One of new media’s bigger coups over old seems not to be lasting: Gawker notes that only a few months after abandoning the New Yorker for the start-up Genius, music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is already backing away from his full-time commitment to “the annotation website that sticks bad jokes next to your favorite rap lyrics.”
First Look Media offers us its code—if you wanted help redacting documents or getting around gag orders, look no further.
Gawker writers discuss which way they’ll vote on unionizing as part of Writers Guild of America, in the comments section (“We like to do these things out in the open.”) But apparently the whole question is causing “a galactic amount of acrimony” among staff.
If you worry that the 2016 presidential campaign may become a fact-free he-said-she-said, Buzzfeed has come up with an admittedly labor-intensive solution—a dedicated in-house “independent research organization” to dig up dirt on the candidates.
Slate’s Amanda Hess explains her goodbye to all that “ladyblogging.” She notes a general “thirst for opinion but dearth of reporting on female concerns” online, so that the “ladyblogger beat is propelled by opinions and opinions on opinions.” “That makes a ladyblog an interesting place for a writer to hone her rhetorical tools,” Hess continues. “But once they get sharp enough, she may begin to fantasize about impaling herself with them.”
