On the Media

Rapper Childish Gambino (A.K.A actor Donald Glover) famously claims to have received his rap pseudonym, "Childish Gambino," from an online Wu-Tang Name generator. But investigating whether this story is true or not led TLDR host Alex Goldman on an odyssey of discovery.

As resources dwindle for news organizations, among the first casualties of cost cutting are the beats that were once the core of journalism’s mission. This week, OTM looks at the great decline in beat reporting. 

This is a repeat of TLDR #23 When Wired reporter Andy Greenberg read Newsweek's cover story claiming to have found mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, he was disappointed. Not so much that the mystery had been solved, but that the answer to the search was not all that interesting. But then, as the Newsweek started getting picked apart, he got a tip about another possible Bitcoin creator: a very ill, very brilliant cryptographer named Hal Finney. 

Gruesome murders of American journalists by ISIS militants have raised serious questions about the way the media should cover these acts of terrorism.  Also, Brooke talks with a public radio legend, and yet another hacking scandal. 

This week, hackers stole and published naked photos of a female celebrities. Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill has covered stories like this before, but she says that this latest example has completely changed her mind about who to blame for these thefts and how to prevent them. 

OTM has traveled the world exploring the nexus of media and society, reaching such far off places as Russia, China, and Egypt. But the center of American politics and power had been overlooked—until now. In a show first broadcast in May 2014, Bob travels to Washington, DC to investigate perception and reality, money and celebrity, and the evolving role of the media in the nation’s capital.

This is a repeat of TLDR #6, In 1998 Swatch tried to completely reinvent our concept of time. Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) would have been a new way to conceive of moments. There'd be no time zones, and also, no hours, minutes, or seconds. PJ talks to Gizmodo's Eric Limer and Swatch Creative Director Carlo Giordanetti about Swatch's plan to create time's version of Esperanto

From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, how media coverage unspools. Also, the #ISISmediablackout after James Foley's murder, and how the music of reality TV manipulates viewers. 

news, international_news, technology, pop_culture, internet, storytelling, life — Steve Terrill is a journalist who works in Rwanda. Or at least he worked in Rwanda, until he accidentally got the office of Rwanda's president Paul Kagame to implicate itself in a long-running online harassment campaign. Alex talks to Steve about inadvertently exposing the Rwandan government's most prolific troll, and being banned from the country as a result.

How a virtual livestream of tweets and vines after the Michael Brown shooting changed coverage, remembering the first gavel-gavel coverage of a court case, and fact and fiction on Shark Week.

A few weeks ago, writer Katie Notopoulos created a holiday called Unfollow a Man Day, wherein everyone (women and men) was encouraged to Unfollow a Man on social media. Men's rights activists were enraged, cable news was intrigued, and a lot of people felt quiet relief. This week PJ talks to Katie about her mission and her manifesto.

A special theme hour - starring a computer competing against a comedian for laughs, the Army's recruitment chatbot, and Google crushing on robots. 

Last week, dating site OK Cupid put up a blog post describing experiments it conducted on its users. In one experiment, the site told users who were bad matches for one another that they were actually good matches, and vice versa. Alex and PJ talk to OK Cupid President and co-founder Christian Rudder about the ubiquity of online user experimentation and his defense of potentially sending OK Cupid's users on bad dates.

How to parse early coverage of breaking news events, Norway's slow TV phenomenon, and a report on the streaming-video revolution.

This is a repeat of TLDR #6. This episode contains some explicit language. Before the Internet as we know it today, there were text-based bulletin board systems all over the country that people could dial into. One of those systems, M-net, happened to live in Alex's backyard, and it was his internet home base for the better part of a decade. Alex went back this week and found out that it's actually still running.