Matt Locke

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. After reading Tuesday’s Sports Creativity Edition, Matt sent us a bit of the wonderful story below and we asked him if he’d be up for turning it into a full-blown WITI. Thanks Matt! - Noah (NRB)Matt here. In the 1980s, I was a lanky, bookish, teenager who wasn't good at soccer and wasn’t posh enough to play cricket. I spent all my time messing with my first 8-bit computer and didn’t get out much. The UK had just launched a fourth national TV network—Channel 4—with a mission to promote diverse programming. This led to them acquiring the rights to broadcast American Football, with surprising success, making the Chicago Bears, and especially The Fridge, cult icons to teens interested in alternative culture.My dad was a carpenter on building sites, and when I was 14 we bumped into a former colleague of his. His friend took one look at me and my brothers and asked if we’d be interested in playing baseball. Our ears pricked up—here was a sport that was so niche it wasn’t even on Channel 4 yet! I think our interest was driven as much by the potential for cult kudos points as it was the game itself.My dad’s friend had been playing baseball in the UK since the 1950s. There had been amateur leagues in the country since the game's creation (the soccer team Derby County’s ground used to be called “The Baseball Ground” as it was initially created in an early-20th Century boom in UK baseball). So he organized a practice, brought along some gloves and bats, and we ended up forming a youth team with our school friends. After a couple of practices, my dad stepped in and set up our own youth baseball club, the Hoddesdon Sharks. In our first season, we finished 1-21.Back in those days, none of us had ever seen the game played professionally. There were a couple of teams in London with ex-pat US players, so we used to turn up at their practices and get some tips, but other than that we worked from printed coaching manuals shipped over from the US by companies importing baseball gear. We were cosplay-ing baseball at best.A year later, Major League Baseball sent two high school teams from New York State to the UK for a friendship tour. They mainly played exhibition games against the UK’s best adult teams, but the British Baseball Federation pulled together a scratch U18 UK team that included me and my brothers. We played the first official GB youth team game against them. To say we were beaten was an understatement. We’d never really seen a proper curveball before, so were waving swords all day and cheering foul tips just because we made contact. In 1990, I left home to go to art school, but my dad kept running the team, becoming Youth Officer for the British Baseball Federation and accompanying a GB youth team to the first World Children’s Baseball Fair in LA in 1990. At the Fair, he managed to catch a ball thrown into the crowd by Hank Aaron after he was throwing around with Japanese legend Sadaharu Oh. He was too shy to ask them to sign it but kept the ball on his bedside table for years.Why is this interesting?This isn’t just a nostalgic story about playing a niche sport—the role baseball played in our family was deeper than that. Years later, my dad told me that the time he spent running practices, umpiring games, and organizing the team were some of the best times he spent with us as teenagers. As a parent of teens now, I can see how your relationships change as your kids grow older—you become a supporting player in the emerging drama of their lives and grasp at every shared interest or activity you can.My dad didn’t share my geeky passion for early computers or contemporary art, but he took the spark of our interest in baseball and ran with it. He went through all the hassle and work of setting up a niche youth sports team—getting the council to give us space for a diamond, raising funds, teaching himself how to coach and umpire, developing the fragile infrastructure for the sport in the UK—just so he could spend more time with his sons. If we were into soccer, all that work would have been done by other people. But baseball was so niche that it gave him the opportunity to make a new space for us to hang out, to have fun together, to play ball.A few years ago, as he got sick with the prostate cancer that would eventually take him, he gave me the glove my mum had bought him years before, that he’d never got the chance to use, and the ball thrown by Sadaharu Oh and Hank Aaron that he’d kept on his bedside table. I found a local team in Brighton and started playing again at the age of 47. The younger players all have access to MLB TV, YouTube tutorials, and a training infrastructure in the UK that far exceeds what we had in the 1980s. My dad played a very small part in the foundations of that infrastructure, but he did it mainly so he could hang out with me and my brothers. Every time I go out to the diamond now, I’m wearing the glove he gave me, and in my kit bag is the Aaron/Oh ball. I never use it, but it’s a little bit of my dad that still joins me on