Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Against Facebook. Provocative from the off: "Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." It's a marketing business, run by geeks. It's not the next Google, it's the next AOL
Cassidy casts his eye over impending Facebook IPO: "It’s the fulfillment of the dreams of the nineties—and a reminder of their potentially fatal attraction." Has a website that expands at astronomic pace just got to be worth money?
36.9 million active customers. 100,000 merchants served in first quarter of 2012. Revenue of $559 million. And a profit at last. Is this the turning point for Andrew Mason's beleagured daily deals website? Watch this space
On Netflix and their risky bet on original programming. "Extreme expenditures on content — a planned $3.7 billion over the next five years — represent either a massive protective moat or a hole deep enough to drown in"
Story of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, and how they changed war photography forever. Radical activists, lovers, chroniclers of Spanish civil war. Both died on assignment. "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough"
"Facebook has created the largest social analytics engine on the planet. They essentially know what we’re thinking before we do." It puts them in a terrifically strong position for now. But will their star keep rising?
Story of much-circulated photo of boy facing line of Russian riot police. "I saw a small boy on what looked like a tricycle moving through a scrum of people raining abuse on the police. Then he just stopped"
Murdoch media empire is in full damage-control mode. But the pain and revelations keep on coming. As employees realise that self-preservation trumps loyalty, more and more spills into public view. How will it end?
They did at first. They thought apps would be a digital enabler of paid content and single-copy sales. Wrong. Apps are fiendishly difficult to make. Horribly expensive. Readers don't like walled gardens. And Apple is the boss
How to be a top financial blogger. Up at 4am. Start work at home in the dark. Go to the office, stare at screens, write non-stop until night. "He is like the host of a daylong radio show, except no one speaks out loud". Scary
"The Murdoch scandals are turning into a first-class disaster for the prime minister, David Cameron, and his party, while so far leaving Labour intact." It didn't have to be like this but Cameron's moral blindness has made it so
"It doesn't stop. Won't stop. Can't stop. Rupert Murdoch is going to be run out of Britain. His is a worst-case scenario: A powerful political opposition moving against him, and a chain of evidence moving toward him"
Photo by Raymond Depardon
Deep under Manhattan lies an archive where things aren't always named as we know them now
