Thread by @fleetstreetfox

A thread on how a journalist's brain works.

Ignore if you're not sure there is such a thing. 1/

In lockdown, after I bitched on here about Thatcher selling off BT, my former student @hwewalker sent me this. (I've been sent it 3,000 times in the past 24hrs by men telling me they already know what I wrote and what I should have written). 2/

techradar.com/uk/news/world-…

It's one interview from a man recalling events of 30 years past and making some sweeping assertions. There's no independent evidence to back it up, and it's got one major fact very wrong which is that Thatcher was booted in 1990 and therefore made no policy decisions in 1991.

But it stuck in my head. How true could it be? Was there someone else who could substantiate it? It sounded like a good story. Whenever I mentioned it to people, they said "really? Wow." Plus, it made me look into my own internet speeds, which was 4Mbps. Was that good or bad? 4/

I had other stuff to do, test veterans things to write, a family to look after in lockdown, money to earn. I thought perhaps with another interview or two I could turn round a feature for @DailyMirror that would earn me a few quid. Simple, easy job. 5/

But while it is easy to find people to bang on about how the internet works, you're never sure they know what they're talking about. So my lovely friends from #KPBA at @Maxim_PR put me in touch with Andy Conibere at @TrooliFibre, an altnet laying fibre optics in the SE. 6/

I told Andy I knew nothing at all about any of it, and what was fibre anyway, and he spent more than an hour explaining 30 years of tech to me.

He said 4mbps was really very, very, bad. He wasn't laying fibre to my part of the world yet but perhaps Elon Musk could help. 7/

Then I spoke to @ChiOnwurah, and was pleasantly surprised to find the shadow digital minister had worked in telecoms for decades and knew EXACTLY what had happened. I found @bayvel_p, recommended by someone on here, who provided some academic balance. 8/

I dug up historic Hansard debates, tried to get in touch with former MPs, got knocked back a LOT.

Then I spoke to entrepreneur Richard Tang from @zeninternet and, after @MirrorAlison expressed an interest, found case studies like @cowboycoder @ChloeRaccoon and @swmae01 9/

There were countless others I couldn't include - Brian in Catford on .3mbps with no-one prepared to fix the line, someone in a Welsh forest on 150mbps, Scottish and Irish followers crowing over their data superiority to the English. 10/

In my downtime, I rewatched the Matrix. I did all 5 seasons of IT Crowd. I began a one-woman campaign about my own phone line. (More on that another day). I obsessed.

I even found a broadband-bedevilled handsome celebrity TV vet who cuddles lambs in @drjgreenwood. /whatnumberisthisnow

Shorthand has a half life and by this point my first interviews looked like gobbledegook. It took half a day just to transcribe one. And I only had about a day a week to spare on it. But my WORD I was getting annoyed. 13/

We HAD this. We were the experts. And we threw it all away. But while the thrust of that TechRadar article was right, there was so much more to it. Tang was right when he said that, if the Tories had spent billions on fibre in the 1990s, it would have been a white elephant. 14/

And while Chi was right to say Tory ideology about markets was the principle reason for the failure to invest in infrastructure, Labour didn't do enough in power to reverse it.

And then, even as we all had multiple internet devices, Ring doorbells, streaming services and our broadband was no longer up to scratch, someone came along and suggested free fibre for all - and his party slumped to its biggest defeat in 84 years. This was OUR fault, too. 16/

I tried to get it all down to its shortest length. Every interviewee got one quote, the facts were boiled to a few words each, and Hemingway would have wept at the sparseness of my prose. It was still 4k words, and 3 separate features. 17/

YOU try getting three features into a national newspaper on consecutive days about something as dry as telecommunications. 18/

Then @paulcockerton suggested a showcase - just like damned.mirror.co.uk. Suddenly, every expert could have their full say. The case studies could blossom. There could be... gifs. 19/

The writing cardigan went on. The notebooks were reopened, and cos OBVIOUSLY I HADN'T SAVED THE TRANSCRIPTIONS, LIKE A DICK I had to re-decipher every bit of shorthand again, after its legibility had decayed to the extent it needed an archaeologist. 20/

Then @renduh got to work. The man's a genius. Don't poach him. I need him, so that I can email someone with things like "can you make it go ding da da ding ding aling?" and he knows what I mean. Plus, the GIFS. 21/

I gave the govt a right of reply. @DCMS took a fortnight and said no, and gave me some guff that didn't even make sense with itself. Much like Sir John Barrow. 22/

But 14k words, 6 months, and a lot of kindly explanations later, it is born. And the internet team at the @DailyMirror have built it so, whenever people want to know why their broadband is down, or how to test their speeds, it pops up at the top of search engines. 23/

Oh, and I still had to hack it into 500 words for a spread in the paper, but I did get to add a lot of other stuff around the outside too. 24/

Which is a long way of saying how it is that one little thing can get its hooks in you, and not only get a life of its own but then continue to exist on the internet until the end of civilisation and/or a decent signal. 25/

Perhaps in years to come, men who read TechRadar and don't question if it's right because MAN THINGS will send people this link reboot.mirror.co.uk/index.html instead 26/

Either way, journalism wins. Thank you to Harry, again, and every one who helped. And here is the hated writing cardigan, balled up in a heap whence it was thrown after I was finally done.

I shall now, to coin a phrase, #REBOOT. /ends

PS have probably just done this so I can show future students who say "but how do we find a story?" and "no-one returned my calls" the reason for my impatient snort.