Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Was the New York Times’s decision to publish a mystery op-ed piece describing an organized resistance inside the Trump administration “gutless,” as the president has angrily deemed it? Or was it a crucial public service, as the Times’s top opinion editors see it? I’d call it neither. What it was, however, was a quagmire of weirdness: fraught…
Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service Medium: Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL. I don’t understand why any publication, even a personal blog, would use Medium without a custom domain name. It’s not just about branding now,…
Village Voice newspaper boxes on a sidewalk in 2013 (Mark Lennihan/AP/Shutterstock) Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories. “Today is kind of a…
Getty Images. Photo by Drew Angerer In early 2019 the L train in New York City will shut down for 15 months to repair damage caused during Hurricane Sandy. Leading up to the closure, VICE will be providing relevant updates and proposals, as well as profiles of community members and businesses along the affected route…
Imagine a group of people who believe that manatees are destroying civilization. Even though there is abundant evidence showing that humans endanger manatees and not vice versa, this hypothetical group continues to insist that manatees are a menace. Imagine further that reporters are assigned to cover this group. But instead of including facts about manatees…
Don’t believe your eyes and ears. Believe only me. That has been President Trump’s message to the public for the past two years, pounded in without a break: The press is the enemy. The news is fake. In raucous campaign rallies, in lie-filled Fox News interviews, through dissembling surrogates such as Kellyanne Conway and Rudolph…
Digital advertising is awfully messy. From ad fraud, murky media supply chains, and Facebook and Google sucking up all the industry’s oxygen and budgets, digital marketing has seemingly never had more minefields. Brands are under increasing pressure to show that their digital ads are not just being seen but are effective. Brand-safety concerns have come to…
Over the weekend, a game developer in Boston named Brianna Wu fled her home after an online stalker vowed to rape and kill her. She isn’t the first woman who’s been forced into hiding by aggrieved video game fans associated with Gamergate, the self-styled reform movement that’s become difficult to ignore over the past several…
Can Twitter be saved? I’m not talking about last week’s social media stock price plunge. It’s the ritualization of Gamergate-style uproar and dishonest brigading that has me disillusioned with the platform. I know soul-searching about Twitter is a bit of a journalistic trope at this point, since we all seem to be simultaneously enraptured with…
Since announcing her new job with The New York Times, a widespread campaign of harassment has targeted Verge reporter Sarah Jeong for a number of tweets she wrote years ago. Many of those now reacting to these tweets have intentionally taken them out of context, and she has since received an unrelenting stream of abuse…