DG #21: Previews from our art director
We’re in the final throes of getting issue 21 to press, so we decided to take a few snaps over the shoulder of our art director, Christian, as he laid out the last pages. Here’s a little glimpse of what to expect from issue #21, which will be out in a couple of weeks.
If you’re not a subscriber yet, there’s still time to sign up and start your subscription on issue #21. We’ll give you a ten percent discount if you use promo code ‘SLOWNEWSDAY’.
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Five things we learned last month
It’s crunch time at DG headquarters, with issue set to #21 go to press shortly. As we get our heads down to put the finishing touches on what promises to be our best issue yet, here are some of the favourite facts we learned while researching its features and infographics.
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DG #21 preview: the Chagos Islands
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forcibly evicted by the UK government so the US could set up a military base. The world’s largest Chagossian community today is in Crawley, near Gatwick, where they continue to fight for the right to return to their islands.
For issue #21 of Delayed Gratification, our associate editor Matthew Lee spent time with Chagossians to tell the remarkable story of an exiled people living in limbo in Britain. On 20th December, Matthew attended a football match in Sutton Coldfield between the Chagos Islands and Panjab FC, a team representing a 19th century Sikh empire. Neither team is officially recognised by Fifa so they’re restricted to friendlies against other unaffiliated nations; last year the Chagos Islands played a couple of games against the Principality of Sealand, and this summer the Crawley boys will travel to Abkhazia for the ConIFA World Football Cup for unaffiliated nations.
This game was pretty even for about 15 minutes, but the Panjab team soon took control and ended up winning 4-1. Here are some pictures Matthew took on the day.
To find out more about the ongoing story of the Chagos Islands, keep an eye out for issue #21 of Delayed Gratification. Subscribers can look forward to receiving it on their doormats in mid-March. If you haven’t subscribed yet, there’s still time to sign up and start your subscription on issue #21. We’ll give you a 10 percent discount if you use promotion code ‘SLOWNEWSDAY’ when you sign up here.
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And the winner is…
The Corinthia hotel, Khartoum,
30th January 2014
Sudan’s answer to Alan Sugar has a dodgy microphone. He has successfully announced two runners-up, but when the moment comes to declare the winner of TV programme ‘Mashrouy’ (‘My project’) – the country’s version of ‘The Apprentice’ – the sound cuts out. The audience is left in momentary suspense as he inaudibly mouths the victor’s name.
The event is being broadcast live, as the final, climactic episode of the series. It is the culmination of three long and challenging months for the contestants, spent presenting their start-up ideas for scrutiny and elimination to a panel of businesspeople. Seven and a half million viewers are watching.
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Slow Journalism Night at the Design Museum
We hope you’ll join us for our delayed review of 2015, at our upcoming Slow Journalism Night at the Design Museum on 30th March.
Bookended by terror attacks in France and California, 2015 also saw political upheaval in the UK, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, continued conflict in Syria and Yemen, and an unprecedented refugee crisis in Europe. But what happened after the reporters packed their bags and moved on? And which events didn’t receive the media coverage they perhaps deserved?
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A grave situation
On 18th January 2015, thousands of Filipinos lined the route to Rizal Park where Pope Francis conducted the largest outdoor mass in history. Addressing a sea of blue and yellow ponchos on a rainy Sunday afternoon, the man known locally as ‘Lolo Kiko’ or ‘grandfather Francis’ called on the crowd of six million, urging them to shun “the social structures which perpetuate poverty, ignorance and corruption”.
As millions of devotees chanted the pope’s name, less than five miles away Tony Bacalso, 62, watched attentively on his son’s seven-inch portable television with his family. He would have loved the opportunity to see the pope in person but it wasn’t possible. “We’d have the cost of travelling there. That, and I have problems with my knees. So I just said that seeing him on TV would be enough,” he explains.
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Infographic: close encounters
Between 22nd and 28th September 2015, Asteroid 2015SK7 whizzed past the Earth, missing our planet by a 26,600-kilometre whisker. We used Nasa’s ‘close-approach data‘ to chart the other space objects set to make a close encounter with Earth.
Bill McKibben looks back on COP21
Two months after the COP21 UN Climate Change Conference drew to a close in Paris, our associate editor Matthew Lee looked back on the talks with US environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. McKibben is a founder or 350.org, a global grassroots climate change movement. Here are his thoughts on the COP21 talks.
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Reagan and the Atomic Priesthood
“The Nuclear Waste Policy Act… which I’m signing today, provides the long overdue assurance that we now have a safe and effective solution to the nuclear waste problem… we can and will prevail over the sometimes complex and perplexing problems associated with energy”
– President Ronald Reagan, 7th Jan, 1983
It was an entirely new predicament for the human race. Nuclear waste had been building up in ever-increasing quantities since the world’s first nuclear power station came online on 1st June 1954 in Obninsk, Russia. The waste was highly poisonous to humans and would remain so for hundreds of thousands of years. It had to be kept far away from the food chain, the water supply and the atmosphere, isolated in such a way that no one would come into contact with it for millenia. Wherever it was stored would have to be so geologically stable that there was no risk that the waste would be jolted into the open by an earthquake, flood or volcano. Whatever material it was encased in would have to remain in one piece until the radioactivity subsided. And the society in which it was buried would have to be so predictably stable that its scientists and engineers would continue to safeguard the waste for countless generations to come.
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Infographic: Revisionist history
Last year, Wikipedia said it was blocking 381 editing accounts for involvement in ‘black hat’ editing, including undisclosed paid advocacy. But which bios have been revised the most during the 15 years of Wikipedia’s existence? Here’s the top ten, alongside the number of times their pages have been tweaked.
This is an updated version of an infographic published in issue #20 of Delayed Gratification, which is available in our shop. If you subscribe now, we’ll give you the issue for free – just use promotion code ‘SOCIAL20′ when you sign up here.
In pictures: the DG infographics tour
It’s been a hectic start of the year for DG’s editor Rob and art director Christian, with three infographics classes for subscribers packed into two weeks.
First stop was Brighton on 21st January, where Rob gave a talk about the art of crafting infographics at the excellent Magazine Brighton, an indie mag store with a brilliant assortment of titles, and which has been a longtime supporter of Delayed Gratification. Here’s the rather wonderful window display Magazine Brighton put together for the event.
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With extreme prejudice
“The organisation that ignores the concerns of its community – particularly minority communities – does so at its own peril,” says chief Michael Meehan of the Berkeley Police Department, with the breezy, my-door-is-always-open candour you suspect he uses to winning effect at press conferences, on new recruits and at swearing-in ceremonies.
Coming from him, it’s more than a soundbite, though. In a California campus town famous for its intellectual left-wing leanings, Meehan is head of a force that looks very much like a paragon of progressive policing: Berkeley has been recruiting exclusively college-educated officers for the past 100 years and was the first American agency to submit itself to civilian oversight in the 1970s. And since 2010, Chief Meehan and his command staff have been engaged in an earnest project to expose the hidden hand of racial bias within their local police culture, using an approach that might just prove revolutionary for law-and-order policy everywhere.
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