Consider the social media editor: Her background and ambitions are journalistic, but because she possesses the very basic people skills required to navigate social networks, she awakens one morning to discover she's become a so-called "Twitter monkey." Read More
A former TechCrunch employee—in the great tradition of many a former TechCrunch employee—is going after the site, asking them on Twitter: "not trying to be a dick but are you still a news site?"
The egregious offense of journalism Lacy offered up for her case? Read More
Entertainment Weekly reports that CBS has ordered a comedy pilot about young gents starting their careers at Groupon. This is all well and good--we'd watch it, if we got a particularly witty email. But we think it's time for MORE tech companies to get television pilots--and we have a few loglines for networks we think could use them! Read More
Facebook, the virtual friend-making machine invented by a socially handicapped Harvard computer whiz*, has published a note teaching journalists how increase their followings.
It is not a primer on the acquisition of friends. In September, Facebook introduced "Subscribe," an option which allows other users to receive only your public updates. You can encourage subscribers to hang on your every word without having to let them into your photo albums, contact information, etc. It's just one of many new Internet-based relationship categories (Gchat sources, Twitter crushes) for which journalists (an historically unpopular race) should be grateful. Read More
Let's blame Mark Zuckerberg for this one: Without Facebook, how would members of the NYPD be able, allegedly, to post derogatory comments about September's West Indian Parade and have the words live on the Internet forever?
“Let them kill each other," wrote someone identifying himself as an officer on a page called "No More West Indian Day Parade Detail," where cops allegedly gathered and used their real names and job titles without bothering with the Internet privacy settings.
"“I say have the parade one more year and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out,” wrote another supposed NYPD employee.
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Yesterday, The New York Post discovered something odd about one of Bloomberg's press secretaries, Mary DeBlase. Mainly, that she didn't exist.
Instead, the young woman who came to try to talk to protesters on Sunday night during OWS' 24-hour drum circle outside the mayor's mansion was an impostor. And we know who she is.
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Poor Salman Rushdie: there seems to be a social networking fatwa against his digital presence. First there was that incident where he tried to claim his Twitter handle, only to find out there was someone already squatting on @salmanrushdie. Humiliated, the Satanic Verses author was forced to claim @salmanrushdie1 until he gained enough support to push out the faker and reign over his rightful tweets.
To add insult to injury, Facebook deactivated his account yesterday, thinking he was an imposter. Then they refused to let him back under the name "Salman Rushdie."
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It's an airport miracle! Jack the Cat, who went missing during baggage handling by American Airlines two months ago, has been found alive.
Search parties were organized via Facebook and American Airlines papered JFK with missing cat fliers; but the chances of finding the cat had started to look slim. “The chances of Jack surviving or being returned readily get minimized each and every day,” one former communications representative for United Airlines told The Observer last week. “It’s a very dangerous place, an airport. Lot of moving parts and moving vehicles and moving machinery.”
And yet somehow Jack managed to avoid them all. Read More
Fox News was the first broadcasting network to rollout the breaking news ticker on 9/11, so it’s not exactly surprising that News Corporation is ahead of the game again. Following The Wall Street Journal’s launch of WSJ Social on Sept. 20, more news organizations will unveil similar ‘Facebook editions’ at Read More
Michael Lewis' math-nerds-on-steroids baseball book Moneyball hits theaters on Friday with a whole bunch of buzz behind it! Mainly, (1) Brad Pitt's an Oscar contender for his performance, but (2) in retrospect the book's legacy and value to the sport of baseball is chronically overvalued and widely misunderstood. Now it has a new kind of buzz: pissed-off women insulted by the idea that they can't enjoy a baseball movie! Read More
The Wall Street Journal announced Sept. 20 the beta launch of WSJ Social, a Facebook news application that allows users to read, share and comment on content within Facebook. “It’s an app that will live on Facebook,” said Daniel Bernard, digital product chief of the Journal’s digital network, at a launch party Sept. 19. Read More
A million pistachio nuts is cool. You know what's really cool? A billion pistachio nuts. Read More
Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, knows how to put on a pair of heels. How did we learn this fascinating tidbit about the spouse of the Minnesota Congresswoman and Republican Presidential candidate? We found it on Facebook courtesy of Bachmann's daughter. Bachmann's staff clearly has some lessons left to learn about the internet. This apparent lack Read More
Miramax, like its frequent interlocutor Deadline, is teaming with Facebook in order to market video-on-demand titles from its back catalog in a burgeoning trend of selling films on Facebook as social experiences. Read More
A million Deadline readers isn't cool. Know what's cool, Nikki Finke? A Farmville manqué. Nikki Finke's Deadline has apparently opened to the public its Facebook game in which players can pretend to be an actor (or actress), director, producer, or (if for some crazy reason they desire this) screenwriter, and try their hands Read More
