Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image: Gizmodo Somewhere in the heart of Facebook HQ, a shadowy team toils behind the closed doors of what would appear to be an average conference room. This is Facebook’s War Room, and it’s the thin line standing between us and chaos. Gizmodo did not visit the War Room, but early Thursday morning, almost simultaneously,…
Back in August, I wrote a big post about the impossible choices that large internet platforms have to make concerning content moderation. A large part of the point of that post is that there is no perfect content moderation, and especially at scale, there are going to be large swaths of people who disagree with…
For years we’ve talked about the journalistic perils of what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or the pretty common misconception that journalists should prioritize factual symmetry in news reporting, instead of actually trying to get to the truth. This usually results in “he said, she said” reporting where both sides are…
On Tuesday, Bloomberg doubled down on its bombshell report from last week, which alleged China had surreptitiously implanted tiny chips into the motherboards of servers to spy on US companies such as Apple and Amazon. If true, this would be one of the worst hacks in history. In its new story, Bloomberg reports that a…
John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, told a group of top editors a week ago that their news organization no longer had to groom young, raw talent. It could go after the best journalists around. As an example of its capabilities in high-impact reporting, Micklethwait cited an Oct. 4 piece under the…
Politico editor-in-chief John Harris has spent nearly three-and-a-half decades in American political journalism, building a reputation for himself as a fair and high-minded reporter and, perhaps more importantly, helping to create a media organization that wields significant influence in Washington while commanding the respect of both Democrats and Republicans. So when Harris became a target…
I regret to inform you that the national mainstream media is at it again: willingly giving a platform to white nationalists. On this morning’s TODAY show, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed the head of Identity Evropa, a racist group that describes itself as “identitarian” because it promotes white European “identity,” according to the Southern Poverty Law…
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…
.entry-header .post-thumbnail This post is written with the Gutenberg editor version 3.9.0. Disclaimer: This post is my opinion and mine alone. After several years of working on WordPress and accessibility and being part of the accessibility team, I have taken the very difficult decision to leave the WordPress accessibility team. I owe it to the…
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…