Rest in peace.
A week ago, New York Times chief television critic Alessandra Stanley landed in hot water after a much-maligned profile of the television producer Shonda Rhimes. In a statement, Stanley deflected criticism of the piece, alluding to the reactionary tendencies of the internet — specifically Twitter. Here's the Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan:
I have asked Ms. Stanley for further comment (she has said that her intentions were misunderstood, and seemed to blame the Twitter culture for that, with a reference to 140 characters)
Stanley's woes are part of a difficult history between the paper of record and the 140-character platform. While many Times reporters were early and influential adopters of the social network, the company has struggled getting all of its staffers on board with "new media," as the company's much-discussed innovation report revealed. The report noted numerous discrepancies with regard to the paper's social strategies:
Readers are finding and engaging with our journalism in vastly different ways. More readers expect us to find them on Twitter and Facebook, and through email and phone alerts. But the newsroom pays less attention to these platforms, even though they offer our main, and sometimes only, channels to tens of millions of readers. Here, too, we are lagging our competitors.
That language is from May — but what does the Times' Twitter footprint look like today? To check, I conducted a very unscientific exploration into the editorial staff Twitter accounts. While the Times employs well over 1,000 editorial staffers, the company keeps an official Twitter list of "NYT Journalists," comprised of the 690 current (and some former) staffers who have Twitter accounts.
There are dozens of heavily followed, high-volume NYT staffers with excellent Twitter accounts. There are also plenty of ghost towns, monuments to the best intentions of the papers' less tech-savvy staffers. And there are eggs. Oh, the eggs! A graveyard of egg profiles.
In rounding up this tour of the Times' Twitter Graveyard I had a few, very fast and very loose rules for consideration. You are eligible for the graveyard if:
- You haven't tweeted in a little over two months.
- You have fewer than 20 total tweets.
- You have an egg as your profile picture. No egg was spared.
Let's go for a walk!
Executive Editor
Senior Editor for Strategy
View Entire List ›
And it may just ruin your workday.
SnapMeNow, a web app, uses your computer's camera to take a picture that you can send to up to 100 recipients via a hyperlink. That image self-destructs Snapchat-style after an interval of up to 10 seconds. When a user receives your Snap, they see a little clock filling up next to the picture, and when the picture disappears, they receive a simple message telling them that the Snap is no more.
Of course, a Snap on your desktop is a lot easier to capture, save, and manipulate than a Snap on your iPhone (as above), so, before the parade of ephemeral nudes, bong-rips, and occult homicides begins, remember: Snapper beware!
LINK: SnapMeNow
And it may just ruin your workday.
SnapMeNow, a web app, uses your computer's camera to take a picture that you can send to up to 100 recipients via a hyperlink. That image self-destructs Snapchat-style after an interval of up to 10 seconds. When a user receives your Snap, they see a little clock filling up next to the picture, and when the picture disappears, they receive a simple message telling them that the Snap is no more.
Of course, a Snap on your desktop is a lot easier to capture, save, and manipulate than a Snap on your iPhone (as above), so, before the parade of ephemeral nudes, bong-rips, and occult homicides begins, remember: Snapper beware!
LINK: SnapMeNow
As a store owner, you understand the importance of beautiful design across your online presence. You know that great design leads to more sales and more revenue.
However, if you are like most online store owners you probably don’t have a design background and years of experience with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.
So how can you create beautiful marketing content that drives more conversions and revenue?
When we were putting together our guide on how to get better marketing results with beautiful design, we spent countless hours searching the web for tools, templates & resources that could help people like you create beautiful marketing content.
In this post, we wanted to share some of our favorites with you in order to help you create beautiful marketing content that drives results for your store.
Read More
As a store owner, you understand the importance of beautiful design across your online presence. You know that great design leads to more sales and more revenue.
However, if you are like most online store owners you probably don’t have a design background and years of experience with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.
So how can you create beautiful marketing content that drives more conversions and revenue?
When we were putting together our guide on how to get better marketing results with beautiful design, we spent countless hours searching the web for tools, templates & resources that could help people like you create beautiful marketing content.
In this post, we wanted to share some of our favorites with you in order to help you create beautiful marketing content that drives results for your store.
Read More
“Police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you,” said a warning Grindr sent to Egyptian users on Thursday.
Grindr
Grindr
Six men were sentenced by an Egyptian court on Thursday to two years in prison with labor for allegedly advertising their apartment on Facebook for men to have sex with each other for a fee of $200 per night, reports the state-owned Egyptian news site Ahram Online based on information from "a judicial source."
This case may be the first case in which Egyptians have been caught on social media for charges of homosexuality, something human rights activists have warned could become widespread as the Egyptian government widens its crackdown on LGBT rights. Since October, around 80 people are known to have been arrested on allegations of homosexuality, including eight men who are due in court on Saturday for appearing in a video that shows a couple of men exchanging rings that made headlines throughout the Arabic press as a "gay wedding."
As the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has stepped up these arrests, human rights activists had speculated that they were targeting people through social media, and Egyptian officials told BuzzFeed News that Facebook groups for gay Egyptians are being closely monitored. But there was little solid information about how social media had been used to entrap LGBT people.
