Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
How many times can we intercut tense courtroom exchanges with footage of Gawker writers hanging out, talking about “traffic” and “content,” and inciting the wrath of Peter Thiel? The next year should put our tolerance to the test! There are not one, not two, but threedramas chronicling Gawker’s demise currently in development. The latest, to be…
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed. Here are two truths and a lie. Which one’s the lie? 1. Pedophiles are taking advantage of YouTube’s algorithm to…
Facebook Inc. has spent the better part of a year telling its users, Congress and the readers of this paper that we’re in charge of our personal data and the ads we see. The network has streamlined its privacy settings, shared more details about how data is used and highlighted how its ad controls work. If we take advantage of all these privacy controls, it shouldn’t still feel as…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Anchor For many, digital media’s ills are down to broken ad tech and the system propping it up. Adam Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech at the Washington Post, says it’s more complicated than simply fixing the plumbing: Advertisers are going to have to work at making ad…
An avid genealogist, I have a knack for using the document trail to root out buried family secrets and often help adoptees and others trace their histories. And so it’s with great amusement that I have unpacked the family trees of anti-immigrant right-wing personalities from Rep. Steve “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s…
.entry-header Credit Spotify CEO Daniel Ek with honesty; in a blog post announcing a major move into the podcast space, Ek wrote: More than 10 years ago we founded Spotify to give consumers something they couldn’t get — music any time, anywhere, and at the right price. Along the way, we broke the grip piracy…
For years, BuzzFeed seemed to be leading the journalism industry toward a brave new future. Now that it has stumbled, the way ahead looks more old-school than ever. The digital publishing industry took a big hit in recent days, when more than 1,000 employees were laid off at BuzzFeed, AOL, Yahoo and HuffPost. Vice Media…
The new site’s only two full-time writers exited Wednesday in protest of editorial director Carson Griffith’s offensive remarks about everything from race to penis size. Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast Gawker 2.0 is blowing up on the launchpad just two weeks after the site’s first group of new staffers came aboard. On Wednesday…
Alden Global Capital, the most reviled newspaper owner in the business, now wants to buy Gannett, the United States’ largest daily newspaper company. As reported Sunday evening by The Wall Street Journal — and then confirmed via early Monday morning press release — Alden, through its Digital First Media/MNG Enterprise ownership, has offered a 23…