“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.” ― Alfred Lord Tennyson Tennyson perfectly captured my state of mind last night. … Continue reading Algorithmic discovery of music lacks emotional appeal
A very long time ago, I met David Porter, and we talked about music and its future. We talked about streaming and the romance of mixtapes. I wrote about his startup, 8tracks. If it was a great and clever idea, from an entrepreneur who loved music and its nuances. David is one of the good … Continue reading No more 8tracks
Earlier this week, the New York Post reported that the cover of the July 29th issue of Time magazine, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission to the moon, is “brought to you by Jimmy Dean” and features a front cover flap with “an ad on its underside ‘celebrating 50 years of quality sausage.’” The decades have certainly been kinder to sausage than they have to magazines. This is just the latest indignity to be suffered by a former property of Time Inc., which itself has been dismantled and sold off like pieces of scrap metal to other publishers, who are now primarily in the business of strip-mining for consumer profile data.
Earlier this morning, while drinking my morning tea and sifting through my morning reads (on Feedbin, if you want to know), I came across a brilliant piece of journalism from Jennings Brown, a writer for Gizmodo. He unmasked a fabulist and fake doctor who passed himself off as a scientist and an expert psychiatrist on sexual issues. It is a smart piece of old fashioned reporting, which included double checking the claims, picking up the phone, having a conversation or four, and yes, using Google and other databases. It is what a reporter is supposed to do. Kudos to Brown and the editors at Gizmodo. Continue reading “Why a Fake Doctor’s Rise is Really a Media Fail”
There were too many of us doing the same job. When I started reporting in 2006 on fresh new companies like Facebook and Twitter, it was a novelty beat that sometimes came across to my senior colleagues as a gimmick. Five years later, there were so many reporters covering Mark Zuckerberg’s every move that we … Continue reading How digital media killed itself
