TL;DR Issue 3: The “how the hell am I 50?” edition

This is a week designed to make me feel old. On Wednesday, I hit my 20th anniversary of blogging (but not this blog — it will turn 20 in 2023). It’s slightly disturbing to think that many of the students I’m teaching now were pre-schoolers when I started in this game…

And today, I hit my half century.

“How did you get old, Adam?”

“Slowly, and then suddenly…”

While I head off to celebrate with my family, while trying not to weep over the brevity of life and the futility of existence, you can find meaning in some fine, hand-crafted artisanal links…

Newsletters

• 🐎The Atlantic’s new stable of newsletters
• 🧠 One of them is Charlie Wurzel’s Galaxy Brain, which is leaving Substack for the magazine.

Facebook

• 👯‍♂️ Big changes coming to Groups.
• 🍼 Facebook is losing a generation.
• 👴🏻 Should it really be trying to lure young people back?
• 👺 The Big Blue is shutting down its facial recognition system.
• 🕵️ Is it just getting ahead of growing concerns about face recognition?

Twitter

• 🔎 Improved searching of a person’s Tweets, for your “finding off-colour tweets and cancelling people” convenience.

Podcasts

• 🎤 DMGT buys podcast company Entale
• 💷 The BBC paywalling its podcasts (via Apple) outside the UK
• 🛑 And Apple debuts a podcast that’s exclusive to its app. The fragmentation of podcasting is proceeding apace, sadly. We will regret this down the line.

Audience Engagement

• 📲 Battle for the lock screen: India edition
• 💼 Ben Green jumps from JPIMedia to Reach
• 💰 Engaged journalism is a revenue strategy

SEO

• 🇪🇸 Google News returning to Spain
• 🤯 Google offering support for indexing AND domain verification issues. *faints*
• 🚨 Another cunning wheeze by the spammy end of SEO.
• 📽 I thought we already knew this: Google recommends giving videos their own page.

Instagram

• 🤝 Wow. Instagram finally restores Twitter preview support. No longer seen as a competitive threat?
• 💃🏼🕺🏻 New sticker: “Join In”, which looks a lot like TikTok’s duets.

Etc

• 🎞 Adobe working with news publishers on tools for verifying image authenticity.
• 😡 Interesting profile of Mike Taibbi, which touches on the idea of what happens when the political world changes around a firebrand writer.

The Big Read: Cancel Culture

No, not that cancel culture. This is a long, and fascinating, list of the reasons people cancelled subscriptions:

Expensive, boring, and wrong: Here are all the news publications people canceled and why

From AdAge to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

Nieman LabLaura Hazard Owen