Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Native advertising and “content discovery” platform Taboola has an ambitious plan to help people discover even more content, specifically “news.” The company, which is best known for enabling brands to scale native advertising across the open Web, has struck a deal to operate a news feed app on people’s phones. “It’s like Apple News,” boasts…
For Richard Nixon, the “Saturday Night Massacre” was the beginning of the end. The nation finally turned against the embattled president after he forced out — on Oct. 20, 1973 — the attorney general and his deputy who refused to get rid of the special prosecutor investigating him. A week later, for the first time,…
Screenshot: Fox News (YouTube) On Monday afternoon, attorneys for President Donald Trump’s embattled lawyer Michael Cohen revealed that thumb-shaped Fox News ghoul Sean Hannity was a secret client of Cohen’s. And while the revelation was met with laughter both inside the courtroom and across the rest of the media, it led to everyone at Fox…
LOS ANGELES — As a son of Chinese immigrants growing up in apartheid South Africa, Patrick Soon-Shiong spent his afternoons racing through the streets of Port Elizabeth selling the evening newspaper. The job, he likes to say, shaped his views on the power of the press and the plight of the underdog. “The newspaper is…
For people interested in a no-frills way to spin up a new personal newsletter, there are more alternatives to Mailchimp-TinyLetter than ever. Prominent newcomers like U.S. startup Substack or the Netherlands-based Revue have focused on simplifying writing tools and streamlining software for the entire newsletter management process, from writing to sending to maintaining the subscriber…
Content warning: rape and death threats On the evening of April 6, a horrific highway crash occurred on Highway 35 in rural Saskatchewan. The crash would take the lives of 16 individuals on the team bus of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team. The loss of life is tragic, and in its aftermath, there has…
A pair of women ride a LimeBike scooter. Photo by the author The Bay Area serves as America’s sandbox. The tech world’s most far-fetched ideas are often sketched and tested here, and if they’re successful, they’ll spread throughout the country. The latest trend to materialize here is motorized scooters you can rent through an app….
“Why don’t you just fire [Robert] Mueller?” a reporter called out to President Trump in the Cabinet Room at the White House Monday afternoon, according to a transcript of the event. From the video, one can see that the president—flanked by his military advisers—selected this inquiry from a number of other indistinct questions that were being…
YouTube has a porn problem on some of its popular videos, and it seems to be coming from the same mysterious source. Twitter users and YouTubers have been complaining about an ad that has shown up before videos on popular YouTube pages, including Pewdiepie, Markiplier, and Dude Perfect. The ad shows a woman gyrating (not…
Our nation’s present uproar over the deleterious effects of social media on society and fretting about the decline of trusted news outlets is nothing new. What’s new is the fact that the straightforward ways to prop up the Real Journalism industry have never been more obvious. For two decades, professional thinkers—most of them employed in…