Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
paging_filter Last week, Gawker Media C.E.O. Nick Denton announced that he would offer generous severance packages to employees who quit because they objected to Gawker’s new editorial policy. On July 16, Gawker published a controversial post about a male media executive, with a wife and three kids, who allegedly solicited a male escort. After near-universal…
Today the controversy-beset website moved to new offices. But is its founder really in it for the long haul, as he insists? One night in mid-June, weeks before his privately-held company suffered a very public meltdown over the widely condemned outing of a heterosexually married Condé Nast executive, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton had dinner…
So let’s say you’re a New York–based publication which has just published the words and portraits of 35 women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape — on your cover no less. Then a hacker decides to launch an all-out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, bringing your servers to their knees. The first reports…
Burn level: sabermetric. .@voxdotcom: Shouldn’t you have linked to @NYMag and not to yourselves? — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 27, 2015 New York released the bold and unavoidable cover last night, for a story in which all 35 of Cosby’s accusers speak out, quickly capturing the attention of the Twittersphere. Vox had it aggregated before…
As if the timing were divinely ordained, this coming week the writers, developers and ad people of Gawker Media’s New York office move into a purpose-built space at 17th Street and Fifth Avenue. It’s a new day, and the beginning of Gawker’s second act. The storm surrounding the CFO escort story has abated sufficiently for…
Business InsiderNick Denton says Gawker is “growing up.” Gawker Media, which has spent the past few weeks working through the fallout over a now deleted controversial post on Gawker.com, has announced how it is plans on “growing up”: new hires, a new office, and a fresh editorial code. Writing in a memo, Gawker founder Nick…
Carlo Allegri/Reuters A nail salon on New York’s Upper West Side, November 3, 2014 Rarely does a newspaper story get the kind of response that The New York Times front-page exposé of wage-theft at nail salons prompted this spring. Profiling at length the experiences of a woman named Jing Ren—a twenty-year-old recent immigrant who was…
coins metadata inserted by kblog-metadata Who the hell knows what is really happening at Gawker, and who the hell cares? Answer: Gawker and Gawker. Which is the interesting thing to me about all of this, the way a story about Gawker has, primarily, been reported on Gawker. And without Gawker leaking internal Gawker memos to…
Social Sharing Toolkit v2.2 In her new book, The Internet of Garbage, Sarah Jeong states that “the Internet is, and always has been, mostly garbage.” She talked with The Toast about topics discussed in her book, including online harassment, doxing, spam, free speech, and the challenges of moderating content platforms and social media networks. You can buy…
Should the published writing of professional writers be subject to any criticism? I believe yes. At least one professional writer disagrees. Mary Elizabeth Williams is a longtime writer for Salon. She writes about “culture,” in the most tepid sense of the word. As an essayist, her style is to follow around day-old conventional wisdom like…