the diamond. (ML)Baseball of the Day:Here’s the Aaron/Oh ball (picture below). If my dad had the nerves to get it signed, it would be worth around $600. But it’s worth a lot more to me than that, even unsigned.Quick Links:Project Cobb is a great resource of early UK baseball history, with scans of the xeroxed newsletters and magazines that show how hungry we were in the 1980s and 90s for any scrap of information about the sport. (ML)MLB wrote a good history of Baseball in the UK for the 2018 London Series. There’s a recurring pattern of entrepreneurs trying to break the game, building momentum for a couple of years, and then giving up. Although my soccer team - Tottenham Hotspur - won the UK league a couple of times in the early 1900s. Spurs are very much the Boston Red Sox of the Premier League - a ‘big club’ with years of glorious failure and close shaves with success. (ML)Joe Gray, who runs Project Cobb, has written What About The Villa? a fantastic book about the short-lived UK professional baseball league in 1890. (ML)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The UK Baseball Edition

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the UK Baseball Edition. Matt here. If I was to ask you what was the most important invention of the 20th century, you might mention the car, the television, the computer, or the internet. But there’s another invention that had such a huge impact on culture and society that people would organize their lives around it, and it drove the growth of multi-billion dollar industries. Despite this, most of us wouldn’t think of it as an invention at all, as it seems to have always just been there. So here’s a brief history of one of the most important overlooked inventions of modern times: the TV schedule.Like all innovations, the TV schedule didn’t come out of nowhere—it built on existing concepts, and adapted them to a new need. Organizing a timed schedule of different entertainment goes back centuries, with mixed playbills common in Victorian music halls. But in the early 20th century a new problem emerged, caused by a radical new communications technology. Telephone networks were starting to emerge, and some entrepreneurs saw them not just as person-to-person communications devices, but as broadcast devices that could send the same content into thousands of homes at once.In the late 19th century services like the Théâtrophone emerged to broadcast live theatre and opera over telephone networks. But the timings of these were still dictated by the physical venues and performances, and the number of simultaneous listeners was limited. Tivadar Puskás, a Hungarian inventor who had worked with Thomas Edison, saw the potential for something completely new. He had invented the multiplex switchboard, which massively upgraded the ability to send the same telephone signal to multiple receivers. Edison’s technology could reach 50 simultaneous receivers at once, but Puskás’s multiplex could reach half a million. Puskás used his multiplex to launch the first true ‘broadcast’ service—the Telefon Hírmondó, a “telephone newspaper” that broadcast news, stock prices, weather updates and opera performances through one-way telephones installed in subscribers’ homes. This gave Puskås a new problem—how should he organise the content for his subscribers? As he was broadcasting from his own studios, he didn’t have to stick to the opening times of a theatre or opera. And unlike a physical newspaper, he could continue publishing updates all day.His solution was to organize the content around the times of the day, breaking it up into hour, half hour or quarter hour chunks. A sample schedule from the Telefon Hírmondó in 1907 still looks remarkably similar to TV and radio schedules today, with news updates on the hour, light entertainment in the early evening, and even a repeat at 1pm.Why is this interesting?The telephone newspapers were a short-lived innovation, but pioneers like Puskás took what they learned about broadcasting into the new world of radio, bringing with them the schedules they’d used to organis\ze content for their listeners. Radio schedules were then, in turn, copied by the early TV stations in the 1930s and 1940s, and by the second half of the twentieth century, the TV schedule was a dominant and hugely influential force on mainstream culture.When I worked at the BBC and Channel 4 in the 2000s, my biggest surprise was that the real power-brokers in broadcasting wasn’t the star talent or TV execs, but the schedulers. Their understanding of ratings, audience data and their competitors’ schedules made them masters of a dark art, with the power to make or break a TV show by deciding where to place it in the schedule.Alongside broadcasting, the TV schedule also had a huge impact on the newspaper and magazine industry.  