Here’s a topic that’s bound to delight everyone. The best way I can think of to understand the social place of the British monarchy is as a very modern influencer content-marketing and celebrity management operation, the influencer house of Windsor. Starting in the late 1960s, there was a deliberate project to reinvent the institution in…
Read More The monarchy as a content-marketing operationSo Matt Hancock is doing the rounds of the sundays, dropping hints that will be briefed out in more detail without attribution later. Perhaps this time’s the charm and the virus will be defeated by the sheer might of talking points distribution. Hell, it worked on us to the extent of getting this shower elected…
Read More A big conversation on seagulls, and afterAnother drive-by media studies thing. Efforts to regulate the media tend to focus on ownership (telco regulation people would say structural remedies) – should you be allowed to own a newspaper and a TV station? What about two TV stations? Can you vertically-integrate content production and distribution? Alternatively, they sometimes try functional things, like requiring…
Read More Andrew Neil should be broken up by the competition commissionSomething I keep talking about without ever putting in the work of writing a definitive statement is the history of the hot take as a media format. The UK media industry cluster invented three new ones at the end of the 90s, they were hugely successful, two of them depraved and corrupted everybody and the…
Read More A case study in the rise of the hot takeWe keep getting news stories about contact tracing call-handlers with nothing to do. The Guardian is especially keen on these and seems to either think they are just idle and need scolding, or else they should be laid off for reasons of economy, as there’ll be no problem bringing them back in future. Strangely, it…
Read More How bad is the contact tracing – really?Via Adam Tooze on Twitter I saw this piece by His Seriousness, Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times. There’s a way to start a blog post, no? Anyway I was interested by this chart: I think this is an example of what I called, years ago, the North Atlantic Bullshit Conveyor, taking inspiration from the…
Read More From the Atlantic Bullshit Conveyor to the Anglospheric Bullshit ConveyorIf politics is theatre, one of the defining features of the form is the presence of the on-stage critics – the media, or more specifically, the big name opinion leaders. They would like to imagine themselves as a Greek chorus commenting on the drama, but if they are, they’re a Greek chorus composed of unreliable…
Read More The failure of the on-stage criticWhy is the Sun so lame these days? Here’s a case study. Overnight everyone was expecting a deluge of incitement to pour forth on the Supreme Court, but when the mountains had finished travailing we got this: This is a mad choice of lead, and a reference to the catchphrase of a TV comedian who…
Read More How did the Sun get so weak?Everyone’s talking about this, and I agree with the point in the kicker: Still, it is less often we think about Bannon simply as a media executive in charge of a private company. Any successful media executive produces content to expand audience size One thing the Buzzfeed article shows, although it doesn’t call it out…
Read More The year the journalistic sewer changed handsThis depressing thread of Marie Le Conte’s, and the associated Press Gazette story, are familiar. This is bleak but I'm absolutely not surprised: https://t.co/H0FHd5RMeH pic.twitter.com/rBPrGgOBw9 — Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) August 3, 2017 In early 2005 I was hired as a staff writer at Mobile Communications International magazine, having impressed at the interview by being…
Read More The answer probably isn’t more NIBs