Here’s how one journalist used all sorts of company account techniques to tell a story about a social media platform for sex workers

Eariler this week I came across a fantastic example of using company accounts in journalism: Guardian media editor Jim Waterson‘s article on how the family that founded the sex-worker social media platform OnlyFans “extracted tens of millions of pounds from its parent company in the last year”.

The article uses so many different techniques that I put together a Twitter thread reverse-engineering the story, paragraph by paragraph. The thread can be followed below, and has also been pulled together into a single page by Threadreader here.

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About Paul Bradshaw

Paul teaches data journalism at Birmingham City University and is the author of a number of books and book chapters about online journalism and the internet, including the Online Journalism Handbook, Mobile-First Journalism, Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, Data Journalism Heist and Scraping for Journalists. From 2010-2015 he was a Visiting Professor in Online Journalism at City University London and from 2009-2014 he ran Help Me Investigate, an award-winning platform for collaborative investigative journalism. Since 2015 he has worked with the BBC England and BBC Shared Data Units based in Birmingham, UK. He also advises and delivers training to a number of media organisations.

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