The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Streisand Effect’: Scientology Imploding?

One of the principles of the New Media age is that attempts to suppress the truth tend to backfire, generating greater interest in the hidden truth. The so-called “Streisand Effect” may now be invoked in the wake of Monday’s debacle in which The Atlantic published a ludicrously over-the-top “advertorial” for Scientology and was forced to […]

The Problem With ‘Sponsored Content’: Atlantic Unpublishes Scientology Article

How do you turn pixels into profits? This is an industry-wide issue for journalism in the digital New Media age, and the “sponsored content” approach — selling ads that look like articles — is supposed to be the wave of the future. Well . . . The Atlantic apparently sold space to the Church Creepy Ripoff […]

‘It’s Not About Politics, It’s About News’

That, in seven simple words, is what Ali Akbar has been thinking about for the past month. He and I have had several long conversations about what an effective, innovative New Media operation would look like and, by the end of this month, he plans to start rolling it out at Viral Read. Not much […]

News From the People’s Democratic Republic of 3600 New York Avenue

The paranoid managerial regime now in charge of The Washington Times has announced a successful further liquidation of the kulaks: The Washington Times summoned several staff members to the auditorium this morning. Inside sources say management has laid off approximately 25 employees in a newsroom of 90 . . . Several employees who were not invited to this […]

Memoir, Narcissism and the Problem of the Unreliable First-Person Narrator

In addition to its advice about “Crazy Hot Sex” (“10 Secrets to Intense Action”), the February issue of Cosmo features an interview with an actress you probably never heard of before. Julianne Hough tells Cosmo that when she was studying dance in London as a girl, she “was abused, mentally, physically, everything. . . . […]

Tina Brown’s Mysterious Career: How Much Is That Zeitgeist in the Window?

Cheap easy-to-use digital self-publishing software has made many things obsolete, including overpaid magazine editors who once allegedly had an inerrant instinct for finding The Next New Thing: Audaciously drawing grand (and almost completely unsupportable) conclusions from small things. Carnival barking in print form. Everything’s the Most Important, the Latest, the Best. News You Can Use; Is Your Hair-Dryer […]

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit

Back in the Day: Andrew Breitbart was a guest on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show In April 2011, Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported that Glenn Beck had been accused of using bloggers’ content without attribution: Mandy Nagy, a conservative blogger known online as Liberty Chick, spent untold hours last fall creating a chart […]

Newsroom Management Training Video

“The idea that I could do for a living that which I would do in my free time, for free, is the single greatest thing on the planet.” — Andrew Breitbart, May 2007 “He had so much energy. He was so positive. . . . He was definitely a mentor. He was great to his […]

« go back — keep looking »