Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This October, when Ido Alexander saw photos a young man had posted on social media, he thought he had hit the bankruptcy jackpot. Mr. Alexander, a Florida lawyer working for a court-appointed trustee, dispatched an appraiser to the man’s home to inspect the expensive-looking gold chains and other jewelry he had been posing in, which he hadn’t…
googleon: all Former Philadelphia Magazine editor Patrick Kerkstra, recently ousted from his post, is rejoining the newsroom that includes the Inquirer, where he once worked as a reporter and columnist, Philadelphia Media Networks senior vice president and executive editor Stan Wischnowski said Thursday. Kerkstra, who will become managing editor of digital content, is one of…
Donald Trump won, and the media is grasping for answers as to why we didn’t predict it. Already, you can see the seeds of many bad solutions forming. The New York Times, a useful enough stand-in for the prestige mainstream media, did communicate in both the tone and substance of its coverage that Hillary Clinton…
Nov 9, 2016 If I see one more ‘this election is Facebook’s fault’ tweet, take or thinkpiece I might spontaneously combust. Could you any more miss the point? Facebook is a tool for more efficiently deciding what content you see. The problem has never been how we look out on to the world, but what…
Image by Jim Cooke Like many major news organizations, the New York Times has a policy that forbids its writers and editors from publicly endorsing any candidate. Ancient journalism folklore states that ideally one shouldn’t have opinions—doing so would anger our one true god, Objectivity—but given that this isn’t possible, it’s instead advised that one simply…
close story-meta-footer Photo Voting in Ohio during the 2012 presidential election. Low turnout early in the day among demographic groups likelier to vote for President Obama made his campaign team think he was going to lose the state (he didn’t). Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times In the history of the Obama…
A generation ago, newspapers and television news programs had a lot of influence over what people read and watched. Stories that made it on the front page got a lot of attention, while most people never heard about stories that mainstream media outlets chose to ignore. Things are very different on the modern internet. Most…
It was an innocent mistake—but one that brought widespread humiliation on a noted Canadian journalist and illustrated just how much our country lags behind America in terms of race coverage. “Code-switching” is the act of changing the language you use, or how you express yourself in conversations, depending on the context. It’s a way to…
ONLINE advertising is booming. Digital-ad revenues in America in the first half of the year reached a record $32.7bn, according to the latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group. For marketing folk, digital ads have great appeal because consumers’ online data can be used to direct what they think are the right…
The decision by the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) to introduce a paywall for “premium content” is an interesting strategic and philosophical shift. Although it will initially involve only 15% of the output of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, it is an acknowledgement that readers should pay for its journalism and, more importantly, that its…