Tag: social media

The pros and cons of building one’s brand on Twitter.

How a terrified mother tried — and failed — to be a walking-talking public service announcement.

What does a magazine cover mean in the digital age?

In the last few years, self-publishing and marketing your own books has become increasingly more difficult.

As once-popular Snapchat becomes an increasingly irrelevant platform, Helena Fitzgerald finds beauty in its uselessness.

A new breed of charlatan posts images of their fake opulent lifestyles on Instagram to lure followers into investing in sketchy financial products.

Online harassment gets out of hand constantly. Can prosocial bots help turn the tide of anonymous interactions before people become abusive?

Spending long periods of time reading people argue with one another on the internet can be wearying. So why do we do it?

Instagram poet Collin Andrew Yost got trounced online, but his experience offers a lesson in how to cultivate empathy.

If reporting becomes excessive, it can do more harm than good.

Fahrenthold on how he follows the money, “shows his work,” and solicits leads from Twitter in covering Donald Trump.

An 18-year-old Parisian woman streams her suicide on social media.

What is Facebook *really* about? Surveillance and advertising, not about “the power to build community” as its new mission statement so disingenuously puts it.

Sleek-kitschy idiosyncrasy is all the rage.

Four times a year, lexicographers update and add words to the OED. Katherine Connor Martin helps decide what makes the cut.

Ev Williams admits that the internet is broken and suggests course corrections, apologizing for Twitter’s role in putting Trump in the White House.

Is the app that ate email eating into a whole lot more—like privacy, productivity, and personal time?

Is the social media movement a form of free-spirited nomadism, or a clever selling of the soul to brands?

If the “real” self is inside us, why do we constantly seek to transform our outer surfaces?

Sophie McBain asks what will become of human memory at the age of smartphones, social media, and unlimited storage in the cloud.

There must be few journalistic feats more difficult than getting inside the head of a teenager. But with “13, Right Now,” Washington Post staff writer Jessica Contrera joins the ranks of reporters who have skillfully chronicled the lives of children and teens, including Susan Orlean (read her classic Esquire piece, “The American Man, Age 10”) and more […]

Burger King likes being edgy, Schwan says, and it has proved that it doesn’t mind doing things that might make other brands blush. In August, as the company pushed a new spicy version of its chicken fries—a cult favorite the chain returned to the menu after a flood of social media requests—it tweeted a picture […]

In a new story for Wired, Bijan Stephen looks at how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to organize and fight for change. As Stephen writes, “any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it,” tailoring their goals and tactics to the media of their time. For the nascent Black Lives Matter […]

After 25 years of fighting a losing war on drugs and with a heroin epidemic raging in his home state of Massachusetts, Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello decided to take matters into his own hands. He opened his police station’s doors to any addict seeking help, promising to get them into treatment. Writing for Boston Magazine, Chris Sweeney […]

On Monday, Jessica Hopper (music writer, culture critic, author of the recent and wonderfully titled The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic) asked her Twitter followers a simple question: “Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t “count”?” Needless to say, […]

Asking how am I going to cover Black Twitter is like asking how I’m going to cover American culture. I’m never going to get all of it, but I’m going to pull what I find interesting. —Dexter Thomas, as interviewed by Chava Gourarie in the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times hired Dexter […]

Eva Holland is a journalist based in the Yukon who has written for publications including Pacific Standard and SB Nation. Her latest Longreads Original, “‘It’s Yours’,” explores the life (and maybe death) of an internet commenter community, “the Horde,” that Ta-Nehisi Coates helped foster at The Atlantic. I spoke with her via email about her […]

By the time I had a few thousand followers on Twitter, people began to refer to me as a “public figure.” While mine was a paltry fame compared to literally thousands of cishet white men in the industry, that type of visibility for women is far rarer due to sexism, misogyny, online harassment, the way […]

I don’t know if I care necessarily about other people’s reactions toward opinions. And I’m not even really talking about jokes. I get attacked for opinions. People get attacked for their likes and their dislikes. And mostly they get attacked for their dislikes because to be negative in the Twittersphere is akin to hate speech […]