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How Not To Close A News Organisation

Published 6th November 2016

Internet

“We are open for business.”

— David Hencke, Exaro ‘Head of News’, 18th July 2016

“We are absolutely devastated. We were going ahead with plans and had only just put up a story the previous day, with a lot more in the pipeline, and suddenly we are told it’s closed just like that.”

— David Hencke, Exaro ‘Head of News’, 21st July 2016

This article is not the story of Exaro – the investigative news site set up in 2011 to, in their own words, “hold power to account”. That story heavily involves Exaro’s investigations of paedophilia and child abuse, and that’s a topic on which I have precisely no insight on whatsoever – either the investigations themselves, Exaro’s conduct during them, or the official police investigations. There are many people who are far more qualified to discuss those matters. I mean literally qualified, with actual qualifications. There is nothing I could ever add to those discussions.

Still, what I want to talk about is something which does impact on the aftermath of those investigations. Whether you think Exaro’s conduct was exemplary, reprehensible, or some complex line between the two, the fact now remains: aside from the usual rescue from the Wayback Machine, there is no primary evidence of those investigations left online. It has all disappeared.

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A Few Random Thoughts About Independent Blogs, Which Turn Into Some Musings About Dirty Feed, Which Probably Won’t Interest Many People At All, But It Was Useful For Me To Work Out A Few Things In My Head, And I’ve Written It Now Anyway So I Might As Well Publish It

Published 5th November 2016

Internet

i.
Two blogs I follow have redesigned recently: Jason Kottke’s kottke.org back in September, and Andy Baio’s waxy.org this month. Both have used their redesigns to muse on the nature of independent self-hosted blogs, rather than just sticking all your writing on Medium and the like.

I can only echo what Andy Baio says:

“Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.

Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.”

At the very real risk of being both self-indulgent and exceedingly smug: Dirty Feed is one of my favourite things I’ve ever done. And one of the reasons for that – a couple of guest posts aside in the site’s early days – is that it is entirely my own. Nobody else can control it, fuck around with it, or tell me what to do with it. If Dirty Feed moved to a service akin to Medium, I wouldn’t find it nearly as appealing to write.

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Name Something Documentary Makers Should Avoid

Published 30th October 2016

TV Gameshows

MAX BYGRAVES: Name something people take with them to the beach.
BOB JOHNSON: Turkey.
MAX BYGRAVES: The first thing you buy in a supermarket.
BOB JOHNSON: Turkey.
MAX BYGRAVES: A food often stuffed.
BOB JOHNSON: Turkey! [laughs]

– Family Fortunes, Series 5 Episode 3. TX: 28th October 19831

You’ve all heard of the Family Fortunes turkey incident, right? The Johnson Family get to the final round, Bob Johnson takes the stand, and proceeds to answer “Turkey” for the first three questions, and runs out of time for the last two. Cue a shot of one member of his family looking particularly murderous.

Hey, describing it removes all the fun. Take a look at the entire round below:

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  1. I specifically wanted to give a TX date for this episode, as it’s rarely mentioned whenever this incident is discussed, but nailing it down has been slightly tricky. The episode number and TX date I’ve stated are taken from IMDB, but it’s worth noting that IMDB can be inaccurate when it comes to things like this. A comprehensive list on Digital Spy claims the Johnson v. Dalby show is actually Episode 3, broadcast on the 28th October 1983. This seems to be some kind of confusion between two different Johnson families – next time I’m near a TV Times archive I’ll clear this up once and for all.

    UPDATE: This piece originally gave the TX date as 18th November 1983, along with the ass-covering above. Many thanks to Steve Williams, who has confirmed that it was actually 28th October 1983.  ↩

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Digital Spy, there

Published 23rd October 2016

Internet / TV Comedy

Yeah, yeah, putting the boot into Digital Spy is a fairly pointless thing to do, really. But it’s 3am, I’m bored, and they’ve mildly annoyed me, so what are you going to do?

