Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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data-module-name=”article.app/lib/module/wsj/breadcrumbs” The sports website Deadspin lost all of its editorial staff this week in an exodus that complicates its new owner’s effort to turn around the former Gawker Media properties acquired a little over six months ago. The new parent company, G/O Media Inc., which comprises about a dozen sites including Gizmodo and the Onion,…
How are you supposed to react when a robot calls you a “gook”? At first glance, ImageNet Roulette seems like just another viral selfie app – those irresistible 21st-century magic mirrors that offer a simulacrum of insight in exchange for a photograph of your face. Want to know what you will look like in 30…
The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich…
Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more…
When I got home from my tomato expedition, I read a tweet from the comedian Sarah Lazarus that made me feel like someone had put a camera inside my apartment. “Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we’ve ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying ‘it’s tomato…
ABC News was among the news outlets that received a pitch from Facebook to license their content. Photo: Kena Betancur/Getty Images Updated Aug. 8, 2019 4:31 pm ET Facebook Inc. FB 2.71% is offering news outlets millions of dollars for the rights to put their content in a news section that the company hopes to…
The Italian General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) seized an arsenal of weaponry ranging from bolt-action rifles and automatic weapons to a “combat-ready” air-to-air missile from a neo-Nazi group in a series of raids supported by police in Milan, Varese, Forli and Novara, the BBC reported on Monday. In a statement to the BBC,…
Google is the dominant player in online advertising, one reason the U.S. Justice Department is laying the groundwork for potential antitrust action against the tech giant. It has a 37% share of the $130 billion U.S. digital ad market, according to research firm eMarketer, but understanding Google’s full clout requires a deeper look at the sector. Google…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 19, 2018. On Wednesday, two representatives of the United States government held press briefings, both of them touching on one of the most astonishing news stories of the Trump presidency—a series of events that had begun two days earlier, when Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki to…
Instagram memers have had enough. They generate the engagement that helps keep Instagram growing—but, they argue, the multibillion-dollar platform doesn’t pay them for their work, or give them any control. So they’re fighting back. And before you write off IG Meme Union Local 69-420 as a joke, the organizers of the collective would like you…