The concern about entrapment over social media prompted the hookup app Grindr to begin sending a message to all Egyptian users this week warning that police officers may be "posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you." Grindr was under criticism this summer for a design feature that might allow the network to be used to pinpoint the exact location of users. The English-language Egyptian publication the Cairo Scene published a story on September 2 that said Grindr was a primary tool for these schemes, but the story included no evidence of documented cases and human rights activists in Egypt say they know of no confirmed cases of entrapment through Grindr or other social media applications designed exclusively for mobile phones.
A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request from BuzzFeed News on whether it planned to warn users about the risk of entrapment in Egypt or other countries where LGBT people have been targeted through the network.
View Entire List ›
“Police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you,” said a warning Grindr sent to Egyptian users on Thursday.
Grindr
Grindr
Six men were sentenced by an Egyptian court on Thursday to two years in prison with labor for allegedly advertising their apartment on Facebook for men to have sex with each other for a fee of $200 per night, reports the state-owned Egyptian news site Ahram Online based on information from "a judicial source."
This case may be the first case in which Egyptians have been caught on social media for charges of homosexuality, something human rights activists have warned could become widespread as the Egyptian government widens its crackdown on LGBT rights. Since October, around 80 people are known to have been arrested on allegations of homosexuality, including eight men who are due in court on Saturday for appearing in a video that shows a couple of men exchanging rings that made headlines throughout the Arabic press as a "gay wedding."
As the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has stepped up these arrests, human rights activists had speculated that they were targeting people through social media, and Egyptian officials told BuzzFeed News that Facebook groups for gay Egyptians are being closely monitored. But there was little solid information about how social media had been used to entrap LGBT people.
The concern about entrapment over social media prompted the hookup app Grindr to begin sending a message to all Egyptian users this week warning that police officers may be "posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you." Grindr was under criticism this summer for a design feature that might allow the network to be used to pinpoint the exact location of users. The English-language Egyptian publication the Cairo Scene published a story on September 2 that said Grindr was a primary tool for these schemes, but the story included no evidence of documented cases and human rights activists in Egypt say they know of no confirmed cases of entrapment through Grindr or other social media applications designed exclusively for mobile phones.
A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request from BuzzFeed News on whether it planned to warn users about the risk of entrapment in Egypt or other countries where LGBT people have been targeted through the network.
View Entire List ›
In spite of ongoing protests against what was introduced as a temporary summer fare cut, Uber announced the less-than-taxi UberX fares are here to stay.
Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters
This morning Uber announced that its 20% discount on UberX fares that the company introduced in July as a "limited time" offer will continue all year round.
The announcement comes just a week after a group of Uber drivers organized a series of protests and work strikes demanding the company repeal the price cut that makes UberX rides cheaper than taxis. According to the company's blog post, an UberX trip from Williamsburg to the East Village would cost $15 — a dollar less than it should cost to take a standard taxi. During protests last week, Uber NYC general manager Josh Mohrer told BuzzFeed News that the company was still evaluating the data to decide whether the summer price cuts would make sense for the fall.
It appears the data has spoken.
Though the decision seems to validate the perception — as drivers expressed during both protests and organizational meetings — that the company is less concerned with drivers' needs and more interested in satisfying riders (and consequently raking in revenue), the organizers have no plans to switch companies and will instead continue their fight to protect their rights as "partners," several organizers told BuzzFeed News in previous interviews.
BuzzFeed News reached out to the organizers for comment and will update with their comments.
Contact the author of this post at johana.bhuiyan@buzzfeed.com
In spite of ongoing protests against what was introduced as a temporary summer fare cut, Uber announced the less-than-taxi UberX fares are here to stay.
Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters
This morning Uber announced that its 20% discount on UberX fares that the company introduced in July as a "limited time" offer will continue all year round.
The announcement comes just a week after a group of Uber drivers organized a series of protests and work strikes demanding the company repeal the price cut that makes UberX rides cheaper than taxis. According to the company's blog post, an UberX trip from Williamsburg to the East Village would cost $15 — a dollar less than it should cost to take a standard taxi. During protests last week, Uber NYC general manager Josh Mohrer told BuzzFeed News that the company was still evaluating the data to decide whether the summer price cuts would make sense for the fall.
It appears the data has spoken.
Though the decision seems to validate the perception — as drivers expressed during both protests and organizational meetings — that the company is less concerned with drivers' needs and more interested in satisfying riders (and consequently raking in revenue), the organizers have no plans to switch companies and will instead continue their fight to protect their rights as "partners," several organizers told BuzzFeed News in previous interviews.
BuzzFeed News reached out to the organizers for comment and will update with their comments.
Contact the author of this post at johana.bhuiyan@buzzfeed.com
We texted people using only the predictive text suggested words.
One of the new features in iOS8 for iPhone is predictive text. This means when you're typing, it suggest what word it thinks you're gonna say next.
If you find this annoying (like me), you can get rid of it.
Go to the Settings app --> General --> Keyboard --> then turn off the "predictive text" option.
"The Government/Get My Hair Done"
View Entire List ›