When reporters use social media for crowdsourcing, they’re often just cold calling in the form of a passing tweet — Did you lose your house to foreclosure? Were you the victim of discrimination in the workplace? Have you ever donated your eggs? Contact me for a story I’m working on! ProPublica takes a warmer approach with its recently formed Patient Harm Community Facebook group. Here’s the question that ProPublica poses to the group: “Were you or a loved one harmed in a hospital? Have you seen  show all text

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Four and a half years ago, I proudly joined the ranks of America's Finest News Source, a/k/a The Onion. For a comedian, tech geek and politics and news junkie, it was and remains an epic high in my life. Today, with a deep sense of nostalgia, I'm excited to move to the next chapter of that insane life having stepped down as Director of Digital to pursue more entrepreneurial ventures. It’s been an amazing ride. Acting as politics editor, I played a part in The Onion's 2008 "War For The White H...  show all text

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After four years at the Las Vegas Sun, Rob Curley is leaving the paper. A memo from Brian Greenspun, the paper’s publisher and president, does not specify what Curley is doing next, just that “Rob has decided he has done… Read more

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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The series will return this fall and span two years, becoming integrated with Grantland.com, the network's sports-culture journalism Web site run by Bill Simmons. Mr. Simmons prodded ESPN to produce the first "30 for 30."

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Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever & Adam D’Angelo @ Crunchies 2010 Quora, a Palo Alto-based knowledge (read: Q&A) community has raised a whopping $50 million in Series B funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook early funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. D’Angelo, who was chief technology officer of Facebook, has put $20 million of his own money (big props for that) in Quora while others chipped in the rest.  D’Angelo co-founded the company with Charlie ...  show all text

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Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than a media entity, but it is making some interesting moves into the content business, including hiring a sports producer to curate content and sending out a weekly email of highlighted content. How far will it go?

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast.

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There are three challenges in using social media content for reporting, as Storyful’s Mark Little has written: finding it, verifying it, and figuring out the best way to publish it. In breaking news situations, reporters often rely on text… Read more

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When it comes to the traditional screen that families gather around, live television is competing against a growing array of self-selected content, and audiences are bolting.

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Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be a dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation. The company will apparently say he is leaving for “personal reasons.” But the evolving crisis — which is just over a week old — centered on his botched resume, and how he handled the thorny issue is clearly the key  show all text

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Nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing money, and as prices soar, a college degree often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

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We’ve written a lot at GigaOM about the rise of newspaper paywalls, a trend that seems to be accelerating as the financial health of the industry continues to deteriorate, and in particular I’ve written a number of posts about what I see as the downsides of paywalls. But the announcement this week that a paywall is coming to Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail — where I spent a large chunk of my career as a journalist — made me stop and think about my opposition to them in a more pe...  show all text

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[Re-posted from last night.] Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays a...  show all text

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“I am honored to be doing this cover. It’s a celebratory moment for our country, and that’s what I tried to capture. (I don’t especially like those rainbow colors, but they are what they are—I had to use them.) I wanted to celebrate the bravery of the President’s statement—a statement long overdue—but all the more appreciated in this political year. We are on the right side of history.” —Bob Staake, the artist who created “Spectrum of Light,” the cover of next week’s issue.

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Is Amazon seriously launching a tech blog to compete with gadget blogs like the Verge and Gizmodo? According to a new report, yes. The funny thing is that Amazon already has a gadget blog, plus seven other blogs on topics like food and music.

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One man’s ruthless, relentless pursuit of market minutiae.

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We weren’t sure about this one at first, but now we have two independent sources confirming that AOL is exploring the sale of its cornerstone technology sites Engadget and TechCrunch. The two would likely be sold together as AOL Tech, possibly including smaller assets like TUAW and Joystiq. The asking price? A hefty $70 million to $100 million. AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years: $70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit  show all text

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Gay rights laws in America have evolved to allow — but in some cases ban — rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption…

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No, Facebook news reader apps aren't declining because users suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to the transition to "trending articles", a new way of surfacing recently read articles in the news feed that Facebook is testing. Update: The Washington Post confirms my hypothesis: "Social reader "collapse" is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: "double-double," 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth."Previously, Facebook had been driving huge numb...

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Are you annoyed by all those automatic Facebook news apps? Apparently you're not alone. They're falling off a cliff right now. The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication. If you decide to click on a link it doesn't ...  show all text

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New York Magazine was kind enough to ask me to write a big story on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to celebrate the company's long-awaited IPO. The story's out now, and you can read it here. If there's anything good in it, it's probably the result of excellent editing and research by James Burnett, Adam Moss, Thayer McClanahan, and the rest of the team at New York. Anything you don't like about it you can blame on me. Here's what the story says: Most people still think of Mark Zuckerberg as a sort  show all text

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More than two decades after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines begins scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.

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More than two decades after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines begins scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.

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Fox is the empire’s good son, but also its most toxic legacy.

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