A few months back, Mike Hayes, who's a senior reporter at BuzzFeed and who also runs the official BuzzFeed Twitter account, sent around an email to the office. Twitter, he reported, was going to be verifying the whole staff at once. To be eligible, employees just needed to attach their work email addresses to their Twitter accounts.

And so then one day in March, poof. Scores of BuzzFeeders with blue checkboxes on their Twitter profiles. Other companies, like The Verge, followed.

so many buzzfeed writers, verified. heads need to roll over this. verify me @twitter

— max read (@max_read) March 12, 2013

There's sort of nothing funnier [...]

"Early on in [Tina Brown's Newsweek] tenure, there were covers for the Olsen sisters and Regis Philbin. Buzzfeed would have covered them, too, only in its 'Nostalgia' vertical, which, like Brown, is preoccupied with the 1990s." —Way harsh, Noreen Malone, way harsh.

With Buzzfeed announcing a fresh $15.5 million in funding today, on top of its previous $11.5 million in funding, all web properties should stop and ask themselves: what would you do with that cash? We already have it planned!

• office radio with AM and FM.

• tiny house collection in the middle of the office's sculpture courtyard.

• a "sympathy big board," displaying only least-viewed blog posts.

• Ben Smith's younger, weirder cousin from Ditmas Park, Yaniv Smith.

• an actual awl.

• basement meth lab (because media companies just becoming tech companies is very 2011; 2012 is about dreaming bigger).

• a fearsome, extremely [...]

Is Twitter your job? We have maintained in the past that it is not. A year later, we think that more and more media employees are engaged in the practice of using their Twitter accounts to promote not just their work, but their workplaces. That's true even with the transition of Jim Roberts from @NYTJim to @NYCJim, as he left the New York Times to become the executive editor of Reuters Digital. (His Twitter is still chock-full of Times links, though!)

How much Twitter work is working? We looked at a work-week's worth of tweets at three publications: BuzzFeed, Gawker and Business Insider. Just how often were [...]

Great ice cream, bad girls [VID]

— Fake BuzzFeed (@FakeBuzzFeed) February 22, 2012

Well, this is happening, and by "this," I mean a Twitter account that consists of running the headlines of a Buzzfeed rip-off website called Pineza.gr through Google Translate. And why not? What does YOUR stupid Twitter feed do for you?

Did you know that sending out mass emails is often illegal? You perhaps didn't. Particularly if you work as a politics blogger, for which an important part of your job is "blasting out" your stories.

But the deeply flawed CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 codified some mass email behavior, and described what's spam and what isn't. The FTC describes what emails are subject to the Act: "'any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,' including email that promotes content on commercial websites."

So, yes. Your mass email promoting your "content" at Politico or BuzzFeeᴅ or your [...]

That Buzzfeed's Ben Smith can't use his own name at his new job, due to his "exit agreement" with his last employer, Politico, is hysterical. Get a grip! Also making the rounds: digital media jobs in "journalism" that require a drug test. How crazy are these people? (But yes, if you want to work at Gannett or NBC or what have you, be prepared to be degraded and give up your rights.) Drug-testing is maybe—maybe!—for people who operate forklifts or drive trucks, so they don't kill us all while baked. Even then, though…. Well, drug-testing is a real bad look for organizations that want independent, American-minded employees. Anyway, [...]