Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Univision Holdings Inc. has been offering buyouts to employees at Gizmodo Media Group, according to a person familiar with the matter, marking the latest case of a digital-media upstart tightening its belt. The former Gawker Media websites, which include the sports outlet Deadspin and the woman-focused site Jezebel, began offering employees buyout packages last week,…
About 20 PC games — including The Elder Scrolls Online and Conan Exiles — have removed a piece of third-party spyware tracking users’ activity outside of the game, and dozens more are said to still have it more than a week after it came to light on Reddit and Steam forums. Called Red Shell (yes,…
The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by…
Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free. Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have…
The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling…
AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner will create a media conglomerate that combines premium content with a vast distribution network to deliver it to consumers. Why it matters: One of its first experiments in marrying the two will be a “skinny bundle” called AT&T Watch, providing Time Warner content (minus sports) to mobile customers. This is…
Comcast and Disney are about to engage in a bidding war for the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, and analysts tell Axios that Comcast is likely to win because it’s more desperate for what Fox is trying to offload. Why it matters: There is huge pressure on media and telecom companies to compete with…
Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum in Washington last week. Why it matters: Many blame these two companies for absorbing the majority of ad revenue that would’ve gone to traditional media. Show…
You’ve likely seen the above photo of two fresh-faced and hoodie-clad Asian women on your Facebook feed, your email inbox, your Google searches, this Yahoo article — wherever your web browsing may take you. EverQuote, the company advertising this photo, is a legitimate company based in Cambridge, Mass., that helps you choose the best car…
It’s late on a Friday afternoon in March, and I’m sitting across from Stephen Miller in his spacious, sunlit West Wing office, trying to figure out whether he’s trolling me. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. This is no easy task. A provocateur as skilled as…