Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was 3am on 14 November 2015, and I had just woken up at my home in Toronto. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I logged on to Twitter to check my messages. As I scrolled through, I read the details of the brutal terrorist attacks that had taken place in Paris hours earlier. Then I saw that my…
GIF I moved to New York two days before starting work at Gawker in the fall of 2014. When I walked up the stairs to the office in Soho I was acutely unsure of how to hold my body so I wouldn’t seem terrified: the only person I knew in the building was Emma, who…
What has already been a discouraging summer for online news now looks even worse. A new Pew Research study reveals yet another reason for journalists to fret about recent changes to Facebook’s editorial vision. Last week, a Facebook vice president announced a major modification to how the company’s News Feed algorithm will rank stories. That…
Over the last three days we saw a really clear example of the new world of news that Facebook is creating, whether you like it or not. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to show a video of Philando Castile — a black man who was shot by the police at a routine traffic…
Ladies, what the fuck. We are (Lord willing) mere months away from finally having the first woman president. National female voices like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Ruth Bader Ginsburg appear stronger than ever. At the same time, personality journalism appears to be gazing longingly backwards toward an era full of Playboy bunnies and…
Begin: WordPress Article Content As large platforms like Facebook and Apple position themselves as the new go-to places to read news, an independent app that started in Japan has landed a new round of funding to raise its own game. SmartNews — a news aggregation app that works with some 1,500 publications and selects stories for you based on your…
Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson is suing the network’s CEO and chairman Roger Ailes, alleging a pervasive practice of sexual harassment. Now Ailes is vigorously denying her accusations and Fox’s parent company is conducting an “internal review.” Carlson, 50, was removed from her 2 p.m. newscast “The Real Story” in late June. The lawsuit…
I didn’t talk to Sarah Ellison for this, and I feel like I have to state that because the way the reporter wrote it, it looks like I did. But the bit about the Richard Mack story is at least 98% accurate. (There were two reporters, not three.) I haven’t been talking to reporters generally, though I…
Last month, we told you about a pair of lawsuits filed by someone named Katie Johnson, who claims that Donald Trump raped her when she was 13, at a party hosted by notorious celebrity pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The claims, as we told you at the time, are being backed by a group of men who…
RJ Bell, the “Vegas oddsmaker” in charge of the sports betting website Pregame.com, and subject of a lengthy investigation by Ryan Goldberg on Gawker’s sister website Deadspin, has enlisted Charles J. Harder—the same lawyer who has threatened Gawker over Ashley Feinberg’s reporting on Donald Trump’s hair—to demand a retraction of the article. Meticulously reported over…