Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
12:53 PM, Wed., May 11, 2016 Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out and listening. My name is Kathryn Borel. In December of 2014, I pressed sexual assault charges against Jian Ghomeshi. As you know, Mr. Ghomeshi initially denied all the charges that were brought against him. But today, as you just heard, Jian Ghomeshi admitted…
We knew Snapchat was a hot commodity — publishers often build entire teams to create content for Snapchat and have likened competition inside the section to “The Hunger Games.” But a new report from The Information found that publishers, including Vox Media (which owns this website), are actually forking over money to Snapchat in order…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Amazon unveiled its own plans to compete in the user-generated video market with the launch of a new service called Amazon Video Direct in a surprise announcement this morning. This service, explains the company, allows creators to upload their own videos to Amazon’s Prime Video and generate royalties based on the hours streamed. Creators…
TV news is corrupt and incentivized to accentuate conflict over clarity, with Washington’s media and politicians constituting “an incredibly corrupt and blinded, symbiotic terrarium,” according to Jon Stewart. The comic-satirist and longtime TV host left no doubt that he’s not softened toward the media, government or the political process since exiting “The Daily Show” during…
—Kevin Drum on Fri. April 8, 2016 2:40 PM PDT Paul Krugman doesn’t think much of Bernie Sanders. Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts. This hasn’t gone over well with many of his erstwhile fans: judging by my own behavior, sometimes i wonder whether @paulkrugman…
Google’s News section will now highlight the importance of local news sources. While Google News has more than 75,000 news sources, it hasn’t always done a good job of surfacing hyper-local blogs and sites about specific topics when a major story breaks. “When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be…
On Monday Claire L. Evans and Jona Bechtolt, the artistic and romantic partners who make up the electro band Yacht, claimed that a sex tape they had made had been stolen and leaked. Across several social media posts—mostly on Facebook—they announced that to take control of the situation, they were going to sell the video…
I got my start writing for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin. What is interesting about that statement is that the appropriate follow-up question is “Which student newspaper?” For many years Wisconsin was unique in being the only university with two daily newspapers, both with five-digit print circulations. The older paper, The Daily…
If you haven’t read the two big Gizmodo stories on the human curators of the Facebook “trending news” box, you should stop and go do that now. They are fascinating: the first one details the working conditions and practices of the people paid to select stories for that box, and the second one alleges that…
Illustration: Jim Cooke We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false. The new conventional wisdom is that video will be digital media’s savior, but it is only a…