Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A few weeks ago, I went on one of my favorite podcasts — The Ezra Klein Show — to talk about burnout, workism, and our relationship to labor. In our conversation, I invoke the idea of “LARPing” your job, a phrase my partner uses to describe the way we try and show evidence that LOOK, OVER HERE,…
Ever since “people-based marketing” was introduced at Advertising Week in 2014, it has become a strategic imperative for almost every brand. Fortune 500 companies are investing in and adopting the tech, agency media buyers are mandating it in insertion orders, and DSPs, DMPs and measurement providers are strategizing around how they can implement this into…
The Guardian is a weird newspaper. Most newspapers don’t have nearly two-thirds of their readers coming from outside the country they’re based in. Most newspapers don’t start in one city and then move to another one. Most newspapers aren’t owned by a trust that mandates it promote “liberal journalism both in Britain and elsewhere.” And…
Last July, ahead of its planned launch in the United States, The Correspondent made its first U.S. hire: Zainab Shah, who’d previously been global lead for strategy and operations at BuzzFeed. Ernst Pfauth — CEO of De Correspondent, the Dutch site for which The Correspondent was to be a new sibling — wrote that, as…
Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.Hasn’t worked out that way. Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was…
Illustration: Art Handler One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great. Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and…
Transformational change cannot occur suddenly — and sudden changes rarely turn out to be transformational. It’s clear that common practices at many of our largest tech platforms must change, but hoping for a shouting-at-the-barricades revolution is unrealistic and possibly unhelpful. While we — representing doctors, health tech professionals, and elements of the policymaking community — recognize and share public dissatisfaction with…
The New York Times is again looking to fashion to amplify its own brand. As part of a marketing push around Earth Day, the publisher is teaming with Everlane for a small collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts that riff on its ongoing “The Truth Is Worth It” campaign, but with an environmental twist. Everlane is…
Instagram memers have had enough. They generate the engagement that helps keep Instagram growing—but, they argue, the multibillion-dollar platform doesn’t pay them for their work, or give them any control. So they’re fighting back. And before you write off IG Meme Union Local 69-420 as a joke, the organizers of the collective would like you…
Private-equity firm Great Hill Partners has agreed to acquire Gizmodo Media Group from Univision Communications Inc., the companies said, ending the Spanish-language broadcaster’s foray into English-language digital media. James Spanfeller, the former chief executive of Forbes.com and president of consumer magazines at digital publisher Ziff Davis, will become chief executive of G/O Media Inc., a…