Best of the Week: Monumental mistakes at work, and the Facebook apocalypse

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, which I suspect will be a little shorter this week, as it's already 8:30am on Saturday (this email is generally scheduled for 10:10am), and I am typing much slower than usual due to a stabbing pain in my right shoulder. Those of you who have seen me type know the vigour with which I hit the space bar - with some going so far as to ask "Why do you want the space bar to die/ What did it ever do to you?" - but it's a much less enthusiastic/ dramatic experience this morning. What's worse is I don't think I've actually DONE anything to my shoulder. I think it's just an injury from a particularly vigorous sleep. I've turned 30, and apparently I'm now at the point where I can injure myself simply from attempting to rest. Excellent. Despite my body breaking down, everyone* in adland and the wider media sector has been telling me that your 30s is your best decade. In the five weeks I've been back, I've heard "It only gets better" countless times. *(There was one exception. One publishing CEO told me the 30s are terrible, and I needed to wait until 40 for things to get good. I am, however, choosing to ignore that advice, because I really don't have it in me to have a shit 10 years, and to enter into it knowing it's going to be terrible). Monumental mistakes at work Ever had a really terrible day at work? Made a mistake that wasn't just one you and a few colleagues would notice? Despite some questionable choices in my personal life, which occasionally bled into my work life - it's likely you'll know about these moments if you've ever taken me for drinks and been given the low-down on my romantic history - the most noticeable mistake I ever made at work was back in 2013 when I still worked in print media. Everything was running late, deadlines had been missed, pushed and missed again. The designers were frustrated, and there were way too many chefs in the kitchen. At the last minute - actually it was well beyond the last minute by now. What do you call it when it's beyond acceptable for things to be changed, but they're being changed anyway? - one of the directors got involved and completely changed the magazine's cover concept. That meant the cover story remained the same, but all the imagery, design elements, sideboxes, headlines, subheads and standfirsts had to change to fit this new theme. It was a horrendous mess of an evening, but there was still that overwhelming sense of relief you get when a big, messy, frustrating project is finally done. "We did it". Time passed, and we would have been well into getting the next edition ready - you know, preparing to miss deadlines, promising it would be different this time, lying to ourselves and everyone around us - when I came into work one morning and there was a distinctly ominous vibe. Hushed chats, serious-looking meetings, and boxes which had not been correctly housed post delivery. What the f*ck was going on? Then I saw my emails. "Have you seen the magazine?" "F*ck man, what are you going to do?" "OMG, whose fault is this?" Normally, I would gleefully unpack the box of magazines when they returned from the printers. Such was my excitement, I generally didn't even bother doing it properly. I'd stab the thick tape with a ballpoint pen - which at various times resulted in a ballpoint pen graveyard and some seriously inky injuries on my delicate hands - and rip it open. This time, sourcing a magazine was a little more difficult. I eventually found one shoved in a cabinet under someone's desk - like a terrible family secret had been discovered, and the person finding it had been so overwhelmed by the atrocity and unsure of what to do, that they simply rushed it out of sight. It was one of the least inspiring covers we'd ever done. The stock image was crap and I hated the colours. But then I saw it. Right in the middle of the cover was the typo. "Descisions". At the time, I felt terrible, but I remember also feeling a little vindicated. "Well, this is what happens when too many people get involved in something they should have just left alone." I naively thought we'd all learn from this, laugh about it, and move on. Instead, I received the only formal warning I've ever received in a workplace. Back in 2013 I thought it was incredibly unjustified (spoiler alert: I still do). I was only features editor at the time, and I'm not even sure if I clicked 'Approve' on the page. There were people higher up than me who did not receive any formal consequences, although I won't go into the conspiracies 24-year-old-Vivienne had at the time as to why that was - as Disney, and indeed my adventures in Cuba have taught me, it's probably time I "let it go". That night, I went to a screening of the Superman movie Man of Steel (God, was that movie truly terrible? Or was I just in a bad head space. My memory tells me it was bad. Really bad), and ended up crying in the pub - made even worse by the fact it was one of those terrible/empty pubs in the Entertainment Quarter with plastic cups, no atmosphere, and a general sense of "this could be so much better, if only..." So, with all this in mind, you can imagine my sympathy this week when [The Daily Telegraph in Sydney somehow accidentally published two pages from rival The Sydney Morning Herald](. Now, this is clearly a much larger-scale cock-up than my Descisions Debacle, so while everyone was having a good giggle about it, I couldn't help but feel for whoever would feel the fallout from the printing error. Fairfax and News Corp entered an agreement to share printing facilities back in 2018. We ran the story on 18 July, 2018 - a mere eight days before it was revealed Nine was buying Fairfax. The agreement meant 120 jobs would be lost across New South Wales and Queensland, with the two publishers saying it was required to "reduce capital intensity". Then-CEO of Fairfax Greg Hywood