Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In just the past few months, the vagaries of climate change have affected everything from the California avocado crop to South African wine production. Now, sad news from the Louisiana bayou suggests that not even hot sauce is immune from the consequences of extreme weather and rising sea levels. Since 1868, Edmund McIlhenny and his…
Spotify, the world’s largest paid music service, will begin offering news and political coverage to lure listeners away from radio and podcasts from rival Apple Inc. Eight companies, including BuzzFeed and Refinery29, have agreed to produce programming for the new initiative, called Spotlight. One of the first shows will be a four- to seven-minute daily…
Just after noon on January 2, I was loading up a Vox Media site on an iPhone simulator to test something when I got a popup that excitedly said: Congratulations! Amazon.com User! You’ve been selected for a chance to get the $1000 Amazon Gift Card, Apple iPhone X 256G or Samsung Galaxy S8! Please Click…
Vox Media is investigating how a new weapon might eliminate malicious ads from its sites by 2019. Earlier this month, the publisher of sites including SB Nation, Vox and The Verge began testing sandboxing, a technique that loads its sites’ advertisements in separate windows, called iframes, to ensure the ads can’t do things like redirect…
The Lenfest Institute for Journalism announced Tuesday that it’s part of a new partnership with The Washington Post. That partnership will bring Arc Publishing, the Post’s content management system for newsrooms, to the Philadelphia Media Network. PMN includes Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News. Lenfest, the non-profit owner of PMN, will help pay…
Image: Wikimedia/Facebook/Gizmodo As the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference reaches a fever pitch, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed alert Monday night. The bulletin told users who followed pages created by Russian trolls that those pages have been removed. And some of the affected users did not like this. A brief search revealed…
On Tuesday you may notice new Facebook and Twitter avatars on Washington Post employees’ profiles. They’re a sign of a day of “social media action” organized by the Post‘s Guild, or union, which is eight months into negotiations with Post management over a new contract. The next negotiation session is planned for Wednesday, and the…
The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie. But on Twitter, there is…
The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman’s account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with “takes” arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. “Grace,” the 23-year-old woman, was…
Is the world’s largest online retailer underpaying its employees? WHEN Amazon announced in 2010 that it would build a distribution centre in Lexington County, South Carolina, the decision was hailed as a victory for the Palmetto State. Today the e-commerce giant employs thousands of workers at the centre. Just 3.5% of the local workforce is…