Media
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Gladwell Skewers Free
“In the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, ‘has so far failed to make any money for…
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Will the Suckers Get Their Money Back?
Yesterday, we blogged a story about a porn app in the Apple iTunes Store, and noted that it was a pretty crappy app. Well, it’s not even an app anymore. Apple yanked it, claiming that “the developer of this application…
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Random Media Notes
Fox News attacks ABC for ‘unprecedented’ access to a U.S. president. Apparently they don’t remember the last eight years. Rules of engagement for journalists on Twitter. WSJ publisher calls Google a “digital vampire.” (via Mediabistro) Facebook tries to be Twitter.…
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Getting Everyone All Better
If you only read one article on health care this year, consider making it the same one as everyone else: Atul Gawande’s “The Cost Conundrum.” Gawande is great on paradoxes, mysteries and ethical conundrums in the practice of medicine, and…
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Julia Solis: The Art Of Ruins
Years ago, I attended on a whim a packed book release party at City Lights for New York Underground by Julia Solis. I stood there, crammed in and dangling off a staircase, as a tall, crimson-haired woman took to the…
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Iran’s Twitter revolution goes global
It’s been amazing to watch it spread. “As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media…
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Why we need newspapers: They stand against tyranny
In the 1960s and 70s, Central and South America were rife with dictatorships which used secret police, the military, right-wing death squads and tight control of the media to quash dissent and keep power. One of the most egregious of…
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Caleb Crain Makes His Blog a Book
I’ll confess that I’d never heard of the wonderful blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything until it made an appearance in book form. Yesterday I saw Levi Stahl’s post on Conversational Reading about the book that its author, Caleb Crain, made…
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Harvard Study ‘Punctures Twitter Hype’
That’s the claim of a BBC News article which quotes the study’s lead researcher, Bill Heil, as follows: “Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends,” and “it looks like a few people are creating content…
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Newspapers dying? Maybe it’s just the cities they mythologized
An interview on New American Media with writer Richard Rodriguez has a fascinating take on what’s happening to American newspapers. Using the famously provincial San Francisco Chronicle as an example, Rodriguez says, “I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so…
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Cynical-C, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Haters
As a journalist of minor note, my articles sometimes appear on websites that actually get traffic. Nowadays, those websites often allow comments. And those comments remind me why there ought to be no internet. There’s a reason why human expression…