I love great, true stories. Ones that make me feel something. Ones that give me a sense of our common humanity, and which surprise and delight me. Ones I can't wait to tell someone about.That cannot possibly be created by a computer. That stay with me for a day (or a month or a year or a lifetime) after I finish them. That understand people are not all good or all bad, that life is complex, and that the most interesting thing about the news is what all those people thought they were doing, not what they did.
But the internet is full of shit. Even once great publications are scrambling to survive, and doing the most idiotic things that the world's most soulless and panicked people can think of in a committee.
Play on fear. Play on hope. Play on celebrities. Look at data and write whatever it tells you worked yesterday. Look at Google trends, or Reddit, and do a take. Talk about the same thing everyone else is talking about. (AI, Donald Trump.) Spam your audience until they're on the verge of rage, but not quite there. Make it hard for anyone generous enough to subscribe to then change their mind. Start a podcast. Start two. One about AI. Another about Donald Trump. More is better. Faster is better. More. Faster. More. Faster.
I know because I've worked in all those places, and despaired as I watched really talented people who once strove only for integrity sucked into those methods. It felt like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when he's forced to drink the blood of Kali and becomes an evil zombie. It was exhausting to recall it to write that paragraph, let alone live it for a millisecond longer.
The very dumbest thing a writer and editor could do at this moment, if we go by the general consensus, is start a publication that is entirely driven by a sense of curiosity. That only covers things that are 1) interesting to us 2) different to, or better than, everything else in the English language. No trends. No 'data'. No takes. No pandering to algorithms. Curation, not aggregation. Making news, not following it. Just totally original stories that are told and presented as thoughtfully and beautifully as they can be with a staff that I'd describe as 'skeleton' or 'guerrilla' (this means tiny and improvised).
So that's what I did.
It's called Bungalow because we explore one story in depth over a series of smaller stories. Also because it is a nice word that feels restful, and wasn't taken. The aim is to create a world. A moment of peace, and thought, in the midst of the maelstrom. Like finding a perfect, tiny, cafe with plenty of tables, but enough people for a pleasant buzz, and no pressure to buy, or rules about what you can or cannot do. A space to sit and breathe.
Three months in, we've been featured in the Financial Times, Feed Me, Semafor, Popbitch, The Browser, Gloria, Perfect Sentences, On My Om, and many others. And lots of people have said very nice things about us. You can see a few below, because they make me really proud and happy.
I hope you'll consider subscribing, and even upgrading, because even if it's not Bungalow, even if it's not me, I want there to be a space in the world that is not optimised to within an inch of its life and chasing the internet around, but that still makes culture, makes news, and makes us feel again. That manages to be relevant without being a dick.
The old world we loved is dying. It's not coming back. It's up to us to make something better.
“Jesus. That was… incredible.”
“Amazing story. I cried while reading it. Thank you.”
“I am filled with awe, fear and compassion at the same time.”
“Outstanding, inspiring and essential reading.”
“Most compelling reading I've experienced in ages.”
“Superb journalism.”
The good news for writers, illustrators, photographers and filmmakers: we want to be a place where you can bring your most cherished work, and know it will be handled with the intention of making it the best it can be.
The bad news: our structure means we can really only accept contributions which are either big enough that they can carry a whole issue, or that fit into an existing planned one.
I have written for every publication I can think of, and was a staff writer at Gawker, a crime reporter, international correspondent, breaking news writer and media correspondent for The New York Times, produced and presented short documentaries for Vice on HBO and edited and mentored at Columbia Journalism School.
I covered the Boston marathon bombing, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, the London riots, the mass killing in Norway, the Arab spring, the hubris of the tech industry, the collapse of the media industry, killer bears and the strangest exorcism imaginable. I’ve done investigative work, and broken stories, on Islamic extremist terrorism, disinformation, Wikileaks, the British phone hacking scandal and many others. I also wrote a book about the mysterious death of the second UN Secretary General in the Congo in 1961.
An associate of Donald Trump once threatened to expose that I had not attended a conference I said I was attending. Julian Assange called me “a sleazy hack job”. The right felt my book was racist because it was not positive about the role of colonialism in Africa. The left felt my book was racist because I am the wrong color to write about Africa in the first place. Nicer (and probably more attractive) people compared me to John LeCarre or Robert Ludlum. My proudest moment was my name appearing for three seconds in an episode of Nathan For You.