Information system breaches are bad enough. However, breaches that go undetected prove to be much worse. Take for example Yahoo’s revelation that…
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Are media companies building another house of cards on Snapchat?
SnapChat has convinced media companies like CNN and Yahoo and Vice to be part of its new Discover feature, and they were easy to convince because of SnapChat's 200M-plus millennial audience. But who ultimately benefits from these deals?…
Read MoreKik CEO: “Hey internet are you listening? Messaging has peaked”
It has certainly been an interesting month for messaging apps in the U.S. Around the same time the New York Times penned…
Read MoreSnapchat hiring journalists to become its own publisher
Not content to rely on major brands for its new media exploration section, Snapchat is also planning on making its own according…
Read MoreKik’s new hashtags reveal the potential of a chat network
Kik continues to ship new features for its chatting application. Following on the heels of Promoted Chats and its in-app browser comes the…
Read MoreThe next WeChat is hiding in Canada and eyeing the U.S.
Four years since its launch, Kik is positioning itself as America’s version of WeChat, the messaging behemoth of China. It believes it has the right product (text messaging, the old-fashioned kind) and the right audience (almost half of U.S. youth) to become a proper mobile first platform.…
Read MoreNew York Times invests in Dutch “iTunes for news” company
Blendle, a Dutch startup that sells access to articles from media outlets in the Netherlands and elsewhere on a per-article basis, has closed a $3.8M Series A funding round led by the New York Times and German media giant Axel Springer…
Read MoreNews Deeply adds another topic-specific site to its network by launching Ebola Deeply
News Deeply, a network of topic-specific sites founded by former ABC News foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian, has just launched its latest addition: Ebola Deeply, a site dedicated to coverage of the disease and its impact on society…
Read MoreNYT asks readers to help identify print ads, using a platform for crowdsourcing called Hive
The New York Times' research and development lab has launched a new project asking readers for help in identifying old advertisements from its print archive -- and the project is the first to be built on a new open-source platform for crowdsourcing called Hive…
Read MoreSnapchat reportedly plans to become a mobile platform, much like China’s WeChat
A recent report says Snapchat wants to become a hub for other services. We can look to another messaging beast -- WeChat -- for an idea of what that might look like.…
Read MoreBuzzFeed’s choice of publisher says a lot about how the site looks at media
BuzzFeed's new publisher is not a veteran media executive or an MBA with a business background, but someone who specializes in looking at how data can influence the way that media is created and shared -- a crucial skill for the current media economy…
Read MoreA Washington Post magazine-style Kindle app sounds like a win for the paper and Amazon
Businessweek is reporting that a magazine-style Washington Post app will come pre-loaded on the new Kindle Fire, a deal that has potential benefits for both the struggling newspaper and for its owner's other company -- Amazon…
Read MoreNick Denton admits he was overly ambitious with Kinja, but insists the platform is on track
Even as it announces a move to a swanky uptown New York office, Gawker Media remains a work in progress, says founder Nick Denton -- especially the somewhat balky commenting/blogging platform known as Kinja that was supposed to reinvent online media…
Read MoreWhy Microsoft is basically stealing Minecraft by buying it for only $2.5 billion
Some might wonder why Microsoft would pay $2.5 billion for a game with low-res graphics and no real plot-line -- but the reality is that Minecraft is far more of an open platform for creativity than it is a simple game, and is likely worth much more than $2.5B…
Read MoreIndieWeb advocates launch Known so bloggers can be social and still control their content
The founders of Known have launched an open-source web publishing tool that uses a number of IndieWeb standards to give users control over their content, instead of handing it and all the related data over to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter…
Read MorePromiscuous media: News needs to go where the people are, not the other way around
Media companies like BuzzFeed, NowThis News and Fusion are increasingly creating content that is designed to live on other apps and services rather than just including links to their websites. This promiscuous approach to media is a smart strategy in an increasingly crowded environment…
Read MoreWunderlist becomes a platform, aiming to be “the home of all the world’s lists”
Wunderlist 3 is a faster, slicker, more collaboration-friendly iteration of the popular productivity app. But it's also the first step in a strategic shift for Berlin's 6Wunderkinder.…
Read MoreMedium adds tech heavyweight Steven Levy as it builds its digital magazine/platform
Wired staffer and tech-journalism veteran Steven Levy announced on Wednesday that he is leaving the magazine to join Medium, the platform/magazine founded by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams, and will be creating a technology hub or vertical for the site…
Read MoreTwitter now supports GIFs on the web, iPhone and Android
After years of not supporting GIFs within the stream, Twitter (s twtr) has finally had a change of heart. On Wednesday, the…
Read MoreIs Medium a platform or a publisher? And is Matter a magazine or a collection? Yes
Medium founder Evan Williams tried to clear up some of the confusion around whether his site is a platform, a publisher or a kind of magazine -- but some of that confusion can't be dispelled because the service has elements of all three. Sometimes it's okay to experiment…
Read MoreFacebook launches a newswire so it can help the media — while it competes with them
Facebook has launched a new feature called the FB Newswire that is designed to give media outlets and journalists a real-time feed of news-worthy content. But who benefits most from that kind of relationship -- those news outlets, or Facebook itself?…
Read MoreAs the line between platform and publisher continues to blur, who wins and who loses?
The term "platishers" is a terrible one, but Jonathan Glick of Sulia has a point about the increasingly blurred lines between platforms and publishers. The real question is what the duties of those platforms are towards the users who create most of the content…
Read MoreCritics say Facebook is erasing pieces of history by deleting pages about the war in Syria
Activists and others involved in the war in Syria say Facebook has been deleting pages created by dissidents and removing content because it violates the social network's standards, and that important information about the conflict is being lost as a result…
Read MoreWhen tweets become ads, or how Twitter continues to blur the line between speech and publishing
Posting things to Twitter might feel like conversation, but in practice it's a lot more like publishing -- which is how a New York Times movie reviewer's off-hand comment on Twitter turned into a full-page newspaper ad, even though he didn't want it to…
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