The Hollywood Reporter / Gary Baum, Ryan Gajewski, and Winston Cho
How TMZ became Hollywood’s grim reaper →“Since breaking Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, TMZ’s singular style of obituary reporting — which has relied on paid informants, known in the trade as “checkbook journalism,” a practice outside the ethical bounds of most mainstream media outlets — keeps the site relevant in the pop-culture conversation. According to those who’ve found themselves in the midst of its buzz saw, it functions as a malignant power that hurts people at their most vulnerable moments.”
The Washington Post / Paul Farhi
The Guardian / Kylie Cheung
A new model for digital media? What Karlie Kloss’s acquisition of i-D means →“In 2006, the then 25-year-old real estate heir Jared Kushner bought the New York Observer — and went on to own it for more than a decade. Almost 20 years later, Kushner’s sister-in-law, the supermodel and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss, bought the British fashion publication i-D from Vice Media Group, months after the company filed for bankruptcy.”
Press Gazette / Bron Maher
Financial Times / Hannah Murphy and Christopher Grimes
X chief Linda Yaccarino resists pressure from advertisers to quit →“Over the weekend, a groundswell of executives and friends of Yaccarino from the advertising industry privately urged her to resign in order to save her reputation, according to three people familiar with the matter. However, she has refused to leave her position, two of the people said, telling those who have called her that she believes in X’s mission and its employees.”
The Guardian / Callum Bains
“There is a misconception that if something is on the internet, it will last for ever” →“Giulia Carla Rossi collects the fragile artifacts of our increasingly transient publishing world. She is a curator of digital publications at the British Library. As part of its Emerging Formats project, she works to preserve the new and often experimental ways in which people are telling stories across the web and other digital platforms, preserving the creations that are at risk of being left behind as technology races forward.”
The Verge / Victoria Song
Humane’s AI Pin seems to be forgetting what makes a good wearable →“Before you disrupt everything, you have to deeply consider the current cultural norms or no one will wear your wearable…Let me put it this way: In public settings, would you rather yell at your chest to talk to a voice assistant or pull out your phone to look up the information yourself?”
The Wall Street Journal / Christopher Mims
How social media is turning into old-fashioned broadcast media →“The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV. Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course — after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.”
The New York Times / Jenny Vrentas and Kevin Draper
Charissa Thompson’s admitting she fabricated reports has put sideline reporters in a bind →“Andrea Kremer, an Emmy-winning sports journalist who has both reported from the sidelines of N.F.L. games and called them from the broadcast booth, described the damage from Thompson’s comments as ‘profound.’ In particular, she said, it harmed those working as sideline reporters, who are relied on to provide news on things like injury updates during the game and to elicit instant reaction from coaches and players.”
The New York Times / Emmanuel Morgan
Garbage Day / Ryan Broderick
TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden →“According to screenshots and cached Google data, I’m comfortable saying there were likely around 300-500 unique videos about the letter and, once again, around 25% of what I personally saw were bots or automated accounts or duets. And the largest comment section I’ve seen underneath one of these videos had around 5,000 comments. Now, let’s do this again. Would you, in 2023, give a shit if there were around 5,000 people being offensive on the internet?”
The New York Times / Kate Dwyer
Jezebel, the oral history: “There was this riotous sense of fun” →Jia Tolentino: “Somewhere toward the end of my time there, the readership data showed that it was essentially half men and women reading the site. That was one of the things that shaped my writing in a lot of ways — that you could write about women’s lives in a way that would be of broad general interest, and would be about the condition of being human.”