TV Guide, first launched in 1948, reached a peak of 19 million sales by the 1980s, making it one of the highest circulation magazines in the US. In the UK the TV schedule was regulated by government, with only two publications allowed to print the schedules—Radio Times for the BBC channels, and TV Times for ITV and Channel 4. That’s how thing went until 1991, when a long campaign from Time Out founder Tony Elliott finally led to the deregulation of TV listings.The TV schedule organized the attention of millions of people at the same time, sharing the same experience, whether it was Richard Nixon sweating in a presidential debate, Neil Armstrong stepping foot onto the moon, or finding out who shot JR. These live, synchronous events created a kind of public sphere at a scale that had never been seen before, and we’re unlikely to see again. Sports are the only TV events that get close—on the list of most-watched US TV programs of all time, the only entries from the 2000s are Superbowls.For nearly a century, a simple list, based around the hours of the day, structured the daily habits of millions of people, shaped the careers of politicians and celebrities, and powered a multi-billion dollar advertising industry. As we spend less time watching live TV, and more time on digital platforms, that power is now passing from the TV schedule to another way of organising our attention—algorithmic streams. (ML)Chart of the DayOfcom’s 2021 Media Nations report showed that for the first time, Live TV accounted for less than half of all UK video viewing:Quick Links:Nikola Tesla’s first job was working on the Budapest Telephone Exchange for Tivadar Puskás and his brother Ferenc. I love connections like this - they explain how important communities and networks are to innovation. (ML)Tony Ageh, Head of Digital at NYPL, is one of the few people I know who has worked with TV schedules from print mags like Time Out through to VOD services like the BBC iPlayer. This talk he did for our The Story conference in 2014 is a fantastic explanation of why list formats like TV Schedules are so powerful. (ML)This history of Netflix’s personalisation tech is a brilliant insight into how media is changing after the schedule. (ML)The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on Feb 9th 1964 is still one of the most watched TV shows ever. Fred Kaps, a journeyman magician, had the dubious honour of being the act that had to follow The Beatles on that show. Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The TV Schedule Edition

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the UK Baseball Edition and the TV Schedule Edition.Matt here. Andy Warhol produced two of the most famous and notorious record covers of all time: the ‘banana’ cover for Velvet Underground and Nico, and the Rolling Stones “zipper” cover for Sticky Fingers.But these weren’t one-offs—Warhol was a prolific record cover designer, creating over 100 covers during his career. He started working as a freelance illustrator in NYC in the late 40s and was commissioned to make his first record cover design for Columbia in 1949. The album was a recording of a concert at MOMA from Carlos Chavez and a mixed American/Mexican orchestra. His illustration, featuring the spidery dip-pen ink style he’d used for fashion magazines and adverts, takes up barely a third of the cover, crowded in by the serif text. But it was the start of one of the most interesting threads through Warhol’s career and gives an early sign of some of the concepts that were crucial to his later work.Why is this interesting?Warhol’s early record covers demonstrate how he learned to work with two concepts that would end up defining his career as an artist: constraints and collaboration. The constraints set by clients, collaborators, and mass production were recurring themes, and you can see how he learns to play within (and later stretch) these constraints in his record covers.My favorite Warhol record covers come from a collaboration with one of the masters of record cover design: Reid Miles. Warhol had already worked on covers for jazz artists at RCA Victor and Columbia, and Miles hired him to work on six covers in total—three for Prestige, and three for Blue Note. For many of these Warhol worked from photos of the musicians taken by Francis Wolff, the photographer who Miles commissioned for many of his most iconic Blue Note covers. Warhol’s adaptions of Wolff’s photos, reducing them to black lines and pops of flat color, are early experiments of the style he would use in his later silk-screen paintings of Elvis, Jackie Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe.I vividly remember seeing the cover of Johnny Griffin’s The Conversation in a record shop in Glasgow in the 90s. I bought it on the spot, not even caring about the music because I had to have the cover. The vivid blue and green flower pattern pops out at you, and the dip-pen ink line, tracing Griffin’s relaxed pose with his saxophone, has a fluid grace that echoes the music inside. You can almost hear the chinking glasses and appreciative murmur of the jazz-club crowd just looking at it.But there was another collaborator that formed an unlikely triad with Warhol and Reid Miles:  Warhol’s mother Julia Warhola. Julia, who moved to New York in 1951 to live with and look after Andy, was a