Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Illustration: Jim Cooke Congratulations to all the wieners. Mark Halperin (and sidekick John Heilemann), Bloomberg Just about the only good thing you can say about Mark Halperin (and John Heilemann) is that they managed to swindle a lot of money from prickly billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who hired the two of them in 2014 for a…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Book readings, interviews, and news radio are coming to Facebook thanks to its new Live Audio feature launching today with a few publishers and authors before opening up next year. A complement to its Facebook Live video streaming, it could bring audio-first content like podcasts to the News Feed, and provide…
Bill O’Reilly’s “white establishment” comments ignite firestorm over his bald-faced racism Fox News host Bill O’Reilly went on a white supremacism-laden rant Tuesday night, saying that the effort to abolish the Electoral College is an attempt by “the left” to take away power from the “white establishment.” O’Reilly went on to denounce Democrats for being…
.entry-header December 20, 2016, 6:35 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Linkedin Share icons In what appears to be the largest digital advertising scam in history, a group of Russian hackers reportedly built a click-fraud machine that stole up to $5 million daily from top advertisers and publishers. But even that is just the tip of…
2017 will be the year that news organizations start approaching headlines with the importance they deserve. A few years ago, around the time that a scary-exciting new thing called “social” started becoming more important than search engine optimization, digital media organizations discovered that nothing mattered more than headlines, at least when it came to getting…
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of…
With fake news a hot topic following the election, The New Yorker has taken steps to make sure people aren’t fooled by The Borowitz Report it runs on its web site. Last week, the magazine changed the tagline of Andy Borowitz’s popular online satirical humor column, which consistently tops The New Yorker’s trending chart, from…
In early July, a website made to look like a real news organization published what would prove to be one of the biggest fake news hits of the US election. WTOE5News.com was barely two weeks old when it published the hoax story, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” It improbably…
Choking down “flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings” and dealing with bathrooms that “transport diners to the experience of desperately searching for toilet paper at a Venezuelan grocery store” were uncomfortable enough. But Vanity Fair reporter Tina Nguyen feared a more severe round of indigestion after her Wells-ian skewering of the Trump Grill attracted the Twitter ire…
The problem is not having more data. The problem is having the right, actionable data and the context of its provenance. But publishers see so much of their relationships mediated by a few walled gardens that their access to understanding who their users are, what they read, what they watch, when they do it, and…