R eal Journalisim, Reddit Chatrooms and The Game of Fonts
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
BuzzFeed launches a new website for its real journalism
By Anthony Ha from Tech Crunch
- “…Senior Product Manager Kate Zasada said the company’s own research has found that some readers ‘don’t completely understand’ that while BuzzFeed is famous for GIF-filled lists, it also produces ‘deeply researched and fact-checked’ journalism.”
- “So the company is making that distinction clearer with the launch of a new BuzzFeed News website.”
- “Smith also noted that while the company is creating a new home for its journalism, that doesn’t mean the site will be unrelentingly serious and highbrow. As we spoke yesterday afternoon, he said that some of the most popular BuzzFeed News stories included multiple articles about Trump, a long essay about Gwen Stefani and a story on the sadly neglected aerial tram emoji.”
Reddit Reinvents the Chat Room With Community Chat
By Arielle Pardes from Wired
- “Reddit’s chatrooms come at a time when the platform is struggling to tame some of the content on its platform. Earlier this month, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told a user that hate speech itself isn’t explicitly against Reddit’s rules—it’s simply too hard to determine what qualifies and what doesn’t.”
- “Reddit has several teams devoted to brigading and trolling, including an Anti-Evil team that builds tools to make the platform safer. When Reddit introduced one-to-one chat last year, that team created mechanisms for preventing spam and harassment in messaging. Those kinds of tools will carry over to the new chatrooms…”
- “Only moderators can start new chatrooms for their communities, and it’s unlikely that all of them will. But Reddit’s product team maintains that the feature could benefit anyone on the platform—and it could bring Redditors together unlike ever before.”
Test your type knowledge with this handy game
By Aileen Kwun from Fast Company
- “…when it comes to actual design fluency, are our eyes as nuanced as a designer’s? Helvetica may incite a knee-jerk reaction on both sides of the aisle, but the normal layperson or design enthusiast (myself included) would likely have a hard time discerning the intricacies of its letterforms from other, similar families of typefaces.”
- “Enter the Font Memory Game, designed by London-based designer Matej Latin, which offers a fun, accessible way to learn more about letterforms. Made as an educational tool as part of Better Web Type, a free online typography class he created for web designers and developers in mind, the game works just like the old-fashion memory game of yore–only in place of imagery, Latin has swapped in letters.”
- “What looks astoundingly simple is actually astoundingly hard–and for the non-professional designer, it’s an eye-opening experience to just how impressive it is to be able to identify the differences instinctually, in the few seconds the game allows you to see the card before it’s quickly overturned again.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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