keen artist herself, drawing cats, singing Russian Folk songs, and making collage constructions of flowers with tin cans and grocery packaging (which he later claimed as an inspiration for his soup can paintings). When he returned from traveling as a young man, Andy would ask Julia to write captions in his drawing sketchbooks, and when he started working as an illustrator he would often ask her to do the same on his commercial work.For the cover of The Story of Moondog, a 1957 Prestige album by the blind, avant-garde street musician Moondog (featured in WITI’s Moondog Edition), Andy gave the entire cover over to his mother’s flowing, looping script, with a text literally telling the story of Moondog. Warhol gave the finished black drawing to Reid Miles, who then colored the sentences into alternating vivid greens and blues. The cover won a Certificate of Merit from the Art Director’s Club of New York, crediting “Andy Warhol’s Mother” as the creator.So what did Warhol actually contribute to this cover? He didn’t write the text or layout the final design, but he was pivotal in making the collaboration happen. He’d already started to move from the modernist ideal of the artist as sole creator, to something new: the artist as a director or facilitator, someone who made things happen around him, rather than making the work himself.You can draw a line from this collaboration with his mother, through the ever-changing cast of collaborators at The Factory, his work with Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, managing The Velvet Underground, right up to his later collaborations with Jean Michel Basquiat. The Moondog record cover marks, perhaps, the moment Andy Warhol moved from being an artist to being a brand. (ML)Warhol Album Cover of the DayIn 1955, Warhol illustrated this cover for a Count Basie LP on RCA Victor. It’s thought to be Warhol’s first celebrity portrait, based on a photograph of Basie given to him by the record company. It’s the only jazz album cover he did that depicted the artist’s face, and closely resembles his later screenprint celebrity portraits. It’s a precursor to the album covers he made in the 1970s and 80s, when Warhol used his silk-screened celebrities portraits on record covers for many artists, including Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, and—surprisingly—Paul Anka. (ML)Quick Links:The brilliantly titled Andy Earhole is a collection of blogs by Warhol record collector Guy Minnebach in Belgium. It was an invaluable resource for this WITI, and well worth diving into if you want to find out more. (ML)In 2015 the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills hosted a comprehensive exhibition of Warhol’s record covers. The gallery guide has a great essay you can read online as a PDF. (ML)The Velvet Underground & Nico LP was published in a dizzying variety of editions. Uber-collector Mark Satloff has over 800 copies of the same album in different versions. (ML)--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.The data-driven enterprise of 2025. Is data embedded in every decision, interaction, and process at your organization? Too often, the answer is no. By 2025, smart workflows and seamless interactions among humans and machines could be as standard as corporate balance sheets, and most employees will rely on data to optimize their work. Need a guide? A comprehensive new look at the data-driven enterprise of 2025 can help.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Warhol Album Cover Edition

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the Warhol Album Cover Edition and the TV Schedule Edition.Matt here. We’re two weeks into a new English Premier League football season, and it’s shaping up to be a cracker so far. Liverpool—part of a duopoly with Manchester City that has dominated the League in recent years—have drawn two games that they should have won, and Manchester United look like they have finally hit rock bottom after multiple seasons of overspending and underachievement. The WITI collective has chosen Brentford as their team to support this year, a canny choice after they scored four goals in the first 35 minutes against a broken United side.My team, Tottenham Hotspur, are living up to the promise of their form at the end of last season under Antonio Conte. And, for the first time in many seasons, we started with a home game played at 3pm on a Saturday, the traditional weekly match time for English football. But I couldn’t be at the first home game, and as a result, I couldn’t watch the opener. This is because the Premier League bans broadcasting any football games at 3pm on a Saturday, a blackout that has a deep history in the politics and finances of the sport.Why is this interesting?UEFA rule 48 gives any European football league the right to ban broadcasts of games on Saturday afternoons, but in practice only England and Scotland (with some exceptions) still implement the ban. In every other professional league, the clubs have sold the rights to broadcast all their games. The reason why this hasn’t happened in