Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted tars the whole startup business with the brush of his experience at HubSpot. One key element is to show that the rest of Silicon Valley is also corrupt with a recitation of all the recent sins of tech companies. Whenever you see a list like this, you should be skeptical. Here’s a paragraph…
I’m all for satire, especially on social media. But when traditional media get involved, they must set some boundaries. That’s what didn’t happen when Esquire published an article by a Jeff Jarvis impersonator. First, here are the facts about what happened. Jeff Jarvis is a media critic, author, blogger, and professor at the CUNY Graduate School…
I vastly enjoyed Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, the memoir of New Yorker copyeditor Mary Norris. The pas de deux that the writer and editor dance together is lively and invigorating, because both want nothing more than for the writing to be perfect. But it’s a fraught affair, because your partner’s job is…
Based on the material I’m reading and editing, a lot of people have forgotten how to use evidence in their writing. They make unsupported statements that the reader is just supposed to swallow whole. If you want to persuade me that your assessment is valid, your prediction is accurate, or your advice is effective, here are five ways…
My Boston Globe arrived yesterday with a second, scary front page, dated April 9, 2017, featuring stories from a future Trump presidency. (It’s actually the front of the Sunday op-ed section, an illustration for an op-ed article called “The GOP Must Stop Trump.”) Donald Trump, predictably, responded by calling the paper “stupid.” Having written pretend stories about…
News is a matter of selection — we can read only what writers and editors choose to publish. But regardless of what outlet you’re reading, from the most massive newsgathering operation to the smallest blogger, you’re not getting the whole story. Why? Because of unspoken biases that we all accept. I want to be clear here:…
To comprehend the absurdity of 2016, just think how it would appear to an observer from 2000. I remember 2000 — it was an intense five years into my tenure as an analyst. We could see where things were going. The Web had vanquished walled gardens like AOL and was about to become universal. People were…
Lies masquerading as truth on the Web are a real problem. Now Sam Mallikarjunan is going to try to solve the problem. Mallikarjunan and his partner Andrei Oprisan are creating a browser extension called Verytas that changes the background color of stories you read: green for true, red for false, purple for satire. How does Verytas know? The…
Politicians (and other people) often can’t or won’t answer a question. How they respond says a lot about who they are. If they were honest, they would say “I won’t answer that” and then say why. But instead, they just take the airtime and answer some other question they’d rather talk about. For example, Mediaite recently…