Tag: twitter
How Burger King Generates Buzz on a Budget
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 […]
The Harsh Realities of Being a Woman in the Music Industry
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, […]
Covering the ‘Black Twitter’ Beat
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 […]
The Creator of #YesAllWomen, One Year Later
Not everything about #YesAllWomen makes me proud. I am particularly bitter, and disappointed, that it did not live up to its name and its promise. As a marginalized woman, even I could not provide a safe space for more than a few hours for others like me. But for those few hours, I loved what […]
Six Years of Longreads
April 17 marks six years since we started this community—growing from just a few readers to over a million, with people now sharing stories in dozens of different languages from hundreds of publishers. Christian Jørgensen put together a really nice Storify timeline of how the Twitter hashtag #longreads first evolved. This community also has grown […]
‘Garbage Comments Cheapen My Work’: Journalist Eva Holland on Freelancing and Commenters
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 […]
What Happens When Public Complaining Becomes a Career Aspiration
The Op-Ed Economy meanwhile means that whatever the event, we’re treated to what is essentially “commentariat tryouts.” Twitter was already the free-floating comment section ready to wrap itself around whatever the topic is. But once CNN began reading tweets aloud on-air sometime around the first election of President Obama, and op-ed columns spread across every […]
Twitter and the Self-Censorship Society
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 […]
The Anatomy of a Tweet
“For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, ‘withheld_copyright,’ if set to ‘true,’ lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The ‘withheld_in_countries’ field can provide a list of […]
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Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars: Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers […]
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“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some […]