the UK is down to two things: a pyramid and a football chairman who hated television.The English Football league structure is almost unique in world football, in that it’s structured around a pyramid that connects every club in the country in an unbroken chain of promotion and relegation. There are no franchises in English football—every year, all the clubs have to play for the right to stay in their league. The top squads get promoted to the league above while the bottom are relegated to the league below.The pyramid gives fans the dream that, with the right investment and recruitment, their team could progress to the top of the pyramid and reap the financial rewards of the Premier League. Brentford achieved this in the 21/22 season, getting back to the top flight of English football after 74 years out in the wilderness of the lower leagues, an absence only beaten by Bradford City’s return after 77 years in 1992.The playoff game that decides which team from the Championship gets promoted to the Premier League is now reckoned to be the most valuable single game in world football, with the winner guaranteed around £170m over the following three years, even if they get relegated the next season, and a large part of these riches are down to TV rights.But the same pyramid is the reason why the English football teams leave money on the table by having a 3pm Saturday blackout. On 22nd August, 1964, the BBC broadcast the first ever edition of Match of The Day, with an hour of highlights from that day’s game between Liverpool and Arsenal. The BBC had to keep the identity of the chosen match secret, as football bosses were concerned that fans would stay away from the grounds to watch the games on TV.Most opposed to the broadcast was Bob Lord, Chairman of Burnley FC, who banned any Burnley matches from being broadcast for 5 years. His argument was that it wasn’t just the top league who was threatened by TV broadcasts, but the whole pyramid. Who would travel to see their local lower league team when they could stay at home and watch Liverpool play Arsenal? In the UK, the vast majority of the matches are played at 3pm on a Saturday, whereas many European leagues spread lower league games schedules away from the top league, so live broadcasts are less of a threat.A soccer game on a 1970s television as imagined by DALL-EOver the nearly 60 years since the blackout started, there has been little evidence that TV has affected football league attendance. In 1964, the average attendance was 14,000 across the top four leagues, and despite dropping to 8-9,000 during the dark days of football hooliganism in the 1980s, it has hovered around that 1964 number for nearly sixty years. At the same time, the value of the broadcast rights to the EPL has exploded in recent years, thanks largely to growth of international markets. In the most recent deal, international rights made up more than 50% of the £10.5bn deal.With so much potential money from those 3pm games left on the table, will we ever see Bob Lord’s TV blackout lifted? There was a reprise during COVID, when clubs were banned from having fans in the stadiums. For a brief, wonderful moment, fans could legally watch every game their club played, assuming they had the right VOD subscriptions. But as soon as the COVID ban was lifted, the 3pm blackout returned. Perhaps in 2024, the 60th anniversary of football broadcasting, it will finally be time to let people watch any match they want. (ML)WITI is now a Brentford Fan Account link of the day:The story behind Brentford’s rise back to the Premier League is great, featuring fans taking over the club, moneyball strategies, and a mysterious professional gambler.  (ML)Quick Links:The first ever broadcast of Match Of The Day in 1964 is on YoutubeA great thread showing how Premier League teams performed in the 2021/22 season based on multiple financial criteria. Brentford come out on top of a lot of them!. (ML)Although of course, the only league table that counts is this - which club in the Premier League has the best food?  (ML)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Sustainability and innovation in fashion. The leader of a cutting-edge institute talks about innovative new materials that “eat” carbon and may enable cotton to grow without irrigation, as well as the potential for building the world’s shortest supply chain in two 40-foot containers. Check it out.—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Premier League TV Blackout edition

