Business

DD: Instagram As a Tool for the Media

Video Debate: Are Gadgets Driving Us Away From Real Conversation?

The Daily Download team discusses Sherry Turkle’s New York Times article, “The Flight From Conversation.”

Ethical Shopping and the Guilt Trip: A Love Story

Fashioning Change is already beta-testing a great site called Wear This, Not That, which invades any big-brand shopping sites you may be browsing and offers ethical alternatives to clothing items you may be interested in. You can also use it from the Fashioning Change site, where you can select a number of fashion retail brands and search for better alternatives.

The tool will also tell you what good you’ll be doing by buying from Fashioning Change instead of the mainstream option. For example, if I buy a United By Blue messenger bag, instead of one from J Crew, I not only save $19, but I also give my money to a company that “removes 1 pound of trash from oceans for each product sold” and get a product that is 100 percent organic cotton. On the other hand, the site tells me, J Crew has a lack of transparency in its supply chain and no commitment to eco-friendly manufacturing.

Kurtz and The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman on Excessive Media Mogul Pay

Compensation for media executives is skyrocketing – and occasionally bears no relationship to the success of the company. Our Howard Kurtz discusses with The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman.

Video: Grover Norquist Juggles the Issues

Grover Norquist is a serious guy.  A really serious guy.  He’s never held elective office, and most people don’t know his name.  Yet more than any other human being on the planet, Norquist drives the bus when it comes to pressuring Congress into keeping taxes low.

Turns out, he has a silly side.

Howard Kurtz and I sat down with the billionaires’ best friend and founder of Americans for Tax Reform in his downtown Washington office to get his reaction on a piece novelist Stephen King wrote for The Daily Beast titled “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”

The serious stuff is here:

And then, well, there’s this video I took with my iPad as we were packing up to leave.

Twitter’s International Intrigue

Sometimes Twitter seems unstoppable.

No matter what the news event, tweeting now plays a key role. Once dismissed as a pedestrian toy for the bored to record what they had for lunch, the social network is now part of the media and political bloodstream.

On Sunday, Twitter users managed to circumvent a French embargo on election results to tell the world that Nicolas Sarkozy had been booted from the presidency. The tweeters used code names to avoid running afoul of the law. Sarkozy was either Rolex (his opulent lifestyle with Carla Bruni) or the wine Hungarian Tokaji (his pere is Hungarian). Francois Hollande, France’s incoming president, was called Gouda cheese, among other things. The hashtag: #radiolondres, for a BBC World War II service.

The reason for the subterfuge: France imposes fines up to $99,000 for releasing election results before 8 p.m.

Days earlier, Twitter users also outsmarted the Chinese regime as the case of dissident Chen Guangcheng played out during Hillary Clinton’s visit to Beijing.

Brokaw on the Media’s Disconnect

Tom Brokaw knows how to spin a good yarn.

We were chatting at Washington’s Newseum, where he was helping celebrate the centennial of my alma mater, the Columbia School of Journalism, when the longtime NBC anchor described how he and Walter Cronkite once escaped the craziness of Louisville on Kentucky Derby weekend by hitching a ride on a hot-air balloon.

Brokaw seems at ease after so many years in the Nightly News trenches, traveling around the country for occasional specials and promoting his latest book. And he delivered some biting observations about the news business in a video interview with my colleague Howard Kurtz for The Daily Beast.

Most Americans are not as ideologically divided as the pugilistic pundits they watch on television, Brokaw says. They feel disconnected from the “closed game” of politics, which has “its own language” and “its own culture.”

Public Weighs In On President Obama’s Endorsement of Gay Marriage

As soon as the news of President Obama’s earth-shaking endorsement of same-sex marriage broke, I jumped on my Facebook page to ask friends to weigh in.   We’d like to hear from you if you think his views will have a powerful impact on the coming presidential election.

Many Democrats hailed Obama’s dramatic comments to ABC’s Robin Roberts; some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, voiced opposition; religious conservatives lambasted the president. But it remains to be seen how such a sensitive issue plays with voters, and in my book Facebook is as good a listening post as any.

Here’s a particularly passionate response from reader Phil Catalf0:  ”Yes, I think he was right to do so and I think it was courageous of him. Frankly, I wasn’t sure it would be best for him to do it, because I was worried about the political cost; I think it’s imperative that he be reelected and that the Republicans be handed resounding defeats this year at all levels of government, given the outrageous things they have enacted or attempted to enact at the federal and state level. But President Obama did the right thing, and I salute him for it. By the way, lest anyone think I’m a gay activist, I’m a 61-year-old straight male who has been married to the same woman for nearly 34 years. And I have never felt that homosexuality or the prospect of gay marriage posed any kind of threat to our marriage–nor that it went against God’s will.”

Real Founders of Silicon Valley: Those Bravo-Inspired Entrepreneurial Events In Full

Regular readers will know that PandoDaily has been somewhat, ah, skeptical of Bravo’s new “Silicon Valley” reality show, which begins shooting next month. “Snobs!” cried one critic. “Wait until you know more details before you judge!” wailed…well, actually, the exact same critic who in no way has been lobbying for a cameo on the show.

And, sure enough, now that said details have begun to emerge, it appears we may have entirely underestimated the legitimacy of “Silicon Valley.”

Stop the Press

If there’s one thing Mitt Romney and President Obama can agree on, it’s how much they can’t stand the press.

I watched in amazement on Wednesday as Romney’s press wranglers tried to physically stop reporters from asking questions at a rope line in St. Petersburg.   Even a Secret Service agent jumped in, telling them to “come off” the line.

Since when did covering a meet-and-greet become a federal offense?

Were campaign officials afraid that the candidate would say something off-message that they would then have to defend for the next news cycle?  The words “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order” – Romney’s dismissal of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden — are probably still ringing in the ears of campaign staffers.

Band-Aids: Not Much Better Than Nothing

The title and subhead say it all. Do Band-Aids work? Not really.

Slate is famous for its contrarian takes on society. Here, they challenge the conventional belief that applying a Band-Aid to a wound will help it.

Basically: it won’t.

On Being Black and Atheist

Religion and race are both highly complicated issues with enormous meaning and ramifications in our lives. In 2012, we can expect them to be used as shorthand, to be explored superficially, as election day approaches.

But there’s an overlap between the two that isn’t discussed much: the unpopular position held by African-Americans who don’t express any faith at all.

What the Internet Looked Like When Facebook Was Born

Facebook is about eight years old today as it celebrates its big coming out on Wall Street.

In Internet years, eight years is more like fifty. The web in 2004 was vastly different – not so much much that you wouldn’t recognize it, but enough that you’d be surprised at what the web looked like. The Atlantic is here to remind you.

How “Battleship” Enlisted the Navy

Hey, if you’re going to make a movie about an alien invasion based on a children’s board game, the most important thing is realism.

Dumbest Post – Is Harry Potter Making Kids Swear?

No one wants his or her child to require a five-second delay every time the kid speaks. Parents have long battled with their children to tame the natural impulse to swear.

There’s a new culprit being blamed for bad language: books. Well, not a new culprit.