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 [...]

In our attention-addicted world, the notion of bad PR has become a quaint anachronism, like watching a TV show when it’s broadcast or publishing Katie Roiphe. But while you’d be forgiven for assuming that any appallingly newsworthy transgression is ultimately a positive career move (let’s face it, Tan Mom probably has an agent by now), that’s not always the case. There is such a thing as bad publicity—however, it’s tricky to predict whether a horrid scandal will render you irredeemably persona non grata, or set you up for life. Since it would behoove us all to grasp the whys and wherefores of this complex terrain, here’s a handy [...]

Here are the shocking revelations about where Mitt Romney slept in January while campaigning, according to the fine people at Think Progress, who themselves sleep in biodegradable hovels. Uh, the Empire Hotel doesn't even make the list of the best hotels (or most expensive hotels!) in New York. And there's basically nowhere else to stay in Palm Beach except the Breakers. Even I've stayed at the Omni Parker House in Boston! This is one of those topics on which the media is not equipped to advise us. All hotels look expensive to the LIBERAL MEDIA.

The campaign also spent $60 on a Best Western in Arizona, by [...]

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who've been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional "objective" news organizations; others work for "non-objective" news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader. This means something—mostly about the media and what it is now, possibly also who the police perceive as media and relation of reporter to demonstration. But with the exception of a Journal-Sentinel photographer, [...]

Tonight, at PowerHouse Arena, it is the Brooklyn Launch Party for Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You, a nonfiction chronicle of what Beijing has so recently become. As China is now (well, as usual) so much in the news, we asked him some questions!

Choire Sicha: Tom Scocca, as you have written a book called Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, which is brand new and good and also a book I have read, you are the only expert on China.* (*That I personally know.) Is this a great week for China or what?

Tom Scocca: If you set aside the fact that all [...]

When Andrew Breitbart commandeered Anthony Weiner’s admission-of-digital-lecherousness press conference earlier this month, just seven minutes elapsed before he began to recount the tale of how America was first introduced to his strange media empire. In 2009, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles approached Breitbart with footage of low-level ACORN employees apparently offering to abet the proprietors of an illegal immigrant child prostitution ring. “To those who say your journalism here is suspect,” a reporter asked, “what do you tell those folks?” Breitbart snickered.

“'You're going to be held to a different standard,'" Breitbart said he told O’Keefe and Giles at the time. “But I said, what we're going [...]

There's several proven tactics to conducting a press conference with humiliating personal admissions and one of them is exhausting everyone, which was pretty successful with Anthony Weiner's confession of sharing "personal photos" with women he did not know (six in three years, most before his marriage) online. Everyone was exhausted, except maybe the New York Post's Andrea Peyser, who really, really wanted to know where his wife Huma was. (At least that's what she kept screaming.)

But the press conference also ran counter to many of the prevailing ideas about crisis PR: one is to keep it short; another is have your wife with you. (The Spitzer event did [...]

Those "bundled-up youngsters who attend PS 10 in Park Slope, Brooklyn… joined by their parents yesterday for the icy trek to school" pictured in the New York Post's attack on the school bus strike, as part of their ongoing anti-union campaign? "EVERY SINGLE THING about this is inaccurate. My kid and her friend were with our sitter (we do a nanny share, it’s great), who picks them up at school —neither of them were with their parents. I walk her to school every morning because it is two blocks from our house. We do not rely on buses. We are completely and utterly and thoroughly unaffected by the [...]

The National Conference of the American Copy Editors Society has announced its headline contest winners and it is now clear who is destroying the media. Among the many talented, hard-working winners—and you know we love our copy editors!—we find a batch of puns so foul, so egregious, that it's difficult to not feel pranked.

First place for individuals at newspapers with circulation under 80,001 goes to a staffer at the Wichita Eagle, whose winning entries include this… one.

Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman shows how it's done. Displeased with your boss, freelance editor or coworkers? Just refuse to share (but do share why).

Kay Merryweather, 34, an artist on the Lower East Side, volunteers at Trinity Church, giving out food. She said that during the financial crisis, when banks were receiving bailouts and financial executives were receiving multimillion-dollar bonuses, the church often ran out before the long lines of working poor were fed. “The bankers were getting all of these millions,” Ms. Merryweather said. “And we didn’t have enough food.”

But not far away, Benny Zable, 66, a longtime activist, was protesting while wearing a gas mask and a suit that read “Work Consume Be Silent Die.” He said his outrage came from the heedlessness of economic growth. “It’s the greed factor,” [...]

"Nothing is certain but death and taxes" and, since 2007, "trend pieces about miracle fruit parties." Oh yes: "The miracle fruit party" is the trend piece that just won't die, despite that there have likely been more feature stories about miracle fruit parties than there have been actual miracle fruit parties.

The Wall Street Journal went big in 2007 with an A1 story that explained that the berries are "a slightly tart West African berry with a strange property: For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet." Then NPR couldn't wait to tell all of their listeners about it. The New York [...]