Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Slot 1 In February, a week before Campbell Brown said onstage at Recode’s Code Media that Facebook would carve out a section within its Watch video hub for news publishers, the company’s head of news partnerships threw out the idea in a meeting in New York with several publishers, including traditional media companies like CNN…
Google’s AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole….
Oh hai, Batman. Last month, Variety reported that Hangover director Todd Phillips was in talks with Joaquin Phoenix to star in the stand-alone Joker origin film—a compelling choice to play the Batman villain who could probably give the character a depth we haven’t seen since Heath Ledger. But following Variety‘s announcement, another actor unexpectedly threw…
One officer involved in the city’s massive corruption scandal said officers kept the replicas “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them.” Last week, the beginning of an explosive corruption trial involving eight members of Baltimore’s elite Gun Trace Task Force revealed that a handful of Baltimore…
An enormously popular YouTube video, uploaded last month by an account called Ridddle, explores a bong-rip hypothetical: What if someone detonated a thermonuclear bomb in the depths of the Marianas Trench? In the seven minute clip, a gravelly-voiced narrator uses convincingly scientific-sounding language — at least at first. As it goes on, though, the video’s…
After retracting public comments three times in a little over a month, New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss defended her columns and tweets Friday, claiming a social media “mob” is smearing anyone who departs from far-left political orthodoxy. “Saying ‘I am offended’ is a way of making someone radioactive; a way of smearing their reputation,” Weiss told…
A yoga-pants refusenik, a climate-science skeptic, and a tech writer with a neo-Nazi pal, among other offenders, have put James Bennet in the crosshairs. Exterior of the New York Times building, photographed on June 29, 2017. By Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. “I’ve lost the capacity to gauge the opprobrium—what’s irrational versus what’s a reasonable amount…
In December, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet met with a group of Times employees to answer questions about his much-questioned opinion section. At the time, A.G. Sulzberger, now publisher of the Times, was conducting a tour of the newsroom he was about to inherit, meeting with employees from different corners of the newspaper. The Q&A session…
Kenneth Eng is on the other side of viral now, where it’s hard to see him. 11 years ago, in 2007, it was easy to see him. He achieved a brief burst of viral infamy for writing a column titled “Why I Hate Blacks,” inexplicably published by the now-defunct AsianWeek. He had every quality we…
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—who secretly schemed to annihilate Gawker Media, a goal he achieved in August 2016, and to force its founder, Nick Denton, into personal bankruptcy—may yet have cause to regret that he has reveled so publicly in his vengeful triumph. The German-born, Donald Trump-supporting (with a $1.25 million campaign donation) Thiel is…