The Awl
Is it marketing or is it journalism? The case of Tumblr's 'Storyboard'
Mohney recently spent a week in Taipei reporting out a forthcoming profile on the Taiwanese video spoofsters (and Tumblr users) Next Media Animation. (If nothing else, it illustrates the type of money Tumblr is willing to sink into its nascent editorial venture.) And a human interest piece about the people responsible for mending the cracks and crevices in New York's pavement was inspired by The Daily Pothole, one of the city's 22 official Tumblr blogs. "Normally, nobody would be interested in pot-hole fillers," said Bennett. More
(2)It's no fun to traffic in chocolate, or humans, on Valentine's Day anymore
We've been seeing cute animals on the web for as long as there's been a web. What's grabbing me today, on Valentine's Day, is the universality with which cute animals are standing in for the, er, transactional elements of the holiday. In most cases they displace some of the more unattractive elements of mass human sexual behavior (chocolates, roses, intimate apparel) that are otherwise so prevalent this time of year. More
A new iPad app that promises a future for long-form journalism
The app will initially feature Longform.org's top 25 most popular sources, which range from the websites of monthly magazines like GQ, The Atlantic and The New Yorker to online-only offerings such as The Awl and Grantland. It's designed to filter links based on word-count, "so you can take out all the daily pageview-churning content and what you're left with is all the long feature stories," said Linsky, speaking by phone this aftenroon. "We wanted to start with the stuff we love and that we know our readers love, but the plan is to try and go big with it. ... We plan to expand pretty quickly and broadly." More
(2)Cantona and the making of the Cosmos
I believe there are many ways to God, and though I’ve been taught to love one God, the father the almighty, I’d argue He is manifold, and one of his materializations comes in the form of Eric Cantona. Others think of Eric merely as a temperamental French soccer player, now inactive, a man who once launched himself into the crowd at Selhurst Park one Tuesday night to kung fu kick a fan who was calling him names. But that’s like saying Jesus was an itinerant preacher from first-century Judea. More
The new radical gesture: Repel the spiders from Mountain View!
"When you're a writer, there's such an instinct to monetize all your interests and turn them into work in some way," says zine revivalist Marissa Meltzer. "So a zine is one nice way to feel more casual, more off the grid. I'm not a proponent of rejecting the Internet, or rejecting paid work or anything like that. I just think in these times, when everyone has to hustle for stories to get their names out there, it's nice to have side projects." More
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