Recent quotes:

The Wall Street Journal shutters eight blogs: “The tools for telling” stories have changed » Nieman Journalism Lab

“If it were 100 years ago, this would have lasted for 50 years, but the way technology changes and the way reader nature changes every five years now, its lifespan was just so much shorter,” New York Times metro editor Wendell Jamieson said at the time. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an important bridge, but it’s a different industry than it was when City Room launched. It’s truly the post-blog era, and I barely had time to get into the blog era.”

Why a Membership Model? - Political Wire : Political Wire

as publishing moved to the Internet and digital ads evolved, the incentives grew out of whack. Publishers no longer have a direct relationship with most advertisers. Instead they increasingly use ad networks. These ad networks pool an audience across thousands of different publications and websites. Advertisers tell the networks what audience they want to target and their ads are shown wherever those readers happen to be visiting. What does this mean? Publishers no longer have direct relationships with advertisers so they try to make themselves as attractive to ad networks as they can. This often means sharing personal data about their readers and resorting to other reader unfriendly tactics to show as many ads as they can. Advertisers no longer care about individual publications since their audience may come from thousands of different sites. To make matters worse, the Internet has a virtually unlimited inventory of ad space which drives prices down to ridiculously low prices. This often leads to ads that are in very poor taste. The membership model is much more direct and honest. Publishers are directly accountable to their readers. That’s it.

Mike Butcher thinks Facebook is fried

Extremely close to giving up on Facebook as a place where any kind of rational debate can happen. That sounds extreme. Let me explain my thinking. The early days of Twitter were pretty good but that's all done now, and the limitation of 140 characters says it all. It's also full to the brim with trolls (as I found during the Referendum). Is use it as a way to announce things. It's very tough to have much of a debate on. Facebook allows for longer pieces but I've seen simple posts descend into multiple sub-threads of arguments. The trigger is now too easily pulled and I'm as guilty as anyone, because the medium is just too easy to hit post on. The 'original' social media was blogging. Someone would write a post which would appear in an RSS feed. Maybe there might be the ability to comment. But before comment platforms you had to reply with your own blog post, which would ping the original you were replying to. "Blog fights" like this would continue over days, perhaps weeks. The responses detailed and closely argued. The slowness afforded real thinking. Perhaps Medium is gradually getting there - at least you can follow people and read longer pieces which follow an argument. I may use their app more, come to think of it. When Ev created Medium I thought he was crazy. Now I'm starting to see the potential. As for myself I'm going to check myself from here on to TRY and reply in a slower, better thought out manner. I may save a post and reply when I'm on a desktop instead of trying to reply on a mobile which makes you want to get it out quickly and not think too hard. We live in very strange times now, and we (and I include myself) need to tack back towards rationality, civility and a kind of 'slow thinking' our ancestors possessed but which modernity has lost touch with.

Trump in hock to Putin and his comrades

Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin.

Confessions of a social media exec on influencer marketing: 'We threw too much money at them' - Digiday

Social team is a bunch of millennials, so we’ll often find someone we like and we’ll throw it into a database with keywords. But usually it’s a CEO or CMO or whoever saying, “Oh, my kid likes this guy.” At this major car brand I worked for, we paid $300,000 for a few photographs because the CEO’s kid liked someone.

The sad economics of being famous on the internet | Fusion

We’re a two-person video creation machine. When we’re not producing and starring in a comedy sketch and advice show, we’re writing the episodes, dealing with business contracts and deals, and running our company Gallison, LLC, which we registered officially about a month ago. And yet, despite this success, we’re just barely scraping by. Allison and I make money from ads that play before our videos, freelance writing and acting gigs, and brand deals on YouTube and Instagram. But it’s not enough to live, and its influx is unpredictable. Our channel exists in that YouTube no-man’s-land: Brands think we’re too small to sponsor, but fans think we’re too big for donations.