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the Andy Warhol Album Covers Edition and the TV Schedule Edition.Matt here. Making a film is a remarkable feat of coordination, craft, and luck. Especially if you are on location, there are multiple factors that will affect what you can shoot in a day, with many of them—like the weather and light levels—out of your control. So when you’re making a movie, you need a plan to control as many of these factors as possible. This is where the call sheet comes in.The call sheet might look like a simple piece of paper, but it’s a miracle of organization and information—compressing the complex processes of movie making into a clear set of instructions that every single person involved can understand.Unlike the status hierarchy of communication formats in most industries (like emails or memos with their carefully curated cc lists), the call sheet works because it’s democratic—everyone on set gets the same printout, regardless of whether you’re the A-list star or the person making the sandwiches. The call sheet has to work for everyone, as without it, no-one can do their job. In an industry predicated on money and egos, it’s a surprisingly egalitarian tool.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.The Omega Project: created by US Special Operations Forces to help the world improve their health and fitness. Check out their analog journals for nutrition and fitness. January is a great month to begin working with a coach to meet your goals. Gain insight, accountability, and support. Subscribe to Mission.BrXnd is a new project at the intersection of brands and AI. Have a play with the first experiment: AI brand collabs. Try it now.Stat Significant is a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about culture, economics, sports, statistics, and more. Check out Stat Significant.Why is this interesting?The call sheet works because it’s an example of what I’d call “folk infrastructure.” No-one has copyrighted the call sheet as a format, no platform has been developed that owns its production or distribution, and there isn’t a historical record of who first invented it. Instead, the call sheet is a format that has been passed down from production to production since the early days of cinema, gaining complexity as the industry changed from silent movies to FX strewn Hollywood spectacles. Today, even on the most complex digital shoots, film productions still rely on a simple page or two of printed paper.The oldest call sheet I’ve managed to find online is from 1940, for Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator. This early version shows how the document got its name—its a simple list of what time actors or production crew are being “called” to set. A call sheet from the same archive for the 1966 production of A Countess From Hong Kong shows how they had grown more complex, including times for all cast and crew on set, along with transport instructions, a list of shots the Director wanted to complete that day and (most importantly for the crew) details of the on-set catering.An example from the 1996 production of James Camerons’ Titanic shows how the call sheet had grown over the years to cover the incredible complexity of filming a modern Hollywood movie. Over two pages, this call sheet covers all the contacts and timings for key cast and crew, location and transport details, weather and sunrise/sunset, paramedic and emergency contacts, lists of shots with alternate takes if the weather prevents shooting, instructions for extras and other “atmosphere and standing” cast, special instructions for props, wardrobes and other craft departments, and even details on school provisions for child cast members. As the shoot was for 15th December, the back of the call sheet even has a message wishing the cast and crew a Merry Christmas, and letting everyone know there will be a Christmas raffle on set that day.This is a great example of how the call sheet isn’t just a list of information, but a critical part of creating the working culture of a movie production. The call sheet is traditionally put together by the assistant director or production coordinator, and one of their most important daily tasks when on a shoot. You can tell if the people leading a movie production know what they’re doing by how good their call sheet is.If the shot list is vague, the call times unrealistic, or they miss crucial safety information, word will quickly spread amongst the crew that their leaders might not know what they’re doing. The Merry Christmas and raffle information on the Titanic call sheet aren’t just fun—they show that the production team are not just on top of every single detail of the shoot, but that they also really care about the wellbeing and of the cast and crew.I’ve worked in digital and media for over twenty years, and I’ve seen lots of ways to coordinate teams, improve communication and get things done. But despite the sky high valuations of tools like Slack, Github and Trello, I don’t think I’ve seen anything as effective as the folk infrastructure of the call sheet—the simple pieces of paper that make movie magic possible. (ML)Quick LinksLike all movie ephemera, call sheets have become collectable, especially if they’re signed. If you want to get a present for a Stars Wars fan, this original call sheet from Star Wars in 1977 is only $250 (ML)The title of Apple TV’s 2023 documentaries celebrating the achievements of black actors’ in Hollywood - Number One On The Call Sheet - is an insider reference to where a film’s biggest star is listed. If you’re number one on the call sheet, you know you’ve made it. (ML)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Call Sheet Edition

