Need to Know (newsletter) explained

Need To Know, also known as NTK, was an email newsletter, published late on Fridays, written by former Wired journalist and Irish Times columnist Danny O'Brien and former Wired and Future journalist Dave Green.[1] It was devised in 1996 while Green and O'Brien worked at Wired.[2] NTK was published weekly from 1997 until 2004, when it moved to fortnightly publication. From May 2005 until July 2006 it continued on a monthly schedule, though it often ran late; the final newsletter on the website is a "MiniNTK" dated 8 January 2007.

The newsletter billed itself as "the weekly tech update for the UK" (later "week^H^H^H^H fortnightly" or "week^H^H^H^H now-monthly") and presented the highlights of the week's happenings in the IT, blogosphere and general internet community, with a focus on UK culture and politics. It also looked at less weighty matters such as confectionery and nudity in films. It took an irreverent tone similar to The Register, Private Eye and Viz.

Format

The newsletter is also available on the World Wide Web and has used a fixed-width ASCII text-based layout since its inception. It was sent to subscribers in plain text email. Since 2004, the website has offered readers the ability to use their own style sheet.

Each newsletter comprised (at least some of) the following sections:

Significant events

February 1998:NTK launched the Falco competition, named after the rock star Falco who died that week. Readers were encouraged to email their predictions of which technology companies would fail (dot-bombs), and NTK would proclaim "FALCO" with the list of accurate tipsters when announcing that companies had actually failed. This practise predated Fucked Company by two years.[4]
  • December 1998: NTK launched STAND.org.uk (now defunct), a UK campaign group lobbying for fair UK internet policy.[5]
  • February 2000: NTK launched Kevin Warwick Watch (now defunct) in reaction to Kevin Warwick's sudden popularity in the mainstream press.[6]
  • September 2000: NTK launched a "drily ironic t-shirt competition", where readers can come up with amusing T-shirt designs and NTK can sell the results back to them.[7]
  • December 2000: NTK launched "Fax your MP", now known as WriteToThem. They also launched their own ironic T-shirt sales site NTKMart (now defunct) with the first winner of their competition: "I got £80million in venture capital for my .com idea and all I have left is this lousy t-shirt".[8]
  • August 2001: NTK published the now infamous "dancemonkeyboy" video of Steve Ballmer dancing to Gloria Estefan music at a developer conference.[9]
  • June 2002: NTK hosted their own conference, X-COM 2002.[10]
  • March 2003: NTK launched snackspot.org.uk (now defunct).[11]
  • June 2004: NTK hosted another conference, NotCon '04.[12]
  • August 2004: NTK launched dohthehumanity.com (now defunct).[13]
  • September 2005: NTK launched the Open Rights Group.[14]
  • References

    1. Web site: Mackintosh. Hamish. Talk Time: Dave Green. The Guardian. 16 October 2003. 30 January 2016.
    2. Web site: NTK: Need To Know . 2000-11-10 . Here's our manifesto for the print version from 1996, originally planned during the dying moments of our encarceration at Wired.
    3. Web site: Need to Know 2004-10-01 . 2004-10-01.
    4. Web site: Need To Know 1998-02-13 . 1998-02-13.
    5. Web site: Need To Know 1998-12-11 . 1998-12-11.
    6. Web site: Need To Know 2000-02-18 . 2000-02-18.
    7. Web site: Need To Know 2000-09-01 . 2000-09-01.
    8. Web site: Need To Know 2000-12-01 . 2000-12-01.
    9. Web site: Need To Know 2001-08-03 . 2001-08-03.
    10. Web site: Need To Know 2002-06-07 . 2002-06-07.
    11. Web site: Need To Know 2003-03-28 . 2003-03-28.
    12. Web site: Need To Know 2004-06-04 . 2004-06-04.
    13. Web site: Need To Know 2004-08-06 . 2004-08-06.
    14. Web site: Need To Know 2005-09-02 . 2005-09-02.

    External links