Hi, we reach 13 million readers but we can’t afford to pay you freelance types for your work. Can we have 1,200 words for free?
Meanwhile, Marco Arment’s The Magazine has just 25,000 subscribers who pay $1.99 a month, allowing him to pay writers $800 per article.
(via chartier)
The second this-makes-the-Atlantic-look-really-bad thing to happen this year.
So this is where I was profoundly foolish. I told them about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. And in doing so, Aaron would explain to me later (and reporters would confirm), I made everything worse. This is what I must live with.Journalist, and close friend of Aaron Swartz, Quinn Norton • Discussing her role in the case, during a long article she wrote for The Atlantic. Read the whole thing. This one quote does not do the story justice. But we recommend starting with the editor’s note from Alexis Madrigal. It’s a tough one to read, and shows how the federal government can break people down in federal cases.
digg:
SPONSORED: The Taliban Is A Vibrant And Thriving Political Movement: Full Story
Honestly, The Onion will never let us down.
Ever.
And The Onion wins everything.
We screwed up. It shouldn’t have taken a wave of constructive criticism — but it has — to alert us that we’ve made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out. We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge—sheepishly—that that we got ahead of ourselves. We are sorry, and we’re working very hard to put things right.
If you remember correctly, the ad was something of a spectacle. Fun to look at though.
We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.The Atlantic • In a statement regarding their controversial scientology ad, which we wrote about earlier in clearly positive terms. Perhaps not the best way to make a good impression.
InstaSnopes: Sorting the Real Sandy Photos from the Fakes (also, follow Is Twitter Wrong?)
Have been saying for years that you could create a hugely popular news publication that was like Snopes, but faster. This article? Proof.
Apple’s maps are bad. Even Tim Cook knows this and apologized for them. Google’s maps are good, thanks to years of work, massive computing resources, and thousands of people handcorrecting map data.
But there are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. There’s a third company that’s invested billions of dollars, employs thousands of mapmakers, and even drives around its own version of Google’s mythic “Street View” cars.
That company is Nokia, the still-giant but oft-maligned Finnish mobile phone maker, which acquired the geographic information systems company Navteq back in 2007 for $8 billion. That’s only a bit less than the Nokia’s current market value of a bit less than $10 billion, which is down 93 percent since 2007. This might be bad news for the company’s shareholders, but if a certain tech giant with a massive interest in mobile content (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) were looking to catch up or stay even with Google, the company’s Location & Commerce unit might look like a nice acquisition they could get on the cheap (especially given that the segment lost 1.5 billion euros last year). Microsoft and Yahoo are already thick as thieves with Nokia’s mapping crew, but Apple is the company that needs the most help.
Apple has bad maps. Nokia has maps that are better than Google’s, according to Madrigal, though nobody thinks about it. Apple has enough money that an $8 billion buy wouldn’t even make them blink. So, should they?
Fear of a Black President
As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.
Read: The Atlantic
Three lines that really grab you in this piece:
1) “The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled.”
2) ”The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on everything. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”
3) Regarding Shirley Sherrod: “In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. ‘What will my babies say?,’ Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. ‘How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?’”
Historically, the police in the United States have employed a standard response when confronted with armed suspects in schools, malls, banks, post offices, and other heavily populated buildings. The first officers to arrive never rushed in. Instead they set up perimeters and controlled the scene. They tried to contain the suspects, and called in a rigorously trained Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. The SWAT team arrived, assumed positions to keep the suspects pinned down, and negotiated with them until they surrendered. SWAT teams stormed buildings only when necessary to save lives, such as when hostages were being executed one by one.
Today, however, police officers are setting aside traditional tactics. They are being taught to enter a building if they are the first to arrive at the scene, to chase the gunman, and to kill or disable him as quickly as possible. This sweeping change in police tactics—variously called rapid-response, emergency-response, or first-responder—is a direct result of the shootings that occurred at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20 of last year, which was the worst in a series of shootings in schools across the United States in the 1990s.
You have to wonder how much this has held up since then, and how much this sort of training helped tonight. (ht pbump)
Redditors are collecting the blacklisted sites at a freshly minted subreddit, r/BannedDomains. The list so far includes at least five: BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com,TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost.
Redditors are prevented from submitting links to any of the above sites. Instead, they’re greeted with the following message: “this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.”
There’s a bit of backstory here: Jared Keller, a social media editor for The Atlantic, got banned from Reddit a couple months back after heavy posting of Atlantic links, something the community-oriented network frowns upon, but is very tempting due to the high amount of traffic it drives. But why prevent people from even submitting links from such big sites? Well, a Reddit technical staffer Jason Harvey claims that these actions were taken as an absolute last resort.
UPDATE: The bans are temporary, according to Reddit staffer Erik “hueypriest” Martin. (ht Brian Ries)
McArdle, who is currently on book leave, has blogged about business and economics for the Atlantic since 2007. In August, she will start as special correspondent on economics, business, and public policy at Newsweek/Daily Beast, based out of their Washington, D.C., bureau.
McArdle joins Newsweek/Daily Beast as it slowly but surely continues to expand its roster of prominent bloggers — including, most recently, conservative columnist David Frum, who joined in January — and as the website has seen its highest traffic numbers since launching in 2008 (it received 12.7 million unique visitors in May, according to internal data.)
This is the second big-time blogger the company has poached from The Atlantic — the first was Andrew Sullivan, who has written a number of cover stories for the magazine, most infamously this one. In The Atlantic’s defense, they’re also seeing some record traffic numbers and scoring some big hires.
Seriously, What’s So Great About Corgis?
Head: Not as beautiful as a weimaraner, nor as perfect as a labrador retriever, nor as adorable and hypo-allergenically fluffy as a cockapoo, the corgi face is reminiscent of your bawdy uncle who farts a lot and one time took all your allowance money in a game of poker, except then he left it for you under your pillow where you found it only after crying for hours over the loss of your hard-earned savings when he had to get out of town quick-like. Point being: A corgi is questionable, even if its heart is good, and a corgi would sell you down the river if it had to, smiling with cocked head and gleaming brown eyes. Unfortunately, you can’t hate the corgi, even when the corgi is scamming you hardcore.
Body: A corgi is not svelte. A corgi is not even, perhaps, in admirable shape. A corgi has a long, weird body, topped with that uncle-like head. Its chest puffs out, like a small man who’s worked out too aggressively on his pecs and forsaken his lower half. When a corgi is running, a corgi’s belly often hefts to and fro, ungainly. This is amusing, but is it cause for reverence, or corgi-worship? We think not. Further: A corgi’s low stature was to keep it from getting kicked by cows it herded, a metaphor with some deep Internet ramifications, we think—they performed their duties “by nipping at the heels.”
Legs: Oh, lord, this is where things get really messed up. The legs… Why are they so little, like tiny stumps, like the bound feet of women in a less empowered society, like something one could barely walk on, much less rely upon to break into a joyous, slobbery trot? Why are we promoting, even celebrating, the apparent deformities of these dogs!? This is a kind of fetishism! Internet, you are sick.
Read more. [Image: @benjysarlin]
Obviously, Jen Doll hates the Internet.
Everything about this is wrong. Corgis are great. I’m canceling my subscription to this dumb magazine.