Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The press must defend all norms, not just those that pertain to themselves. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump committed a huge no-no. This was nothing trivial like empowering white hate groups or waging public and legal vendettas against his enemies—he’s been doing those things all along. For the first time since winning the presidency last…
Perhaps I found myself in the viral content world because I made the careless mistake of taking an arts degree at university. For over half a decade afterwards, I was lucky enough to work as an actual journalist for a few quasi well-known publications. But after years of trying, I gave up pursuing work with…
Anant Goel, Nabanita De, Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft at Princeton’s hackathon (Anant Goel) When Nabanita De scrolled through her Facebook feed recently, she felt afraid. There were so many posts with competing information and accusations about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that she didn’t know how to begin deciphering the fearmongering from the reality. The…
It would be relatively simple to produce a web-based feed, outside of Twitter or Facebook, that includes only stories from vetted news orgs. That doesn’t mean that their stories are true, just that they are making their best efforts to produce real news. There’s no time to get into a deep philosophical discussion about this….
Your Post Has Been Launched! Fabulous! Don’t forget to share with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. 1. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday appointed Stephen Bannon, the controversial executive chairman of far-right website Breitbart, as his chief White House strategist and counselor. View this image › Evan Vucci / AP The appointment — Bannon first…
There’s been much ado in media circles this past week about the prevalence of “fake” news on social networks and what, if any, effect that had on the outcome of the U.S. election. Stories from big players like InfoWars and The Blaze as well as cookie-cutter outlets like Occupy Democrats, WorldNetDaily, The Other 98% and…
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch AOL announced a sizeable round of layoffs on Thursday. Recode’s Kara Swisher reported 5% of its global workforce, or 500 employees, will be affected. In a memo sent to staff obtained by Business Insider (which you can read in full below), AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said the…
Oct. 21, 2016 7:51 p.m. ET Earlier this month, a majority of editorial staffers at Fusion signed union cards to join the growing list of digital journalism outlets embracing collective bargaining. But now some employees at the millennial-geared web publisher are frustrated by the response from Univision Communications Inc., Fusion’s parent company. Employees say executives…
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images You may not remember Milo Yiannopoulos, the failed London tech entrepreneur who adopted a white-nationalist persona beloved by scores of 20-year-old white college bros convinced political correctness is the reason no one will sleep with them. If not, that’s understandable — his public visibility took a bit of a dive…
Can the presidential election result be blamed on failed algorithms? Facebook had taken the brunt of that claim in the days of shock following Donald Trump’s election. Then, on Monday, Google stumbled into the fray, and by the end of the day, it’s own mini-outrage produced a significant change in how Google does business. What’s…