Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Jeff Fager. Photo: AP/REX/Shutterstock The afternoon of March 7, 2018, was go time, or so we believed. Inside a glass huddle room at the Washington Post, its walls covered with headlines from journalistic coups of the past, we began dialing numbers on a speakerphone and pressing send on carefully drafted, bullet-pointed emails. For nearly four…
By request, here’s my post explaining how I view The Correspondent’s decision not to have its headquarters in New York or the US, and to base the English-language operation in Amsterdam. (I am an advisor, and the Membership Puzzle Project, which I lead, is partners with The Correspondent.) You can find the background to this…
The startup could build the largest repository of annotated and scored news articles. Some precautions apply. No one has ever attempted to create a review system for news comparable to what Rotten Tomatoes is to the movie business. Reasons are multiple: assembling a team of reviewers for news is tricky; the appreciation of news material itself is…
Illustration: Jim Cooke (Photo: Getty) In the thousand years since Donald Trump sailed down an escalator and crash-landed with a wet thump in the Oval Office, a lot of Americans have changed, for good or ill. Many of us are more political or more cynical, impassioned or deflated, hopeful or entirely gutted. The time before…
end post-heading Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, as the editorial head of Fox News online, I reviewed a draft news story that said porn actress Stormy Daniels had confirmed having an affair with Donald Trump a decade earlier. The only problem was … Stormy hadn’t said that. Daniels and her associates were playing…
Illustration: GMG Art, Photo: Damien Sendler’s promotional headshot Warning: This article includes discussion about suicide and sexual assault. The subject sometimes speaks about sensitive mental health topics with language that departs from best practices. If you look up Dr. Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler online, you might think he has a MD and a PhD from Harvard…
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed. Here are two truths and a lie. Which one’s the lie? 1. Pedophiles are taking advantage of YouTube’s algorithm to…
An avid genealogist, I have a knack for using the document trail to root out buried family secrets and often help adoptees and others trace their histories. And so it’s with great amusement that I have unpacked the family trees of anti-immigrant right-wing personalities from Rep. Steve “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s…
Me, scrolling back through seven and a half years of Kotaku articles. I guess everyone eventually writes one of these posts, and today it’s my turn. At the end of December, I’m leaving Kotaku. I’ll continue co-hosting the Splitscreen podcast, but that’s gonna be it. Starting next year, I’m getting back to my first great…