Hours after successfully campaigning to have a woman —Jane Austen —featured on a new British banknote, Caroline Criado-Perez was bombarded with rape and death threats. The vast majority came via Twitter. At the peak of the frenzy last month, the 29-year-old freelance journalist was receiving about a threat every minute. Some of the politer messages […]
Na Imprensa Internacional
BECAUSE Mike McAlary started reporting on cops for the New York tabloids in 1985, Nora Ephron’s play “Lucky Guy,”which recently completed its run, featured word processors on the newsroom desks rather than typewriters. Too bad. We in the ensemble would have loved to pound on bulky desk-crowding typewriters for the sound alone. Well, I would […]
Nate Silver has turned number-crunching into a glamour profession. Nate Silver was down on Anthony Weiner’s chances long before the selfie-snapping former congressman’s campaign to become New York’s mayor had to contend with the publication of a second wave of X-rated messages and priapic self-portraits. “I think his favourables were low enough that he had […]
Editor’s note: There’s a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media —but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they […]
Over the weekend, I found myself at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine, Texas. It was my first trip to the gathering, even as a native north Texan, but I must say it was an extremely valuable and exciting place for any nonfiction storyteller to be. Speakers and authors came from all over […]
If Facebook were a car, it just went from zero to 60 mph in six seconds. The social networking company said Wednesday that it had revved up its mobile advertising from virtually nothing a year ago to 41 percent of its total ad revenue of $1.6 billion in the second quarter. “Soon we’ll have […]
Conversations have been abuzz lately online and offline about the role of Big Data and data science in a variety of fields — from the pharmaceutical industry to the news industry. Data is all around us and it will only become more pervasive as digital technologies advance and our daily lives become centered on […]
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, formally inaugurated a new political party bearing the name of his antisecrecy organization on Thursday and declared his own unorthodox candidacy for a seat in the Australian Senate in national elections to be held later this year. In a telephone interview, Mr. Assange said he had every confidence […]
Relegating online comments to the bottom of an article seems so old-school newspapery in retrospect, doesn’t it? Long the default for many news organizations online, the message is that reader comments are an afterthought, a footnote, less important than the story itself. Gawker Media wants to change that perception. Founder Nick Denton has been […]
Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices to website editors around the country that say things like, “Report on the new provincial budget tomorrow, but do not feature it on the front page, make no comparisons to earlier budgets, list no links, and say nothing that might raise questions”; “Downplay […]
Over the past decade, academic research has increasingly examined issues of multitasking and distraction as people try to squeeze more activities into their busy lives. Prior to the Internet age, some cognition science research focused on how behavior might be better understood, improved and made more efficient in business, hospital or other high-pressure settings. But […]
Around 2008, I began to notice an interesting fact: Google Books was reshaping the way I did research. I was on sabbatical and had more time than usual to pursue various projects. Like most historians, I went to libraries and archives in search of paper evidence, but I also delighted in digital discoveries, happily downloading […]
Wednesday the American Journalism Review broke the news that it’s going to quit publishing its print magazine. Starting this fall (the date isn’t specified), all AJR content will only be available online, and they’ll introduce this change alongside a major website overhaul. The story making the announcement explains that University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College […]
During her first year as chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer made big strides in changing the company’s culture. But reversing Yahoo’s declining revenue is turning out to be a far stiffer challenge. The difficulty was underscored Tuesday, when Yahoo reported that revenue from the company’s two primary moneymakers — display and search advertising — […]
In the furor following the leak last week of top secret National Security Agency documents, tough questions about national security and personal privacy often got drowned out by the cacophony of messenger-shooting. Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old Booz Allen employee who handed over the data was a hero, martyr, villain, traitor or perhaps a paranoid child of techno-libertarianism. His […]
MY colleague Thomas Friedman’s levelheaded take on the National Security Agency eavesdropping uproar needs no boost from me. His column soared to the top of the “most e-mailed” list and gathered a huge and mostly thoughtful galaxy of reader comments. Judging from the latest opinion polling, it also reflected the prevailing mood of the electorate. It reflected mine. […]
We’ve known for a long time that big companies can stalk our every digital move and customize our every Web interaction. Our movements are tracked by credit cards, Gmail, and tollbooths, and we haven’t seemed to care all that much. That is, until this week’s news of government eavesdropping, with the help of these very […]
Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of […]
Shortly after Salon’s biographical sketch on Laura Poitras went live, the award-winning documentary filmmaker agreed to a phone interview, her first since she helped reveal the scope of the National Security Agency’s digital surveillance. “I feel a certain need to be cautious about not wanting to do the work for the government,” she told Salon, but agreed […]
The way South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tells it, what her state needs is more tax cuts and what it doesn’t need is the “public policy nightmare and fiscal disaster that is ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.” But to Charleston Post and Courier reporter Doug Pardue, who has spent more than 15 years reporting in South Carolina, […]