said the production of newspapers would be "more efficient" as a result of the agreement, and indeed we at Mumbrella ran the line "the arrangement will have no impact on content for either publisher". But these things always have impact, even if unintended. The story was, of course, excellent traffic for us - everyone loves a bit of schadenfreude, particularly when it felt like about 15 people in the whole country were at work this week - but it was definitely a tough day at the office for whoever pressed the wrong button/ uploaded the wrong file/ didn't notice the error until it was too late. It still has nothing on The Australian Financial Review's 2014 bumper ANZAC weekend edition's 'World Is Fukt" debacle though, does it? Facebook in your living room Speaking of the world being 'fukt',[Facebook released its financial results this week](. To say it generated far less traffic for us than The Daily Telegraph's misprint would be an understatement, but it was an important story nonetheless. The results revealed Facebook has thus far set aside US$3 billion for the anticipated fallout from the US Federal Trade Commission's investigation into the social media giant's data processes. In his reassuring call to investors, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was thus keen to talk all things privacy. He made multiple references to some elements of social media needing to be like Town Squares, where we broadcast what we want others to know and consume, and interact as a "community" - think a public Instagram feed, or a horribly racist/sexist Facebook page where people don't even bother to hide their problematic views and trolling, because they know the chances of real consequences are slim to none. Other elements of social media platforms need to be like our living rooms, he said. That is, "private spaces". And it's the digital living rooms that Zuckerberg wants to focus on. But here's the thing - don't you get the distinct sense Facebook is already in your living room? It's become commonplace for my friends and I to "joke" about the information apocalypse - the inevitable moment we believe will come within our lifetimes, where everyone's data is dumped, Wikileaks style, unedited and unchecked, for everyone to consume. When one of my friends becomes particularly paranoid about this eventuality, I reassure her that while it will indeed be horrific, other people - who say far nastier things and have far more unusual sexual proclivities, will feel it worse than us. Essentially, "Don't worry. World is fukt. But others will be more fukt than us". Zuckeberg, however, sees opportunity in this paranoia. He wants to build a platform built around the principles of private interactions, encryption, safety and interoperability. Plus, he wants to reduce permanence. "You shouldn't have to worry about what you share coming back to hurt you later, so we won't keep around messages or stories for longer than necessary." For me though, it already feels too late for that. I am constantly horrified when my Facebook memories draw my attention to what I used to put on the platform back in the day. Why did we write so publicly on people's 'Walls'? Why did I think that status update, so carefully crafted when it had to fit the formula 'Vivienne Kelly is....', was in any way cryptic? (Spoiler alert: it wasn't. Everyone knew I was annoyed at my ex-boyfriend). And there's no saying that my current behaviour online won't horrify me in years to come - even though now I think I am much more sensible and restrained. Plus, Facebook knows I am pulling back. It's getting increasingly needy and dramatic. It's sending me notifications for the most banal activities, including just letting me know someone I really don't care that much about has just posted something I definitely don't care about to remind someone I barely even remember how I know about some memory I definitely wasn't there for in the first place. Notifications used to give me such joy. Oh how I was addicted to the red circle with a high number in it. Give me more. Give me more. Now though, it's a disappointment. But Facebook is trying, because it knows I am disappointed. So, Facebook's sprucing-up of its platforms will come with trade-offs. Even Zuckerberg knows that. "We can't have complete free speech but no hate. We can't have complete privacy while also stopping every safety threat. We can't tell platforms to keep everyone's data private, but then expect a broad definition of data portability for research or competition. The values and equities at stake are too important and too conflicting for any company to 5 balance them in a way that everyone will be comfortable with. So part of building trust will be deferring to a public process on how to make these tradeoffs," he said. Speaking of private, and the trade-offs we have all made to use this all-consuming platform, is Facebook listening and reading? Zuckerberg says no. He denied the company uses content from messages sent between people on its platform to target them with relevant advertising. Now, I wouldn't want to call one of the world's most powerful men a flat-out liar, so instead, when he said this, picture my face as Marcia from The Brady Bunch saying "Sure, Jan". If you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google it. Or better yet, just talk about it in Messenger, and see if it then follows you around. I have enough anecdotal evidence to fill an entire column and question Zuckerberg's claims, and I know you do too, so come the information apocalypse, we can all sit around the campfire and laugh about how we all knew it was coming, but we did it anyway. That's it from me this week. It's 10:01am, I'm late for breakfast with my mum, and I need to set this things up to send. I'm off to the AFL tonight and have no idea who to go for. Sydneysiders tell me: Giants or Swans? Viva la revolución, Vivienne Kelly Editor - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](