Welcome to Bungalow

YOU’RE RECEIVING THIS BECAUSE you've either interacted with my work, or kindly supported the launch of Breaker. Lachlan decided he wanted to devote himself to media news there, and he'll continue to do that like nobody else can.

I'm starting Bungalow to do something different: one story, explored in all of its constituent parts, in depth, every issue. If you'll forgive a little manifesto-ing, I'll explain more.

The internet is the whole world sprinting in a circle. If you stop someone and ask them why they're sprinting, they'll say: because everyone else is sprinting.

I want to harness the thing we all end up doing as a guilty antidote to that churn: diving very deeply into one story, and following all of its tangents and inspirations to uncover a world that you could never otherwise have seen.

It might be one night, or one moment, unpacked. It might be a topic or a person — Me Too, Faustian bargains, mass hysteria, Benny Hill, Al Qaeda — explored anew. It might be the archive of one amazing or horrifying person. It will certainly mostly be material that is not already online. (A lot less is on Google than you think.)

There will be ten issues a year. But all sorts of wonders will shoot more often from those issues, across text, images, video and audio, into your inbox, and in collaboration with the many wonderful publications doing similar work.

The aim is to tell you things you didn't already know and take you to places you could never have gone yourself. To make stories big again. To find the myths and legends that get lost in the algorithms. To talk to the most interesting people about the most interesting things.

I believe that journalism should humanise. It should grant people their dignity, and not seek to shame or judge or convert, but to understand. It should surprise, and delight, and horrify, as life itself does. And it should achieve all of that without ever losing a sense of fun, or taking itself too seriously. We're only telling stories here.

It will launch soon, and you can join here. I know I've asked for your support once already recently, but I believe it's worth doing so again just one more time. ⸭