Over on Ganymede & Titan – the Red Dwarf fan site I contribute to when I’m not sulking because I hate Red Dwarf – a quite extraordinary thread has popped up. Short version: there are lyrics to the opening theme, nobody fucking knew about it until now, you can hear them most clearly 14 seconds into this video, we’re all gibbering wrecks because of this, and Darrell is our new lord and saviour.

Long version: read the thread. It’s worth it. Seriously.

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Linkrot

Published 12th October 2016

Internet

Keith Instone, writing on the site Usable Web in December 2012, taken from the Wayback Machine:

“I just noticed that Alertbox articles (and other things) from useit.com are now incorporated into nngroup.com”

Ah, two sites belonging to famous usability consultant Jakob Nielsen.

“From a practical perspective, it means different URLs for Alertbox articles.”

Uh-oh. Jakob hasn’t broken a load of links, has he?

“So far, all of the redirects seem to be working (no linkrot).”

Excellent. Well done, Jakob.

Back to Keith and the site Usable Web, today:

500 Internal Server Error

Oh well, maybe it’s just temporary. Let’s take a look at March 2016:

403 Forbidden

Linkrot… on an article about linkrot. Bonus points go to Usable Web for having the slogan “Links to web usability history”. Not much history present there any more.

See also: famous designer Jeffrey Zeldman complaining about a web community being destroyed, and then destroying one himself.

(Don’t look too far in the past on sites I’ve been involved with, though. I definitely didn’t write a pompous article about all this years ago which suffered exactly the same fate. Promise.)

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Tom, Dick and Einstein

Published 11th October 2016

Computing

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, here’s an interesting article from the May 1984 edition of Acorn User – on the dangers of just targeting boys in Information Technology classes, and the impact that could have on girls’ future careers…

May 1984 Acorn User article

It is perhaps somewhat pathetic that an article published in Acorn User in 1984 manages to be more progressive than huge swathes of Silicon Valley. Maybe if more people had listened to Robin Ward back then, we’d all be a lot better off.

Scan nicked from 8BS’s Acorn User archive.

A Year in the Life of Blockbusters

Published 18th September 2016

TV Gameshows

The most popular thing I’ve published here on Dirty Feed this year has been this piece on the title sequence to Blockbusters, scanned from the 1989 Blockbusters annual. Never let it be said that I’ll pass up the opportunity to scan a few pages and profit from someone else’s hard work, rather than actually writing something informative myself.

With that in mind, then, here’s a couple more pieces from said annual. Firstly, here’s producer/director Jenny Dodd, on a year in the life of the show. (On the second page of that article is a wide shot featuring a brief look at the complicated projector setup used for the game board. Has anyone else got a close-up of this famed contraption?)

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Hi-de-Hi! Edits #1: Raiding the Funny Cupboard

Published 13th September 2016

TV Comedy

Jeffrey looking confused

The first episode of Hi-de-Hi! is one of my favourite sitcom pilots of all time.1 And for at least the next four series, Hi-de-Hi! is one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. This is for so many reasons, all of which is worth an article in itself, but put simply: my favourite thing about the show is that it’s the perfect mix of everything. Every single kind of comedy I love is embedded into its soul. A show that doesn’t sneer at broad comedy, yet includes moments of amazing subtlety. It knows the magic is in the blend of the two.

Recently, BBC Two have started another repeat run of the show in their Afternoon Classics slot. I’ve long meant to do a full comparison of these broadcast versions of the show compared to my DVD copy – which fully admits on the back that “for contractual reasons certain edits have been made”. I was mainly expecting just the odd music change – but actually, the changes have ended up being rather more interesting than I ever imagined, and for the the pilot at least, actually ask rather more questions of the broadcast repeat than of the DVD.

Let’s take a look, shall we? Just to clarify, the two versions we are comparing are:

Neither of these versions, you will note, is what was actually transmitted originally on the 1st January 1980. So, which version is closest to that original edit? We can perhaps make an educated guess about that later.

