Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
My boss brought up the infamous Cheerios tweet on my first day. Almost a year had passed, but it was still a cautionary tale: At 8:06 pm on a casual Wednesday night, a seemingly innocuous tweet was sent out and quickly caused a firestorm. Within 24 hours, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called for…
Until recently, $300 million was the highest valuation that digital media companies aspired to. That’s around the price AOL paid for the Huffington Post. Subtract $100 million, and you’re in the ballpark of what NBC Universal paid for Daily Candy and what Turner paid for Bleacher Report. The latest class of digital media companies is…
Photo: Getty Images In the fallout since the first GOP debate, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes has found himself caught between Donald Trump, who has the full backing of Fox’s misogynist audience, and Megyn Kelly, the star anchor whom Ailes has nurtured and sees as the key to reaching younger viewers. For a few days, Ailes didn’t know how to handle…
Megyn Kelly broke her silence on her feud with Donald Trump during her Fox News show Monday. The friction stems from Thursday’s Republican primary debate, where Trump took issue with Kelly’s question about his previous comments about women. On Friday, Trump told CNN that Kelly “bombed” and that she had “blood coming out of her wherever.”…
Upworthy bet millions of venture capital dollars that progressive values are the ultimate viral content. But after being forsaken by Facebook and facing layoffs, we’re told the site’s left-wing leadership has successfully fought off a staff unionization drive. Over the weekend, I received the following anonymous message, alleging that Upworthy recently laid off six staffers…
Photo A party in Brooklyn in December celebrating the 20th anniversary of Vice. Credit Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Some staff members at Vice Media have voted to unionize, according to two people familiar with the matter, joining other digital media outlets that have recently moved to organize. The writers will join Writers…
Google’s decision Thursday to shut down YouTube media buying on its programmatic network DoubleClick Ad Exchange (or AdX) signals the tech giant wants tighter control of its growing advertising ecosystem. But the attempt to create a so-called walled garden with video ads has some agency execs baffled. Under Google’s new rules, marketers won’t be able…
Time Magazine giving the cover over to virtual reality may seem like it would be great for the technology, but the art team behind the image itself seems to have … I don’t even know how to put this … dropped the ball completely. The images, and the story inside, are terrible. Here are just…
paging_filter Could it be? An old-fashioned newspaper war, but one fought in the digital trenches? Neither venerable news institution wants to call it a head-to-head battle, but the numbers are beginning to tell us otherwise. Meanwhile, we can only begin to speculate about the business implications of the numbers we see. Just now, The New…
Back in the fat years – two or three decades ago, when the “mainstream” media were booming – I was able to earn a living as a freelance writer. My income was meager and I had to hustle to get it, turning out about four articles – essays, reported pieces, reviews – a month at…