What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?

Jeff Fager. Photo: AP/REX/Shutterstock The afternoon of March 7, 2018, was go time, or so we believed. Inside a glass huddle room at the Washington Post, its walls covered with headlines from journalistic coups of the past, we began dialing numbers on a speakerphone and pressing send on carefully drafted, bullet-pointed emails. For nearly four…

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‘It was always a problematic child’: What went wrong for Sizmek – Digiday

Ad tech has had another casualty. The news of Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing has shaken digital ad executives, who regarded the company’s ad server business as an important contender to Google’s. But the company’s vision of becoming a fully integrated buy-side tech stack was built on a crumbling foundation, according to ad tech sources. What didn’t help…

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The House We Live In — Real Life

At the Atlantic earlier this week, Sidney Fussell reported on Airbnb’s policies toward hosts installing cameras to observe their customers and the platform’s apparent ambivalence about enforcing them. As Fussell notes, Airbnb hosts are permitted to have cameras installed in living rooms, common areas, and outdoor spaces, but not bathrooms and sleeping areas. They are…

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Border news: Donald Trump tweets threat to close US-Mexico border “next week” – Vox

President Donald Trump has occasionally threatened to “shut down” the US-Mexico border for months. Nothing has happened. But now, the president is putting an actual timeline on the threat — insisting that he will shut down all or “large portions” of the US-Mexico border “next week” unless Mexico stops all Central American migration into the…

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Why private equity is growing so fast — Quartz

CalPERS, the $360 billion California’s state pension fund, just announced plans to increase its investments in private equity. It’s not hard to see why. Despite the high fees charged by private equity funds, CALPERs claims there are huge payoffs. Its private equity portfolio returned 16.1% in 2017, compared to just 11.5% for its stock portfolio,  and…

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