Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social…
The staff of alt-right wesbite Breitbart was reported Friday to work in the basement of a rich Egyptian Muslim. Yes, seriously. The Guardian US reported that Breitbart executive and Trump CEO Steve Bannon was registered to vote in Florida, a state he does not live in. Other journalists have since thrown some cold water on the significance of that…
Blogging was fun, and it broke the rules. As founder Nick Denton said in a 2013 interview, “The basic concept of Gawker was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day.” Which is another way of saying Gawker tried to harness…
So this was the first sunset I captured in 2012. It cost me $6,612 to take this photo. more $12 in gas to go from work to this spot and then home. The camera I took this with cost $2500. The lens was another $1600. The Singh Ray Reverse Neutral Density filter was $210. The…
Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press released the results of a review of State Department appointment data that they used to make some striking claims about Hillary Clinton’s schedule as secretary of state. According to their reporting, Clinton spent a remarkably large share of her time as America’s chief diplomat…
Bing map There aren’t many small towns in the U.S. with two printed newspapers. For a while, there was one fewer. Now the Homer Tribune has resumed print publication, joining the Homer News in serving Homer, Alaska, a fishing-and-tourism town of 5,000 at one end of the nation’s paved road system. Both regularly win awards…
Gawker.com will cease operations today. I asked former editors of the site to help us send it off. Thanks for reading, commenting, and tipping. Long live Gawker. —AP Former editor Gabriel Snyder While fearlessness at tackling any topic is its hallmark, Gawker was always terrible at talking about itself, especially at telling the world what…
Gawker.com is shutting down today, Monday 22nd August, 2016, some 13 years after it began and two days before the end of my forties. It is the end of an era. The staff will move to new jobs on other properties in Gawker Media Group, which are lively and intact, and the whole operation will…
This is a column about Gawker.com’s demise, but it is also a column about a plane ride I took last Friday. The two are related, though it might not seem that way at first. I’ll start with the plane ride, which was from San Francisco to Raleigh-Durham. I sat next to a woman who brought…
Gawker.com, a website where people who would never be on the list at a club told America what wasn’t cool anymore, died today. Or maybe last week. I don’t care. Gawker is gone, felled by Peter Thiel, an anti-democratic billionaire creep who perfectly embodies the stereotype of Libertarians as people who will scream “tyranny”…