or that felt that way, thanks to syndication or shared childhood viewing experiences. Circa 2011 that's no longer the case. "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is one of the greatest of all "Simpsons" episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as "The Waste Land" -- and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that's going to be.

The 'Radiolab' Effect

coldbrain — 2011-02-26T15:31:31+00:00

As you'd imagine, smiles ensue. But Radiolab is more than just a post-ironic, earnestly clever refashioning of findings for the literate and curious not apt to subscribe to Nature or The Lancet. What seems like dumbing-down harbors revelation: To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven't simply replaced the theologians, the metaphysicians and the social critics as posers and answerers of the biggest questions. They've also become, in a time of gene-splicing and hadron-colliding and psychopharmacology, our true avatars of creative expression, the last radical artists left.

On Pageview Pumping

coldbrain — 2011-02-19T16:16:33+00:00

Daring Fireball:

> But what interests me about all this is the underlying war going on between those playing the pageview game, and those that hate the pageview game. To put it another (simplified) way: the war between quality versus quantity.
Siegler comes close to getting it, but falls short. Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple “pages”. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple “pages”), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.
It is, as Jim Coudal and I argued at SXSW, a race to the bottom. Be careful of the “everyones” who say pageviews are imperfect but the best we can do. They’re the ones who are happy with the web as a market for bullshit.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!: Amazon.co.uk: Douglas Coupland: Books

coldbrain — 2011-02-19T15:30:12+00:00

Book Review - 'Marshall McLuhan - You Know Nothing of My Work!' by Douglas Coupland - NYTimes.com

coldbrain — 2011-02-19T15:22:31+00:00

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book. Not weird bad, just weird in a way that makes you stop and think about what precisely the author, Douglas Coupland, is up to. Like the man it chronicles, Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances. Rather than offering a doorstop-size addition to the Great Man canon, it comes in at just over 200 pages that nonetheless sprawl and unfold to their own idiosyncratic rhythm.

Correct, don’t delete, that erroneous tweet — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard

coldbrain — 2011-02-19T15:20:31+00:00

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

How Long Does Bill Murray Spend in Groundhog Day?

coldbrain — 2011-01-15T15:46:05+00:00

There are, at least, 36 separate days shown in the movie including his multiple death scenes. There could be more, but it's hard to verify if some moments are simply later in the same day or an entirely different day. Additionally, in the scene where Bill Murray revealed he's a god, he stated, “I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.” Of those the movie only showed electrocution, so that brings it to a base line of 42 accountable days. However, there were many days not shown. We know from the scene when Billy Murray and Andy MacDowell are throwing playing cards into a top hat that it would take, “Six months. Four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert.” So, we have a bare minimum of six months.

The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics « Clay Shirky

coldbrain — 2011-01-09T14:48:20+00:00

One way to escape a commodity market is to offer something that isn’t a commodity. This has been the preferred advice of people committed to the re-invention of newspapers. It is a truism bordering on drinking game material that anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”
This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help. The suggestion that newspapers should, in the future, create a digital product users are willing to pay for is merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.

Everyone Hates Ticketmaster — But No One Can Take It Down | Magazine

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T18:19:39+00:00

Among fans and artists, of course, Ticketmaster is widely despised. It extracts high service fees (known commonly as “those goddamned Ticketmaster service fees”) but has offered very little innovation in ticketing over the past 30 years. The Pixies, for example, added thousands of names, complete with contact info, to their marketing database thanks to the Troxy gig—something they can’t generally get when they sell tickets through Ticketmaster. And now, in the wake of the Live Nation merger, many in the concert industry are worried that Ticketmaster might be more interested in promoting its own artists and venues than in selling tickets for rival acts.

Do writers need paper? « Prospect Magazine

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T18:17:15+00:00

As the sales of e-books finally start to soar, what effect will this digital revolution have on publishers, readers and writers? Will the novel as we know it survive?

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T18:15:11+00:00

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web - NYTimes.com

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T11:42:00+00:00

WASHINGTON — How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century?

By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive.

Nick Denton, Gawker Media, and journalism’s future : The New Yorker

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T10:48:55+00:00

Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo [...] Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose. Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) It also helped bolster Denton’s image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator—he initially paid his bloggers twenty-four thousand dollars a year—and cultivated a helpful sense among contributors that they were the crew of a rogue “pirate ship,” as Gawker people sometimes say, initiating stealth attacks on the ocean liners in midtown.

US politics is angry, polarised, and gridlocked. Can it be reformed? | Timothy Garton Ash | Comment is free | The Guardian

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T10:23:05+00:00

Washington moves at the pace of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. It needs to be more like Silicon Valley if it is to compete with China

YouTube - THE MOST AMAZING GOLFER THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN.

coldbrain — 2010-12-02T17:48:46+00:00

Blackbird Pie – Twitter Media

coldbrain — 2010-11-21T12:26:07+00:00

This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts.

