Citizen Spin

Citizen Spin is a long-form video essay show produced by ht.live and carried by my name. It lives primarily on YouTube, and possibly as long-form on Facebook. Short clips get cut downstream for the other platforms, but the long-form essay is the product.

It has been a start-and-stop idea for a while. This is what it is now, and I expect to be doing it for the next ten years.

What it covers

The major issues in society that are of public interest, dug into properly. Not one video per topic: each issue becomes a series, and the series keeps going as the issue does.

What makes it different

Good explainers already exist. They publish a piece and move on. Citizen Spin is built to do four things they do not.

1. Fact-checked essays, corrected in the open. When I get something wrong or make a bad assumption, I say so on the record. Being criticised and corrected is part of the format, not a failure of it.
2. A playlist per issue, built over time. The first essay can go up the day after something happens. A year later there may be twelve in the same playlist. Playlists allow insertions, so when new information arrives about an old essay, a new one goes in right after it. That insertion is how corrections work.
3. Predictions, with a public scorecard. I will make a lot of predictions, and I will point out what I see as the narrative playbook: how crises get handled, how stories form, the arc they follow. I will often be wrong. When I am, the playlist says so.
4. An evergreen record with a named lens. Each playlist ends up as reliable facts plus my commentary, filtered through a framework I state openly, so you know the lens. Here is that framework.

The unit of the show is the playlist, not the video. Every essay is an entry in a series that is still open.

The name

"Spin" is deliberate. I expect people on the left and the right to look at a given essay, or at me, and see a contrarian or someone playing both sides. The name owns that in advance. What I am actually after is a fair, fact-checked, well-considered approach, open to being corrected.

What I expect from it

Honestly: reputation, not money. I expect people to come to know how I think, what I value and how I parse an issue, and that will follow me. I also expect to misspeak, to be wrong, to be taken out of context, and sometimes to be on the wrong side of something because I had not lived it or met it in my research. I am drawn to that risk. I do not expect this to make me famous or rich. The first episode will say all of this plainly, and log it as the show's first prediction.

How it is researched

Sources come first and commentary last. Quotes come only from real transcripts, with timestamps. The research guide is here.