“Homepage traffic, blogging, niche email newsletters. They were some of the foundational concepts of digital media in the early 2000s. And as the digital news media business turns again, they’re increasingly the ones media organizations are turning to.”

“Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, and Anthony Bourdain are the latest celebrities to be verified under Twitter Blue, the social media platform’s paid-subscription service that allows anyone to get a blue check mark by their display name if they pay $8 a month and confirm their phone number. Except the actor, athlete, and celebrity chef died years ago, before Twitter Blue even existed.”

“The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.”

“[Jonah] Peretti says he doesn’t regret turning down the Disney deal, and I don’t either, though I’m sure our investors do. At the time, the upward trajectory seemed clear: Social media would swallow the old internet, and we’d rise with it. And for a couple more years, we seemed to be rising…But our big prediction was wrong. Social media turned dark and began to contract.”

“[Doni] Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all. Her writing has made her a public enemy of the conservative crowd intent on remaking the county. Far-right leaders have confronted her at rallies and public meetings, mocking and berating her. At a militia-organized protest in 2021, the crowd screamed insults.”

“It’s an astonishing business story. Famous people from every walk of life you could think of have, in the span of a few days, grabbed their megaphones to tell the world they did not pay for a specific product. Imagine if they felt the need to tell you the same thing every time they passed a restaurant they didn’t want to eat at. Most people seem to agree with the celebrities.”

“Traveling in Ireland last week, President Biden abandoned the decades-old tradition of holding a news conference while abroad. On Thursday, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia met with Mr. Biden, but the two did not hold a news conference together, another practice of his predecessors that Mr. Biden has frequently chosen to skip. After the meeting, Mr. Petro took questions from reporters — alone — at microphones in front of the West Wing.”

“He faced calls to resign, including from a government minister, and was forced to apologise after the German weekly Die Zeit published private text messages between him and [former Bild editor Julian] Reichelt in which he said that east Germans were ‘either communists or fascists,’ railed against ‘intolerant Muslims’ and described himself as ‘very much in favour of climate change.'”

“The $787.5 million settlement effectively erases more than half of the profits the company earned last year. And for Fox, this is just the start of its reckoning with the cost of election lies. Additional lawsuits that could vaporize another chunk of earnings are pending from Smartmatic, a maker of electronic voting systems, as well as several Fox shareholders.”

“When I asked Sandvik what would be required to make yourself entirely safe from cyber threats, she replied: you wouldn’t be online at all, and you would have to live in the forest.”

“Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks.”

“An on-air career seemed unlikely for a Black woman in the 1970s. It didn’t help that she had been imprisoned for armed robbery. But she broke barriers.”

“Nothing good would come of elevating his dangerous disinformation to the level of scientific discourse where each individual is positioned as ‘equal’ in terms of the data they bring to the table. But ignoring him entirely is equally fraught. In today’s environment of social media and fragmented news, he will find a platform, or create one.”

“It was quite the backflip by the 50-year-old media mogul whose legal case has played out in lurid media headlines for eight months. He launched the proceedings after Crikey named the Murdoch family as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the U.S. Capitol riot.”

“Given how highly Murdoch values his image as a swaggering media giant, it was probably money well spent. Otherwise he would have had to testify under oath and the world would see not the robust titan of popular legend but an elderly mogul who is physically frail and, more importantly, who could not stop his TV station pandering to Donald Trump for fear of alienating the audience that had turned Fox News into such a profitable cash cow.”

“Moving forward, it seems that anyone wanting to post an ad or promote a tweet will have to cough up $8/month for Twitter Blue, or $1,000 per month to be recognized as a verified organization.”

“With one regional sports network in bankruptcy and others losing subscribers, the local sports TV model is in upheaval, threatening the financial foundations of MLB, the NHL and the NBA. The effects could be wide-ranging, from how fans watch their favorite teams to how much players get paid.”

“Written for Google, these stories take a trending search term and manage to confect a news story out of answering it. They tend to reverse the conventional architecture of a news story by burying the relevant information near the bottom of a story so readers spend more time on the page before arriving at a simply-told answer.”

“For years, Twitter has been a go-to for agencies that need to warn people during a rapidly changing crisis. The National Weather Service uses it to share hurricane and tornado alerts. Firefighting agencies tweet updates about where a blaze is headed. It’s supposed to give people a heads-up so that they can take precautions to keep themselves safe.”

“The seven-times F1 world champion, 54, has not been seen in public since December 2013 when he suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident in the French Alps.”

“As AI proliferates, this lack of originality in our daily language is what will render so many of our jobs irrelevant. But this is where I become optimistic. Because to me, it’s clear that one of our best defenses against the rise of the writing machines might be to learn how to think like a poet.”