Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Tom Wheeler was feeling the heat. It was August and the head of the Federal Communications Commission was sitting on the deck of his family’s vacation home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Sweat dripped onto the paperwork before him. For months, the tall, bespectacled Wheeler had been consumed by an arcane but important debate over how…
We plugged our Twitter account, @voxdotcom, into the poetry-generating website Poetweet and were so tickled with the results that we tried it on a bunch of other handles, too. Here is the outcome: Vox The New York Times BuzzFeed VICE ClickHole The Verge CNN The New Republic Fox News MSNBC SB Nation Want to turn your…
Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings this week, the Associated Press published (by way of CNBC, Yahoo, and others) “Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts.” It’s a story without a byline, or rather, without a human byline — a financial story written and published by an automated system well-versed in the AP Style Guide. The AP implemented…
Before he was voted Hipster of the Decade, before he was coining musical subgenres and helping the New York Times understand “alt” culture, Carles was another mid-00s music blogger who just wanted to get his site listed on Hype Machine. The music discovery engine uses an algorithm to pull the “most-blogged about” songs from the…
Legacies are never simple; they create victims as well as beneficiaries. The more substantial the legacy, the more heated the disputes are over who has title of ownership, who gets to enjoy an inheritance, and who is left out in the cold. One of the most dangerous ways to treat a legacy is to bask…
Google on Thursday added to Wall Street’s concerns about a slowdown in its core desktop search business and falling profit margins as it reported quarterly earnings that fell short of already downbeat forecasts. The search company’s shares, which had already underperformed the wider market over the past three months, slipped another 2 per cent in after-market…
“This guy says he’s a doctor, so maybe he’s right.” Photo by Monkey Business Images/Thinkstock. The best account on Twitter, without question, has just over 40,000 followers and doesn’t tweet anymore. It’s called Don’t Read Comments (@avoidcomments), and in its heyday it periodically tweeted things like “Nobody on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I…
Online comments sections are a double-edged sword for publishers. For those trying to increase loyalty and engagement with readers, comments should be an essential part of an audience strategy. But all too often, they becomes a haven for trolls and spam. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new comments sections as people shift their online conversations…
To state the obvious, it seems like an odd time to discontinue the one Times beat devoted solely to race and ethnicity. (A few words of reminder: Michael Brown of Ferguson, Eric Garner of Staten Island, Tamir Rice of Cleveland.) But that’s what happened this week, as the Times announced that Tanzina Vega, who has…
by Katie Hawkins-Gaar Published Jan. 29, 2015 10:13 am Updated Jan. 29, 2015 11:05 am New York Times front page on Wednesday, January 28. (Photo by Katie Hawkins-Gaar) It was an exciting moment for user-generated content. The New York Times featured nine Instagram photos on the front page of its Wednesday edition. As far as…