All times given are for the DVD version of the episode, so even if you didn’t record the repeat broadcast version, you can skip to see exactly where the changes are. Cut dialogue in the repeat broadcast version is like this.

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  1. Along with ‘Allo ‘Allo!, You Rang, M’Lord?, Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, and… hang on, there’s some kind of link here that I can’t quite put my finger on. ↩

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Blade Runner Afternoons

Published 6th September 2016

TV Gameshows

One of my most vivid television memories as a child was the title sequence to Blockbusters.1 Every afternoon I’d lie in front of the fire, and that gorgeous neon cityscape would transport me to another world.

I often wondered how it was made… and the answer came when I ended up in hospital, and I managed to borrow a copy of the 1989 Blockbusters Annual. Contained within was a four page feature on how the titles were made. I devoured it… and then had to give the annual back at the end of my stay when I had the temerity to get better. I never managed to trace down a copy over the years, and in the end those pages became a distant memory.

Nowadays, I’m an adult, and eBay is a thing. And this morning, I finally saw that feature I hadn’t seen for over twenty years. If anything, it’s even more detailed than I remember, with many absolutely gorgeous behind-the-scenes photos… and well worth sharing with you lot.

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  1. Technically, the second title sequence – the first is nice enough, but nowhere near as good as the famous one. ↩

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The Dirty Feed Guide to Good Living

Published 1st September 2016

Internet / Life

I enjoy watching other people have arguments on the internet. All the fun of the fight, without actually getting hurt yourself. It can be immense amounts of fun.

After watching one such fight on Twitter recently – which cumulated in a load of deleted tweets and a half-assed apology – the person involved tweeted the following immediately afterwards:

“Spend time with people you love. Interact with the world directly. Climb/lift/eat/enjoy something. Run. Read. Play. Cry. Smile.

Go now.”

Once you’ve finished vomiting, there are all kinds of issues you could take with that. It seems to be a plea for the reader to step aside from the internet and do other things instead… ignoring the fact that on the internet I still spend time with people I love, read, play, cry, and smile.

If we want to take things further, I’d point out that for some people – disabled, physically ill, or with mental health issues – being told to climb, lift, or run instead of spending time online with people who care about you is not only thoroughly ridiculous, but actively harmful.

And to get philosophical for a moment, the phrase “interact with the world directly” sets off alarm bells in my head. As though there isn’t something direct about how we can interact on social media. And I’ve walked through real places that I should have appreciated in a complete daze. Being there doesn’t always mean that you’re there. Some of the most engaged I’ve ever been with the world has been online.

But all that isn’t the worst thing about this tweet. The mistake here is that this person took their own bad behaviour… and projected it outwards. They knew they’d behaved ridiculously, and clearly thought that stepping away from the net for a while was best for them – which is a perfectly valid choice. But to make themselves feel better, they decided to turn what was best for them into some kind of motto for good living for everyone. A motto which certainly suited them at that particular moment… but is not a general guide to life.

To repeat: that tweet is not actually about helping others. It’s simply about making themselves feel better. It’s merely a useless platitude which is too simplistic to be truly useful to anyone.

My advice would be: when you’ve screwed up, sometimes you should wallow in your mistake. Not for long – doing that can get very unpleasant indeed. (At some point I need to stop beating myself up for mistakes I made twenty years ago, but that’s my own issue which I need to work on.) But sitting back for a moment and simply appreciating your error, rather than turning it into some kind of grand teachable moment for the world, is often the best option. Learn the lesson you need to learn, not paper over your cracked ego by giving out useless platitudes.

Of course, I’m not saying nobody can ever give advice for life. That would not only be utterly ludicrous, but considering this article, ridiculously hypocritical. I’m just saying you don’t need to leap straight to the teachable moment when you’ve fucked up… and that teachable moment needs to be carefully considered, not an instant reaction to your own personal circumstances.

Sometimes, when you’ve behaved like a bit of a dick, the only thing the world needs from you is to recognise that you’ve behaved like a bit of a dick.

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