The first Engaged Reading Digest of 2020

Happy new year, all!

Here's the very first digest of links relevant to practitioners of engaged journalism in 2020, to start the year right.

(I might have cheated a little by writing this yesterday… )

Look, when is journalism going to take esports seriously?

How many newspapers do you know with esports sections? With gaming coverage outside reviews?

The coverage of the market is massively below its economic importance, as this story might hint:

Germany Has Created Dedicated Work Visas For Esports

Germany has taken the first steps in order to help regulate esports competitors coming into their country with dedicated work visas.

Bleeding Cool News And RumorsGavin Sheehan

Podcasts are more versatile than you think

Whenever a medium becomes hot, you get gurus springing up, telling you how you should do things. One of the reasons I will probably never be rich as a consultant is that I always emphasise experimentation and learning, rather than out-of-the-box solutions.

Posts like this give me faith that I'm doing the right thing, though: it turns out that some really unexpected formats can be really effective in podcasts. If you’re still obsessing about there being a discernible “formula” for successful podcasts, well, this should shake your worldview a little:

Text adventures make Best Podcasts list

At 9to5 Mac, Bradley Chambers made a list of his 10 top podcasts of this decade, and at #4 was a surprising choice. [Relay FM’s Members-Only shows] are something else, though. I am mainly talking about their episodes like Danger Town Beatdown. O...

Six ColorsJason Snell

The journalist's guide to reverse image search

This is a hugely useful guide to reverse image search, which is crucial for fact-checkers, investigative journaists - and journalists in general. As ever, bellingcat are providing great resources — for free.

Guide To Using Reverse Image Search For Investigations - bellingcat

Reverse image search is one of the most well-known and easiest digital investigative techniques, with two-click functionality of choosing “Search Google for image” in many web browsers. This method has also seen widespread use in popular culture, perhaps most notably in the MTV show Catfish, which e…

bellingcatAric Toler

Rebuilding the people's web

Anil Dash – one of the earliest bloggers, and one whom I've been lucky enough to meet a couple of times — has foudn his mojo again in recent weeks, and has been writing some great stuff about the tension between the open web and the platforms.

This is well worth your time:

The People’s Web

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren’t designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren’t run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be

Anil DashAnil Dash

Life as a Stack Overflow moderator

This is a fascinating insight into how life as a mod on Stack Overflow actually works. If you're at all interested in content moderation, this is for you…

The other side of Stack Overflow content moderation

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I intend to stop actively contributing to Stack Overflow once I publish it. I was hesitant because I had found a group of people that made content…

MediumSotirios Delimanolis

How the GoPro media team work

This video is a fascinating insight into how GoPro's media team makes those apparently "spontaneous" action videos:

Happy New Year to you all. Feel free to send me any suggestions for great pieces you've read — or even better, written.