We launch our new Friday travel series with Matt Locke of Storythings on the charms of Brighton, UK. Enjoy and let us know what you think about the new feature. -Colin (CJN) Matt here. A few years back, when I was still on Twitter, I saw an article that claimed to have found the most hipster city in the world. I clicked the link, thinking I’d be mildly annoyed if my home city, Brighton, wasn’t on the list. The article rated cities by the ratio of hipster staples - indie coffee shops, tattoo parlours, vinyl stores, etc - per person, and I was mildly embarrassed to discover we’d come first.So that’s the first thing you need to know about Brighton. If you look at a political map of the south of England, it’s all Conservative blue, apart from one tiny dot at the bottom that is a sandwich of two (red) Labour MPs with a filling of the only Green MP in all of the UK. We’re a tiny island of progressive culture, and despite that being reason enough for the haters, I love it. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.The city has long had an alternative, arty, seedy reputation. It’s just over an hour from London, and has been a bolt-hole for anyone trying to get away, or get away with something, since Prince George built a ludicrous Pavilion for his mistress in the 18th Century. Underneath the Pavilion is an underground tunnel so that the increasingly obese George could get to his horse and carriage without being ridiculed by the people of Brighton. Somehow, that story seems to capture everything about the city and its healthy disregard for authority.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.The Mandate is a newsletter about the weird world of masculinity | Written by Olympic Medalist & NYT/Men's Health contributor Jason Rogers. Subscribe here.The BrXnd Marketing X AI Conference is happening on 5/16 in NYC. Early Bird tickets are 20% off until the end of the month. Get your 20% off ticket today!Coefficient Capital and The New Consumer have teamed up to bring you fresh new insights in F&B ahead of Expo West! Check out our comprehensive reportLike all seaside cities, it’s longer than it is tall, squashed down between the coast to the south and the beautiful South Downs national park to the North. Most visitors only visit the narrow strip between the two piers, a short walk from the train station. To the east, the Palace Pier is a working attraction with vertiginous fairground rides, ghost trains, amusement arcades and fish and chips. To the West is the stark and strangely beautiful remains of the old West Pier, burnt to an iron skeleton by a mysterious fire in 2003.The main tourist traps in the city are on the direct road from the train station to the beach, passing through the clock tower and West St - a desert of dodgy bars, restaurants and clubs that no Brighton native would ever be seen in - and then in the immediate beach areas spreading out to the two piers. If you come this way, pass through West St as quickly as you can and find a few of the decent restaurants on the beach - Riddle and Finns, Shelter Hall or, if you’re a member, the new Soho Brighton Beach House.If you get past the West Pier and beyond, you’re in Hove, which used to be full of retired couples, but in the last few decades has become the place where you move when you start to have kids - think of it as Brighton’s Prospect Park. As the demographic changed, so have the shops and restaurants. My favourite Brighton spot is Murmur, right next to the West Pier, or The Salt Room, part of a mini-chain that includes the excellent Burnt Orange and The Coal Shed.The best shopping spots are not in the monolithic Churchill Square, but in the two areas called The Laines and North Laine. The Laines are a maze of twisty streets combining old-school jewelers with pop-up art stores and high fashion. Nearer the station is North Laine, where you’ll find Resident, the best record store in Brighton (and possibly the UK) and the now-ubiquitous gen Z dungaree shop Lucy & Yak.As you’d expect in a city filled with wannabe artists, there’s a thriving cultural scene in the city, but it’s not centered around a single location or venue. Instead it’s defined by the many festivals and events the city hosts throughout the year. The main one is the Brighton Festival every May, with its sister Fringe event and Artists’ Open Houses. Then there’s Brighton Pride - the biggest in the UK - in August, and the excellent Great Escape, the UK record industry’s version of SXSW, with loads of industry panels and over 500 emerging artists playing in venues across the city.Actually, the festivals are a good example of the third and final thing you need to know about Brighton. This is not a city that builds museums or monoliths to honour the great and the good. We’d rather throw a party, and wake up with a hangover on the beach, as the tide washes over the stones and wipes us all clean, ready to party again the next day. (ML) —Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

Why is Brighton Interesting? 

