Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A Facebook ad in October urged political conservatives to support the Trump administration’s rollback of fuel emission standards, which it hailed as “our president’s car freedom agenda” and “plan for safer, cheaper cars that WE get to choose.” The ad came from a Facebook page called Energy4US, and it included a disclaimer, required by Facebook,…
Often top referrers to articles in our network include a mix of the usual suspects: Google search, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Drudge Report. But one day at the beginning of October I was looking at a story in Currents and noticed another referrer in the mix: SmartNews. SmartNews is an app that aggregates and…
Recode, a technology website that was among the first in a wave of journalist-led media startups, is being folded into sister site Vox.com, its parent company said Thursday. Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell said in a memo that Recode would relaunch as a section of Vox.com starting next year. Recode will continue to exist as…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo Media Group) When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think…
Brand collaborations are hot, and Facebook wants to do some matchmaking of its own. Facebook is testing a new ad format that features multiple advertisers in one unit, bundling dynamic ad campaigns from two different companies in a side-by-side version of Facebook’s Collections ads. Cameron Mills, who works in growth at e-commerce company Brandless, flagged the…
If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately—and making it easy…
A new complaint to a lawsuit against Facebook claims the social network significantly inflated a video metric that measured time spent. Publishers are furious about the lawsuit and are blaming the miscalculated metric for forcing the industry to shift from text to video. Between February and July 2016, seven major publishers like Mic and Fox…
The Civil Media Co. bills itself as a solution to some pressing problems in modern journalism, pitching a new cryptocurrency that would help news consumers support quality information and weed out bad actors. So far, the effort isn’t going smoothly. Consumer demand for the new so-called token that the company is selling has been weak…
In this newsletter and column, we talk about power a lot: how to get it, how to share it, how to do good with it. And if you’ve been to any journalism conference or workshop lately, they’ve almost certainly touched on diversity. OpenNews is an organization dedicated to supporting newsroom developers, designers, journalists and editors…
Stock investors are welcoming money-losing companies into the public markets this year with open arms. About 83% of U.S.-listed initial public offerings in 2018’s first three quarters involve companies that lost money in the 12 months leading up to their debut, according to data compiled by University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. That is…