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The Guardian
"A bad night is not always a bad thing," wrote the late science fiction author Brian Aldiss. A long-time insomniac, he appears to have been searching for the silver lining of a condition that, in chronic form, can suck the lifeblood from you. One does not have to try hard to build the case against insomnia — the way its vampire clutch leaves just a hollow shell of you to ghost walk through your days; the way it trips you up and compromises your cognitive integrity.
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The Baffler
The prognosis for American journalism is not good. In due course, the cancerous forces of Google, Facebook and algorithmic optimization will complete the terminal ravaging of the journalistic trade from the inside, chewing through it vital organs one newsroom at a time, hollowing out its traditions and lore. Journalists and editors will grieve the demise of their beloved calling, which once nourished the sacred democratic principle of holding those in power to a sustained public accounting — and, on occasion, created a kind of widely accessible art form.
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Digiday
Facebook had a bad 2018 when it came to trust and privacy, leading to a growing chorus of calls for people to delete their accounts. On Monday, renowned tech journalist Walt Mossberg tweeted that he was quitting Facebook at the end of the year, for example.
But top marketers aren't joining the movement. Instead, they say they're giving Facebook time to work on solutions and will continue to put their ad dollars toward the platform.
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Wired
For many women, especially journalists, politicians and other public figures, Twitter is something to endure. Many have accounts out of professional necessity, but the cost of their participation in Twitter discourse is often attacks, threats and harassment. Women learn to block, mute, report and ignore their mentions. Some tweet directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, frustrated that he seems never to take the problem of abuse against women on the site seriously.
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Nieman Lab
In 2019, I expect to see more consolidation, delineation, and bundling within digital media. These are overly glamorous words for relatively old-fashioned strategies, which fits neatly into what I predict 2019 will bring: exciting words for simple products — in other words, marketing to consumers, particularly among younger brands not already doing so.
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Digiday
There's less money than ever to go around at digital publishers — and more unions popping up to fight to make sure employees get a fair share.
This past week alone, employees at Ziff Davis and New York Magazine both voted to unionize; Slate staffers voted almost unanimously to authorize a strike over management's refusal to remove a right-to-work clause from a contract currently being negotiated; and in meeting rooms across town, representatives for Gizmodo Media Group, Vice and the Dodo are all busy negotiating either their first or second union contracts with management.
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Media Post
Tech companies that depend on advertising as their primary source of revenue like to describe themselves as mere platforms to share content, but their similarity to publishers grows every year.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snap have made editorial interventions to scrub themselves of objectionable content, fake news and divisive political propaganda. They're not completely blind to the content they distribute.
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Publishers Weekly
A fellow publishing professional told me recently that she wished hybrid publishing had a different name — that it would be better if hybrid publishing could be clearer, sexier somehow, as if that would solve its lingering challenges. But there is no name hybrid publishing could adopt that would change the fact that it's a gray zone — between traditional publishing and self-publishing — or that it's an emerging model that's still being defined.
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IEEE Spectrum
A decade ago, a group of crop scientists set out to grow the same plants in the same way. They started with the same breeds and adhered to strict growing protocols, but nonetheless harvested a motley crop of plants that varied in leaf size, skin-cell density and metabolic ability. Small differences in light levels and plant handling had produced outsize changes to the plants' physical traits, or phenome.
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The Washington Post
Extreme weather associated with climate change appears to be arriving on cue, and the gardener cannot see out the year in these parts without reflecting on the Year of the Monsoon.
Next year, by the way, will be the Year of the Big Chill, followed by the Year of the Great Drought, followed by the Year of the Steaming Cauldron. You heard it here first.
But back to 2018, where more than five feet of rain brought not just a whole lotta H2O but also bizarre growing conditions.
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Botanical Society of America via Science Daily
Astronauts in low-earth orbit could use a fresh salad to brighten up all those freeze-dried meals. But the microgravity space environment can affect plant growth in ways we're only beginning to understand. In research presented in a recent issue of Applications in Plant Sciences, researchers showed that two different transcriptomic approaches could feasibly be used to understand how subcomponents of plant organs respond to the space environment.
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