Saturday 30th May: My Media Roundup by Adam Tinworth, media analyst and journalism trainer, One Man & His Blog

Every Saturday morning, we invite a publishing pro to put together their top media links. This week's guest editor is Adam Tinworth.

Adam Tinworth is a business journalist by background, but in recent years has been a consultant and trainer in online journalism, a visiting lecturer at City, University of London, and a media analyst at his blog One Man & His Blog.

You can also find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Adam says:

"You’d think that after 17 years writing a blog that’s always been based on sharing interesting links for journalists, finding a handful to share on this newsletter would be a pushover, wouldn’t you? And yet, as I stare at the balefully blank screen in front of me, inspiration just doesn’t come. It’s all because I have a dirty little secret: I do most of my learning from outside journalism. And so, I didn’t feel particularly inspired to share a load of links about journalism.

So, I’m going to cheat a little. I’m going to suggest some invaluable sources of in-bound information that might help you think about journalism in a different way. And, in particular, why we’ve been building up to curated emails of this sort for a very long time.

(They did warn you that I’m a lecturer above, didn’t they? Well, this is a teachable moment…)"

John Naughton is one of those annoying people who has been blogging even longer than me. While his Observer columns are excellent value, his public notebook is a compulsory daily read for me. It does a perfect job of cutting through the clutter and finding incisive writing that’s worth my time. And, just to prove that you can teach an old blogger new tricks, he recently revamped his site to make it more amenable to email delivery.

Tech journalist Charles Arthur’s blog generally arrives as a newsletter. And I read it. Straight away. It’s another example of superb curation, where he delivers a daily update on the tech and media stories that really matter. Fundamentally, the challenge for all of us is in finding good stuff amongst the great sea of content chum that sloshes around the internet. I value, and will continue to value, those who are good guides. In fact, some of them I’ll pay for that guidance.

Which brings us to…

Can this piece really be six years old now? My goodness, it can. This is an article that changed the whole way I view online journalism. Ben Thompson’s razor sharp analysis of where value lies in the digital publishing ecosystem shifted my thinking, in a way that will familiar to many of my former students (like Chris of this here parish). This is why I chuck Ben $10 a month to subscribe to his newsletter - the very first paid newsletter I signed up for.

Now we’re getting positively prehistoric. This post is 13 years old. But it still contains a truism that many publishers are struggling to get to grips with well over a decade later. In an age of abundant content - why do we always seem to see more content as the solution to any problem? Jeff explored the alternatives in such an influential way, that it’s still resonating in these curated newsletters all these years later.

Another oldie. I’m a big fan of the online science magazine Nautilus and their stuff is always useful and compelling. We bandy the term “viral” around freely, but we don’t often think deeply about what it means, and how information actually spreads on the internet. But if you want your reporting to be read, you need to understand this stuff. And this is a good start. (Let’s just gloss over the fact that viral has regained its original meaning of late…)

I nearly had a nasty accident in the shower the other week, when I realised the the editor of HSJ was being interviewed on The Spectator podcast. When was the last time you remember a B2B editor being amplified by a high circulation mag like that? Which brings me to this piece from last month, which asks some very important questions about which voices we choose to amplify, and which voices we should be hearing from directly.

And just to finish up, here’s a podcast for you. Podcasting is one of those spaces where, to me at least, the journalism world doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to what’s happening in the indie podcast space. I love this nature-centric podcast from the actor David Oakes. This is the closest you’ll find to a magazine in podcast form, that explores different aspects of our relationship with nature through a series of fascinating interviews.

If you would like to guest edit a future edition of My Media Roundup, simply reply to this email.