Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I spent the morning of London’s Pride parade hand-stitching dildos onto a flag. I’d been using the sex-toy motif in my work before I made a flag of Isis out of them and brought it to the march. Previously, I’ve attached dildos onto postcards from each country where homosexuality is still illegal to point out…
If we know one thing about the media business right now, it’s that hardly anyone wants to be just a publisher any more. Everyone would much rather be a platform—or, failing that, hook up with a giant platform like Facebook FB that can achieve the kind of social distribution required in today’s media environment. For…
BuzzFeed is the leading media company for the social age, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and viral content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. Our technology powers the social distribution of content, detects what is trending on the web, and connects people in realtime with the hottest content of the…
Alexandra Staley, perhaps the most-wrong reporter in the New York Times’ rich, cosplay-filled history, is moving back to beat reporting from movie criticism, per a memo from editor-in-chief Dean Bacquet. Staley will move from writing about the film industry to “creating a new beat: an interdisciplinary look at the way the richest of the rich…
Circa, a news app, will cease publishing circa now, according to a post from its co-founder Matt Galligan on Medium titled “Farewell to Circa News.” This announcement follows days of drama surrounding the news app’s fate, which abruptly stopped updating on Monday, leaving at least one reader very confused. But now we have our answer:…
Farewell to Circa News It’s with great disappointment that we let you know that Circa News has been put on indefinite hiatus. Producing high-quality news can be a costly endeavor and without the capital necessary to support further production we are unable to continue. Our mission was always to create a news company where factual,…
Mobile news service Circa, which attracted lots of attention in media circles but had limited traction with users, is shutting down. Founder Matt Galligan says the company, which stopped updating its news app on Monday, is on “indefinite hiatus” and says his remaining employees will need new jobs. Circa raised at least $4 million since…
Is it possible comment sections aren’t as terrible as many journalists believe? That’s the argument of a new study, “A Tale of Two Stories from “Below the Line”: Comment Fields at the Guardian,” just published in the July issue of The International Journal of Press/Politics. Of course, in the slow-moving world of academia, a “new”…
Here’s the short Circa version: We tried to do something very different, we took huge risks, we built a product that spawned a whole new category, and we enjoyed every moment of it, at least until the money ran out and that sucked. Care to know more? By all means, read on: We got some…
The New York Times jealously guards its status as America’s paper of record through an obsessive focus on decorum and propriety. So it’s interesting to see in two leaked photos that the paper’s brass has a sense of humor behind its respectable front—even if that humor veers into “making light of mass killings” territory. Above…