Within the Context of No Context: Amazon.co.uk: George W.S. Trow: Books

coldbrain — 2010-11-20T16:16:41+00:00

Brief reflections on contemporary American culture cover celebrity, privilege, crime, drugs, teen-age alcoholism, race relations, politics, and the media.

The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism: Amazon.co.uk: Upton Sinclair, Robert W. McChesney, Ben Scott: Books

coldbrain — 2010-11-09T10:31:46+00:00

Ryan Holiday: In 1920 Upton Sinclair self-published arguably the first ever structural criticism of the corrupt and broken press system in America. Not only did he self-publish it but he refused to copyright it, hoping to pass through the complete media blacklist a book like this faced. It's not only fascinating but a timeless perspective. Sinclair deeply understood the economic incentives of early 20th century journalism and thus could predict and analyze the manipulative effect it had on The Truth. Today, those incentives and pressures are different but they warp our information in a similar way. In almost every substantial charge he leveled against the yellow press, you could, today, sub in blogs and the cable news cycle and be even more correct. In fact, the reason that most newspapers could escape this criticism is that over the last 50 years they have instituted many of the important changes he asked for.

Wipe Your Feet | The Print Is Not Dead, It Is Not Even Print

coldbrain — 2010-10-16T15:25:16+00:00

I looked around my parent’s kitchen. It’s the nicest kitchen I’ve ever been in. If I had a million dollars, I’d get an island and wheel it into my kitchen and put a Cuisinart stand mixer on it. I’d replace my fridge with a Sub-Zero fridge and fill it with organic blueberries and yuzu and Dom Perignon. If I wrote for Esquire and made a million dollars, the first thing I’d do is put a garbage disposal in my kitchen. The second thing I’d do would be to buy lots of copies of Esquire and take the pages I’d written out of it and wallpaper my bathroom with it. But if I were writing for Esquire in 1977, I wouldn’t be able to email or win games of Scrabble against my friend Gabe. I wouldn’t be able to show my mom a video of a man dressed up as a sexy vampire singing Beyoncé. I wouldn’t know that there had been an earthquake unless I waited ten minutes and forced myself to change stations to watch the news instead of Intervention.

Price Is Right Perfect Bid - How Terry Kniess Beat The Price Is Right - Esquire

coldbrain — 2010-10-16T15:20:45+00:00

In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything.

The Question: Is a messiah complex the cause of England's failings? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport | guardian.co.uk

coldbrain — 2010-09-16T16:33:56+00:00

The likes of Diego Maradona are extremely rare. Football is almost never about one player or about the manager, it shouldn't be about the search for one "world-class" player or coach. It should be about taking the best raw materials available and assembling them in the best possible way. English football needs to rid itself of its messiah-complex, stop looking for a mythical saviour who is going to redeem the protracted decline and get on with making the best of the present situation. As long as there are messiahs, there are going to be crucifixions.

New Liberal Arts in Simple HTML

coldbrain — 2010-09-11T13:19:02+00:00

“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life . Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results.” — David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?” The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

Charlie Brooker | When it comes to phone-hacking, the press is the elephant in the room | Comment is free | The Guardian

coldbrain — 2010-09-06T07:26:37+00:00

Anyway: everyone knows and accepts in their bones that showbiz news is almost certainly fiction, yeah? So when you eventually stumble across a report regarding something you have some first-hand knowledge of, and that report turns out to be peppered with inaccuracies, exaggerations and inventions, you shouldn't be surprised, right? Of course you shouldn't.

Long-form journalism starts a new chapter | Media | The Guardian

coldbrain — 2010-09-05T11:04:14+00:00

"We're experiencing a moment in which the humans are regaining some control over what gets filtered around the web," says Armstrong. "Twitter and Facebook are critical to driving traffic for publishers, and people like to share stories that are thoughtful or unique. These stories are a bit more evergreen than breaking news – they live longer lives and get passed around."

What I Read: Jay Rosen | The Atlantic Wire

coldbrain — 2010-08-14T17:39:37+00:00

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from an interview with Jay Rosen, press critic, writer, and professor of journalism at New York University.

Are we really in a cultural golden age? | Music | The Big Questions | The A.V. Club

coldbrain — 2010-08-14T16:08:27+00:00

Sallust, the Roman historian who made his name by connecting great events to the moral outlook of the people involved in them, said it more than 2,000 years ago: “The golden age is before us, not behind us.” Twenty centuries later, we still don’t seem to have learned his epigrammatic lesson: We—both the critical we and the popular we—spend an inordinate amount of time looking backward and mourning a golden age of culture that is likely irrecoverable, while looking at the present day as either approaching or having already arrived at an utter nadir.