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Facebook Changed The Way Articles Are Written. Now Articles Are Changing Back, Thank God

“Facebook’s rising dominance as a referrer led to … content that was optimized for social media. … The problem with social-optimized content is that its overt, eerie familiarity drapes a kind of lowest-common-denominator cynicism across the internet … [and favors] exaggeration over subtlety. … SEO content, on the other hand, dispenses with the emotional in favor of the mechanical. It can be stilted and awkward — but it’s more honest and transparent.”

John Calder, Publisher Who Introduced Beckett, Burroughs, And ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ To Brits, Dead At 91

“[He] helped introduce British readers to continental writers including Eugene Ionesco, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and also championed edgy Americans, publishing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch.” In 1966 he was convicted of obscenity for publishing Hubert Selby’s gritty novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn. The conviction was overturned on appeal, in a landmark free-speech case.”

Heatwaves And History: Britain’s Broiling Weather Has Revealed Centuries’ Worth Of Archaeological Evidence

“The drought has had [a] surprising effect: All over the country, ghosts have been rising up out of the earth. In the fields of England, Wales and Ireland, the lost lines of houses and settlements, barrows and henges, the street plans of ancient towns from Roman times to the Paleolithic and the Middle Ages — everywhere the past is returning, written on the landscape. These phenomena are known as cropmarks.”

How Sonos Is Building The Audio Internet

“Over time, everywhere that you might want to enjoy music—in different rooms of your house as well as outside the home—we want to have a product that serves that scenario really well, and also any content that’s relevant to you. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to summon that up wherever you are. All of our work is going into those areas. And again, when I say content it’s not just music. It’s sonic culture umbrella in general: podcasts, entertainment, TV soundtracks, things like that.”

As Streaming For All Media Grows, Physical Books Are Holding Their Own

The oldest form of physical media is actually holding up quite well. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018–2022, the consumer market for physical, printed books is holding its own in an increasingly digital world (see “Print Presses On”). Between 2018 and 2022, sales of physical video games, home video, and music are expected to decline each year, in some instances by double-digit percentages. By contrast, sales of physical books are expected to grow modestly, by about 1 percent annually, every year.

Streaming Services Are Inadvertently Recreating The Cable TV Model

The digital landscape is already fragmented, and it’s continually fragmenting further, as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it’s beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.

Big Public Radio Merger

Minneapolis-based Public Radio International will merge with PRX, a Boston audio technology company, the firms said Wednesday. The combined organization will reach an audience of 28.5 million people each month in broadcast and online, and have 56 million monthly podcast downloads.