Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Getty If you’ve been online today (God help you) perhaps you’re aware that a piece masquerading as critical discourse—while really just being a coming together of two oversized egos—ran in the newspaper of record. In other news, it’s a day ending in y. Lord alive, online has been bad: media types justifying their friendships…
Early on in Megan Boyle’s experiment in live-blogging her life, she decides to take a bath. She’s trying to get it all down, but there are some difficulties: 12:22AM: bathwater is running. i’m just going ot do this until forever. ate half of some kind of pill, 1 mg Xanax ithink. ate other one […]…
Last week news came out that Mic, a publication that I once worked at for the better part of two years, laid off its entire editorial staff. Staffers were given zero warning. Management told them during a Thursday morning meeting that their computer access would be cut off at 2 p.m., that they’d get just…
About five years ago, I was asked to visit the newsroom at Mic, a digital-media start-up backed by venture capital and focused on news for the millennial audience. As the public editor of the New York Times, I suppose I was seen as an expert in traditional journalism ethics — especially through the eyes of…
This is about television in the 1990s, but let’s start with a quick, tragic and important trip to 1975. Happy Days is about to deliver its infamous and most cringeworthy episode. In “Fonzie’s New Friend,” the leather jacket-clad Fonz meets up with Sticks Downey, a new-to-town wisecracking drummer. The Fonz decides that Sticks, played with…
CreditCreditJooHee Yoon BARI WEISS: Everything sucks. That’s the overwhelming feeling I get when I spend too much time on Twitter. It makes me feel anxious and angry and amped up. And that’s on a day when I’m not even trending as a Very Bad Person. This fall I read Jaron Lanier’s book “Ten Arguments for…
Our shopper visits the new Amazon 4 Star store, which stocks items with customer review ratings of four stars or better. Brick and mortar never had it so rough. The new Amazon 4 Star store on Spring Street in Manhattan.CreditStefania Curto for The New York Times I have a faint memory of an article I…
Amazon’s options for advertising include its delivery boxes. Photo: Amazon Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.25% handles nearly half of all online sales in the U.S., giving it a popular platform and a wealth of consumer data. Now it’s on track to become the next juggernaut of online advertising, and its rise threatens to upend Silicon Valley’s…
Digital publisher Mic Network Inc. has agreed to sell itself to women-focused publisher Bustle Digital Group for about $5 million, according to a person familiar with the matter—a fraction of Mic’s valuation less than two years ago. Mic laid off almost all of its employees ahead of the sale, another person familiar with the matter…
Mic.com is laying off the bulk of its staff, Recode’s Peter Kafka first reported Thursday. Publisher Cory Haik has left the company. In a departure email published by Recode, she wrote, in part, “What you hear less about the truth is that it is expensive.” Mic raised $60 million in venture funding and as of…