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the Andy Warhol Album Covers Edition, The Call Sheet Edition, and the TV Schedule Edition.Gathering Water Lilies by Peter Henry Emerson, 1885-86Matt here. Back in the early 90s, when I was at Glasgow School of Art studying Fine Art Photography, I was lucky enough to be taught by Mike Ware, one of the leading scholars of alternative photographic processes. These cover pretty much every method of making a fixed chemical photograph that isn’t the usual silver gelatin process. Some of these you may be familiar with from museum visits, such as blue cyanotypes, or daguerrotypes fixed onto a mirrored surface.But for me, the most interesting alternative photographic process was Platinum or Platinotype photography. This process was one of the last to be commercially viable, almost 50 years after the initial invention of photography in the 1830s, but became the method of choice for every major photographer of the early 20th century, including Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Imogen Cunningham. Yet despite its popularity amongst these photography giants, it fell rapidly out of favor, and by the middle of the twentieth century, it was virtually forgotten.Why is this interesting?If you’ve been lucky enough to see a platinum photograph up close, the first thing you’ll notice is the incredible matte quality of the image. This is because, unlike silver gelatin prints that hold the chemicals in a layer on top of the paper, platinum photography uses chemicals that are soaked into the paper, so the image lies embedded in its fibers. This means the paper quality needs to be incredibly fine unless the artist wants the paper texture to be part of their aesthetic.The tonal range of platinum photography far exceeds silver gelatin—the images seem to have an infinite range of tones, noticeable not in the darkest or lightest areas of a black-and-white print, but in the shades of grey in between. They have a depth and fine detail that is subtle, yet almost hyper-real—platinum prints give an incredible feeling of presence, as if you are looking through a window onto the scene.Platinum prints are also by far the most stable and permanent of all photographic processes. If properly processed and printed, the images will retain their deep tones and detail for hundreds of years, much longer than silver gelatin or any other processes. In fact, any discoloration of platinum prints over time is more likely to be caused by the degradation of the paper than the photographic image itself.So why, if this method of photography was so obviously superior, did it fall out of fashion so quickly?The first reason is linked to one of the drawbacks of platinum photography. Although the resulting images are far superior, platinum does not react as quickly to light as silver. This means that you can only make an image using the contact printing technique, in which the negative is in direct contact with the photographic paper. You can’t take a small negative and project it onto the paper, as you do with an enlarger for silver gelatin prints.When we made platinum photographs at Art School with Mike Ware, we used a plate camera to make 8”x10” negatives, then used a hinged contact frame to hold the negatives and paper in registration. We developed the image using the sun, holding the frame in the light, periodically lifting it to check if the image had darkened enough for a good print, and then taking it back into the darkroom for fixing.For photographers like Weston and Stieglitz, who lugged their large format plate cameras across America, this wasn’t a problem. But George Eastman’s invention of the Kodak Brownie in 1900 brought photography to the masses, using a roll of 2.5” square negatives, far too small for contact printing. The rise of 35mm cameras in the 1920s, with a negative roll only 1.4 inches wide, made contact printing even less realistic, tipping photographers away from platinum towards silver gelatin prints.A Street in Bellagio, Alfred Steiglitz, 1895-96The second reason for its demise was not related to photography at all, but the chemistry behind it. Throughout the 19th century, photography pioneers experimented with different metals and chemical reactions to create halides that were sensitive to light. But others were experimenting for less aesthetic reasons. In 1902, the German chemist Friedrich Wlhelm Ostwald discovered that platinum was a very effective catalyst for making nitric acid, a key ingredient in most chemical fertilizers. Unfortunately, nitric acid, which had previously been generated using imported salt petre, was also used in the production of explosives.As a result, the British government outlawed the use of platinum in photography during the First World War, declaring it a strategic military resource. By the end of the war, its value had risen five-fold, making it uneconomic for all but the richest photographers.So platinum photography, by far the most beautiful and long-lasting of all the photographic processes, had a brief moment in the sun before its demise, caused by the very same forces - mass consumerism and warfare - that would shape the rest of the twentieth century.(ML)Quick LinksMike Ware’s site is a treasure trove of deep research and downloadable guides to many alternative processes, including platinum photography. But do heed his warnings, as a lot of the chemicals involved are very dangerous to handle! (ML)Pradip Malde, also a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, worked closely with Mike to develop modern versions of these processes and continues to make and exhibit his beautiful platinum photography. (ML)The National Gallery of Art in Washington has a fine collection of platinum prints, including many by Alfred Stieglitz. (ML)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).