Here’s a bit about some work I’m proud of in my career as a writer and also as a person who sits next to other writers and sometimes helps build things for them. (It’s quite long, I’m very old.)
Journalism and things
Before starting my current job in 2018, I was editorial director at BuzzFeed UK for several years, and senior writer before that (or “Seaioe Weigeę”, as a catastrophic business card printing failure once had it).
Some brief highlights: I worked with Craig Silverman and Alan White to expose a British news agency that provided a steady stream of dubious viral stories. With James Ball, I uncovered a network of Russian propaganda accounts that Twitter had missed – and in doing so discovered that 1/13th of all the original English-language tweets from Russian accounts on the topic of Brexit were personally attacking my photoshopping. Working with academics from Sheffield University I took a deep look at online abuse of politicians. And I covered how looking at patterns of online sharing during the 2017 election may have given us a better insight into what was going on than, say, looking at newspaper front pages.
I worked on data-driven pieces about ethnicity and universities, pay gaps, and (with Emily Dugan) access to wheelchairs. Over the years I helped to debunk a completely wrong Sun front page on mental health, Greater Manchester Police getting a little trigger-happy about “3D guns”, and – in my most hard-hitting work – the terrible threat posed by a shark named Lydia. And I attempted to explain everything from the electoral college system (using shot glasses) to the effects of a disrupted jet stream on British weather (using cute animations).
New Formats
From 2015 onwards, I built and led the New Formats team at BuzzFeed. This was a small team dedicated to creating… well, new editorial formats. Specifically in a rapid, experimental kind of way. My role was part product lead, part editor, part designer, and part rubber duck.
It went pretty well! With just two developers (the brilliant Paul Curry and Chris Applegate) the formats we created powered around 400 million page views in the space of two years, while our interactive work was part of a Pulitzer finalist investigation. Which isn’t bad.
We invented a whole suite of reusable entertainment formats that were behind viral hits large and medium: from choose-your-own-adventure games (credit to Dan Dalton for pushing that one forward) and map games and typing games, as well as one-off custom games (thankyou Robin Edds). Our flexible quiz engine enabled allowed writers to expand where they could take their ideas. Remember the explosion of “what percent X are you?” quizzes from a few years back? That was our thing! (Alex Finnis was the one who realised exactly what you could do with the engine we’d built.) It also allowed us to customise rapidly on the core code when a writer (Ellie Bate in this case) had a great idea they wanted to see come to life.
And we worked with journalists across BuzzFeed News to help them tell their stories in the ways they wanted. We helped Rossalyn Warren tell the powerful story of a Syrian refugee’s journey through WhatsApp messages. We helped Heidi Blake and her investigations team explain the complex web of connections that linked a series of unexplained deaths on British soil to Russia; we also helped them show how a major political donor was dropping rucksacks full of money at post offices across London (that story also involved a complex web.) We helped Patrick Smith unpick the corporate and political chains of responsibility over Grenfell, which turned out to be… a complex web.
We ran live data operations for the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections, the 2016 EU referendum, and the 2016 US presidential election, with graphics going out on both the web and in live broadcasts.
And I’m pretty sure that we were also the ones who invented reaction polling for live Facebook videos – you know, “click the emojis to vote”, that kind of thing – for the BuzzFeed x Facebook EUref Townhall live shows (which I also co-hosted and co-produced, because I am fancy). That’s where we had David Cameron, Nigel Farage and Nicola Sturgeon in front of live audience taking questions about the upcoming referendum – our idea was the viewers could register their approval or disapproval in real time by mashing the ❤️ and 😡 reaction buttons on FB. (The added fun element was that we’d display the live results of this feedback on monitors in the politicians’ eyelines. Lol.)
Anyway, Facebook’s video team loved the idea, but said they didn’t think they could build it in the two weeks we had. Paul built it in a day and half.
What I’m saying is, we were pretty great team and we did some good work.
Some other stuff!
Before doing the New Formats thing at BuzzFeed, I helped create and launch the experimental UsVsTh3m site for Trinity Mirror – which is, er, where I nicked the “New Formats” job title from (apologies to Martin Belam). This was “a three-month experiment that eventually lasted two years”, in the words of Matt Round – I explained a bit of where we were coming from and why we were doing it in a talk at Hacks/Hackers (written up by Adam Tinworth). I was only there for two months from launch before BuzzFeed offered me a job, but I was very proud of what the team created, and the lessons from it stuck with me for the rest of my career – and, I like to think, influenced the direction of the British media, at least a tiny bit. Some bad internal politics meant that it eventually ended in a grim way, but this was absolutely the little editorial experiment launched on Tumblr that could.
Speaking of editorial experiments launched on Tumblr, while I was working at MSN International I launched a little hobby side project called Is Twitter Wrong?, which was an attempt to do fact checking in something vaguely approximating real time – trying to intervene in viral nonsense before it took hold. This kind of blew up when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and unleashed a mini-hurricane of misinformation. I somehow ended up collaborating with Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic on his widely-shared article debunking images, which kind of set the template for how a lot of the early skirmishes of the reality wars would play out.
Jokes
During all this, I also wrote some comedy. In 2013 I produced a piece about the online woes of a fictional British retailer called PriceHound, which became kind of a thing. In 2018 (in my last piece for BuzzFeed), I did it again, because time is circular. In a similar “spend an absurd amount of time creating a fake narrative” vein, I also wrote about how the media would report the apocalypse.
I also wrote about medieval beasts, and how they cannot handle things.
And obviously the high point of my entire career was the time that me and Hannah Jewell filled the empty content space on election day for the 2016 London Mayoral elections by racing hermit crab versions of Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith live on FB. Honestly, watch it: it’s legitimately tense and possibly the most flawless piece of work I’ve ever been involved with.
