Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
GDPR is well and truly here, but a number of publishing trade bodies sat out of talks with Google on Thursday (24 May) – showing that the tech giant is struggling to assuage some publishers over its GDPR policies. Trade groups representing media owners on both sides of the Atlantic snubbed Google’s invite yesterday. Instead,…
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation laws are now in effect, and we’re getting a sense of what publishers have decided to implement on their websites as of May 25 — whether they’ve decided to block European Union and European Economic Area-based traffic outright, set up buckets of consent for readers to click through, or something…
Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a…
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has agreed to meet with a group of publishers next week at four of its global offices to discuss their concerns about its preparations for Europe’s forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation, according to people familiar with the matter. Some publishers have been critical of Google’s stance on the sweeping new data-protection law…
When I was about 30, I was hired to be an editor at The Wall Street Journal. There was no good reason for this. I was a pretty good writer, and I knew the rules of grammar and was in general interested in a lot of stuff. But nothing on my résumé would have pointed…
Some employees in a Wells Fargo WFC +0.15% & Co. unit that handles business banking improperly altered information on documents related to corporate customers, according to people familiar with the matter. The behavior again raises questions about Wells Fargo’s risk-management practices and controls. The bank has been sanctioned in recent months by federal regulators for problems in these areas…
I’ve got a great idea for a start-up. Want to hear the pitch? It’s called the 75 Cent Dollar Store. We’re going to sell dollar bills for 75 cents — no service charges, no hidden fees, just crisp $1 bills for the price of three quarters. It’ll be huge. You’re probably thinking: Wait, won’t your…
Many web publishers have been jilted by Facebook. Now they are quickly falling hard for Apple News. They just hope that this new love leads to new revenue. After a shaky start which led many in the media world to doubt whether Apple was serious about the product (the Wall Street Journal reported in 2016…
Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of…
Illustration: Jim Cooke This is the story of how corporate raiding, complacency, excess, and incompetence are gutting a media company that matters to tens of millions of people. It’s not a novel story, and perhaps not even scandalous by the standards of corporate opulence: A shark-obsessed boss, millions wasted on consultants, and an executive who…