[Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana at ProPublica] The deeply tragic stories of how abortion bans lead to preventable deaths continue. "The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in p … | Continue reading
[Nilay Patel at The Verge] This is, uh, the opposite of this year's trend of a bunch of newspapers refusing to endorse anyone: "Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening c … | Continue reading
[Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented] "A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a seri … | Continue reading
[Heather Bryant] A characteristically sharp piece on the Washington Post's spiked Presidential endorsement and ensuing fallout from Heather Bryant: "Good journalism is not unique to the Washington Post. Or the L.A. Times. Or the New York Times. Or any other specific organization. … | Continue reading
[Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee at The Pudding] "To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies." What an incredible use of the web as a platform. These stories - even … | Continue reading
[Anne Helen Petersen] "The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares … | Continue reading
[Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users] An important announcement from Bluesky: "We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat o … | Continue reading
Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday: I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were things like … | Continue reading
[Jon Hicks] I love this sort of thing: "Usborne's The Detective’s Handbook and The Guide to the Supernatural captivated my imagination in equal measure. This site is an imagined combination of those books – an engaging thematic prompt for me to overcome the quandary of 'what to d … | Continue reading
[Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism] File this under "good, but I can't believe this wasn't already banned": "Sweeping changes to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines aimed at cleaning up the polluted, confusing world of online product reviews went into effect on Monday, mean … | Continue reading
[Joseph Cox at 404 Media] Without needing a warrant, police can track ordinary peoples' smartphone locations - including people who travel out of state to get abortion procedures. The implications are troubling: "“Warrantless law enforcement access to digital information related … | Continue reading
[Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson and Byron Manley at CNN] "More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign … | Continue reading
[Timothy Snyder] Timothy Snyder on the seriousness of the Trump-Vance deportation plans and their implications: "Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation … | Continue reading
[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press] "Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitte … | Continue reading
As regular readers know, I care a lot about growing the open social web: the rapidly-growing decentralized network of interoperable social platforms that includes Mastodon, Threads, Ghost, Flipboard, and many other platforms, both emerging and established. This is for a few reaso … | Continue reading
[Hannah Devlin, Tom Burgis, David Pegg and Jason Wilson at The Guardian] Quite a disturbing new startup coming to light in The Guardian: “The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has … | Continue reading
[Kirsten Eddy at Pew Research Center] The lede is a little buried here behind some pretty shocking top-line stats: "Today, 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites. This is ne … | Continue reading
[Cory Doctorow] Cory Doctorow discusses how he reads writers like Molly White: "This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power." I agree. … | Continue reading
[Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica] "For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Ye … | Continue reading
[Dries Buytaert] "I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi." Lovely! The key seems to be a Voltaic 50-watt panel and 18 amp-hour battery, which run to around $300 in total. That's not a lot of money fo … | Continue reading
[James Salanga at The Objective] "Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalis … | Continue reading
I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web. Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsro … | Continue reading
[Mathew Ingram] Mathew Ingram's overview of the WordPress drama continues to be updated with new information. The hole just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. As he says: it's a mess. "It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as protecting WordPress, and forcing a no … | Continue reading
[Anil Dash] Anil Dash makes a pertinent observation about the current state of the web: "At the start of this year, I wrote The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again, which began by calling back to the Internet of 2000. In thinking more about it, though, we more closely resemble t … | Continue reading
I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site. How it works Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not a full CMS … | Continue reading
[Wes Davis at The Verge] The feud between Automattic (or more specifically, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine is getting bonkers: "WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder a … | Continue reading
[Julian Fell at Australian ABC News] "Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's AI models." So in effect these robot vacuum … | Continue reading
I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse. Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?” We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then ca … | Continue reading
[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette] "Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook." "A se … | Continue reading
[Charles Duhigg at the New Yorker] "As the tech industry has become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon Valley how to play … | Continue reading
[ John Naughton ] "If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30." Running a blog … | Continue reading
[Karl Bode at TechDirt] "The Harris campaign has remained largely silent on whether Khan will be allowed to stick around. And it remains entirely unclear whether Harris will continue Biden’s support of something that, for once, at least vaguely resembles antitrust reform and a cr … | Continue reading
[Ben Werdmuller on Medium] I find myself returning to this piece I wrote on Medium about building downtime into your work and lifestyle. It's important: Eight years into working in America, I’m still getting used to the macho culture around vacations. I had previously lived in a … | Continue reading
[Bix Frankonis] Bix Frankonis does not agree with my analysis of the Fediverse and the Social Web Foundation. For him, much of the issue relates to appropriation of the "social web" name: "Like many trade groups, this one is named and self-described in a manner deliberately meant … | Continue reading
I was tagged in a fairly critical SocialHub post about the Social Web Foundation launch announcement . I wasn’t in a position to add to the conversation then, but I’ve been thinking about it all week. Before I dive further, a reminder: I am not an employee or founder of th … | Continue reading
[Andrew Schmelyun] Following my piece about reading the news on paper, I came across this post from Anrew Schmelyun: "I recently purchased a dot matrix printer from eBay, and thought it would be a great excuse to have a custom "front page" printed out and ready for me each day. S … | Continue reading
I think there’s more work to be done to explore print as a modern product to support great writing and journalism. Lots has been said about its death — but comparatively little about its potential to live on in new forms. I think print has a lot of life left in it: particularly i … | Continue reading
[Dries Buytaert] "Addressing the Maker-Taker challenge is essential for the long-term sustainability of open source projects. Drupal's approach may provide a constructive solution not just for WordPress, but for other communities facing similar issues." Dries lays out a construct … | Continue reading
[Matt Haughey] "A couple months ago I was hanging out with my aunt, and she mentioned her cable+internet bill was around $250 per month. I thought that was insane and that I should do something about it. She's a 75 year old retiree that watches baseball and the hallmark channel, … | Continue reading
[Bop Spotter] "I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below." As surveillance goes, I'm … | Continue reading
[Molly Lempriere and Simon Evans in CarbonBrief] "Remarkably, the UK’s coal power phaseout – as well as the closure of some of the country’s few remaining blast furnaces at Port Talbot in Wales and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire – will help push overall coal demand in 2024 to its low … | Continue reading
[Rest of World] "Technology has transformed how we spend, study, live, eat — even how we sleep. And for the 6.75 billion people around the world who consider themselves religious, technology is also changing their faith. How people worship, pray, and commune with the divine is tr … | Continue reading
[Tracy Durnell] "Blogs coax out deeper thinking in smaller blocks. A blog gives you the space to explore and nurture ideas over time, perhaps growing so slowly you hardly notice the extent of the evolution of your thoughts till you read something you wrote a few years ago." Every … | Continue reading
We’ve been dealing with some intense family health events since Wednesday night, so I’m running on very little sleep and not updating much over here. I’ll be popping in from time to time, but probably not running on all cylinders for a little while. There’s a lot to say — about W … | Continue reading
[Robin Rendle] "Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”" Yes. Co-signed. Speaking of which ... "ProPublica, the nation’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom, is … | Continue reading
[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab] There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%. But the focus is this: "Search traffic, still dominated by G … | Continue reading
[Paul Bradley Carr] "I’ve worked at (and founded!) my fair share of billionaire-funded publications and I’ve always had a firm rule: You have to be more critical of the people writing the checks (and their cronies) than you are of anyone else. It’s the only way to offset the inhe … | Continue reading
[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation] Dan Kennedy picks up on a detail in Brian Stelter's Atlantic article about troubles at the Washington Post: "The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line." H … | Continue reading