Defector / Alex Sujong Laughlin
BuzzFeed is the reason it can’t sell “Hot Ones” →“With its lines of merch, games, and hot sauces, Hot Ones is playing all the BuzzFeed hits, but with one crucial difference—it’s relevant. But that relevance isn’t worth the cost of BuzzFeed’s debt, which threatens to obliterate the husk of BuzzFeed that’s leftover from the last seven years.”
The New Yorker / Kyle Chayka
The Trump assassination attempt meets the internet’s brain-rot era →“Fittingly, for an event involving a former President notorious for spreading disinformation and inanity online, the assassination attempt on Trump suggests just how rapidly today’s social platforms can distort a deadly serious news event into misleading tidbits and gleefully empty jokes.”
The Washington Post / Shibani Mahtani
Wall Street Journal fires Hong Kong reporter who headed embattled press club →“The termination, if linked to [Selina] Cheng’s position at HKJA, would be the latest indication of how even large, well-resourced international media organizations are wary about the risks of operating in Hong Kong, a once-freewheeling city that has increasingly come to resemble mainland China in its suppression of civil liberties, including press freedom.”
Local News Blues / Emily Sachar
Pro News Coaches offers cub reporters serious mentorship for free →Pro News Coaches “is composed of a cadre of former Wall Street Journal editors and reporters working pro bono to help newsrooms – be they small and undercapitalized or large and financially secure – realize challenging hard news, features, and enterprise pieces they might not otherwise have had the wherewithal to produce.”
Press Gazette / Bron Maher
The Atlantic / Charlie Warzel
This is what happens when news breaks →“Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed.”
Platformer / Casey Newton
The e/accs inch closer to the White House →“If Donald Trump retakes the White House, the United States will halt most efforts to preemptively regulate artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley will be allowed to pursue superintelligent systems with minimal oversight.”