John West

Publishers love to pivot these days. It’s a hollow word—a euphemism meant to glaze over the truth about layoffs and the news media’s priorities. MTV News recently restructured away from long-form written content and into short-form video. Vice Media laid off 60 people to focus on video. Vocativ strategically shifted its entire newsroom—that is, axed them—to make room for, you guessed it, video.

Donald Trump is about to have a lot of information on us. When he assumes the US presidency in a few weeks, he will oversee two separate but deeply interconnected surveillance apparatuses—which means that even Americans who typically take a blasé attitude toward privacy may be about to take it a lot more seriously.

Last week, Facebook announced a new crackdown on clickbait—and you won’t believe what happened next.

Compared to the sturm und drang swirling around last week’s Republican National Convention, the Democratic convention this week seemed likely to be a fairly placid affair. Then, as Democrats prepared to gather in Philadelphia to officially nominate Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate, Wikileaks released a dramatic cache of hacked emails sent and received by members of the Democratic National Committee.

In the never-ending war between art and commerce, commerce seems to be winning. The latest proof emerged earlier this month with Vanity Fair’s look at the workings of Yahoo’s heavily-trafficked homepage. Sarah Ellison reports:

Humans have a long and storied history of freaking out over the possible effects of our technologies. Long ago, Plato worried that writing would hurt people’s memories and “implant forgetfulness in their souls.” More recently, Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein’s monster warned us against playing God.

The internet would like to inform you that the thing you thought was good is actually bad—and you might be bad for liking it. I’m referring, of course, to Beyonce. Or maybe I’m talking about dogs. Or Bernie Sanders. Probably Adele. Definitely spooning.

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.

The internet these days is a cesspool of clickbait. I’m talking about the kind of journalism that patronizes rather than explains, reveling in breathlessly counterintuitive screeds—like a high-school junior who just discovered Ayn Rand. Even supposedly top-tier publishers behave like needy friends thirsty for social-media approval. We’re warming ourselves in the glow of a thousand hot takes and cycling through outrage.

Now that summer’s over, it’s official: Jurassic World wasn’t just the biggest movie of the season; it’s the biggest summer movie of all time.

For all its talk about gender diversity, Hollywood remains as male-dominated as ever, a new analysis by Quartz has found.

After a series of botched executions last year, the US Supreme Court has agreed to review whether a common method of lethal injection is constitutional. If not, many states will need a new way to kill people.