Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
June 15, 2015 6:30 p.m. ET Verizon Communications Inc. has no desire to sell the Huffington Post or buy Dish Network Corp., Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said at a Wall Street Journal conference Monday. Verizon agreed last month to pay $4.4 billion for AOL Inc., AOL 0.08 % which owns several media properties including the…
This story was produced in collaboration with Marketplace. If you spent the beginning of February listening to the latest episode of each of the top 100 shows on the iTunes “top podcasts” chart, you’d have heard “Stone Cold” Steve Austin talk about the best way to deliver flowers. You’d have heard the Freakonomics crew spend…
The latest tweak to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm factors in the amount of time users spend viewing stories. Software engineers Ansha Yu and Sami Tas announced the change in a Newsroom post Friday, acknowledging that Facebook users don’t necessarily like, comment on or share every post that is important to them. Yu and Tas added that the…
June 4, 2015, 2:25 p.m. You’ve probably heard by now that Twitter has killed off Politwoops, the Sunlight Foundation’s project to detect when American politicians delete tweets after posting — often a sign that they realize they’ve said something they shouldn’t. Twitter argues that Politwoops is in violation of its developer agreement. (Kudos to J.K….
Photo Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker. Credit Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times “I’m pretty sure we have a revolution coming,” said Nick Denton, founder and chief executive of Gawker Media. “It’s not 100 percent guaranteed, but the existing corporate structure is looking pretty hollow.” It was a mild spring evening, and Mr….
Benny Johnson has become admired and loathed for his addictive brand of political Web journalism. “A hate click is just as valuable as a love click,” he says. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) Benny Johnson needed to escape the Internet. In less than two years, he had built himself up into a Washington media-insider celebrity: one…
Gawker Media may become a union shop. The company’s editorial staff will hold an election on Wednesday to determine if its reporters will join a union, including all staff writers of its popular sites like Jezebel, Gizmodo, and Deadspin. It’s a watershed moment not just for Gawker, but for the media industry as a whole—the first time…
Photo Arianna Huffington, editor of The Huffington Post, reportedly has said she is not sure her ambitious plans for the site can be executed under Verizon. Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images Over the last couple of years, an array of media companies, venture capitalists and wealthy individuals have quietly explored buying a stake in The Huffington…
When John Oliver planted a giant bag of marijuana in my hand Sunday night and broadcast it to millions of HBO viewers, I immediately thought of Chekhov. In one of the Russian master’s shortest short stories, a lowly civil servant is so ecstatic to find an article about himself in the newspaper that he cannot…
Some Changes at The Nib Since The Nib launched in September 2013 we’ve published over 1,500 comics. Except I’ve been saying that line for a while now so it’s probably much more at this point. 2,000? We publish a lot, and the core of that strategy has been a mix of exclusive work and reprints…