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 [...]

What the hell was that about, yesterday? Suddenly everybody (except your racist uncle in the Midwest) had changed their profile pictures and avatars to some little parallel lines symbol. It was as if millions of people tried to make a pink ribbon icon and failed, utterly, because they could not do the curve thing. But it was actually about the Supreme Court deciding who we can marry and then later divorce—the justices are not looking at the usual arguments against marriage such as "bad idea," "everybody else was doing it," "I want a baby" and "I was drunk that year." Instead, they are focusing only on the gender of the [...]

One of our greatest fears as social animals is that someone (or a large group of someones) might be mocking us behind our backs, in ways so silent or subtle that we might never know that we are in fact being mocked. Is this happening to you, right now, on Twitter, while you remain ignorant of it? Yes. Yes it is. Here's how it's happening.

"There are five better sinkholes than that in Brooklyn alone." – New Yorkers living in DC.

— Ryan Avent (@ryanavent) March 12, 2013

It's tough to imagine a news cycle more exciting than waiting for a gaggle of old men in white dresses who are quietly thinking about consensus (and decades-long organized coverups of global pedophilia rings operated by the Catholic Church), but a miracle has occurred in Washington, D.C., to turn our attention away from the Vatican: There is a sinkhole in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. We know, we know, How could anyone tell?

The reaction has been as fast as it has been snide.

DC IS [...]

Micro-blogging service Twitter struggles with corporate and celebrity users who refuse to follow industry standards for social media engagement. Case in point: Twitter user @Pontifex, apparently an elderly World War II veteran with an inexplicably large online following, has outraged millions of Twitter users by refusing to follow anyone but his own duplicate accounts. The rudeness reached such a point today that the end-user has finally given in to intense pressure to retire his Twitter accounts and also give up his job leading a global pedophilia ring headquartered in a European castle.

But there is a #fail even with this alleged cessation of the @Pontifex Twitter account, which [...]

Unless he is actually the Terminator, alleged maniacal killer and ex-LAPD cop Christopher Dorner died yesterday in a burning vacation cabin near the Southern California mountain resort town of Big Bear. And for the first time in probably forever, Big Bear is at the top of the news. As often happens when little-known places make the headlines, cable news hosts struggled to understand the mysterious place—did it have access to television or the Internet?—and people on Twitter mocked the confusion of the cable news hosts, while Big Bear residents used Twitter to say things like, "I was literally looking at the house Chris Dorner was at from the [...]

"Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) has fired his longtime spokesman over a tweet the spokesman accidentally sent from the congressman’s Twitter account praising a Super Bowl commercial featuring the stars of the CBS show 'Broke Girls' provocatively pole dancing, according to the Idaho Statesman. Spokesman Phil Hardy deleted the tweet, which read 'Me likey Broke Girls' after 14 seconds, but Labrador’s district director told the Idaho newspaper that Labrador fired Hardy late Monday over the incident. "

Teenagers are idiots. They listen to 40-year-old music like Led Zeppelin or the New York Dolls, they dress like those old dudes from The Strokes, and they will never have jobs because of robots. But in one respect, today's teenager is much like the previous century's teenagers: They do not like socializing around their dumb parents and weird uncles and Tea Party Jesus-freak aunts. Because all of those creepy segments of adult society spend all their time on Facebook, the kids have finally figured out that Facebook is not at all cool.

Facebook management admits in new corporate filings that they're losing the teen market to competitors that don't [...]

Last week, David Grann and I met in his office at The New Yorker, in midtown Manhattan. It is a glorious fire hazard because he doesn't throw anything away. Grann has been a staff writer at the magazine since 2003 and published two books, the enthralling The Lost City of Z, and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of his reportage. Stacks of papers related to finished stories ("That's Z, that's Cuba, that's Willingham…") line the walls, while the floor is devoted to a book-in-progress, as yet untitled, on the Osage Indian murders and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For fans, a new [...]

Discuss.

You know how something happens and you look at Twitter (or learn about it from Twitter) and people are going insane within seconds of finding out about this news that probably doesn't even have anything to do with their lives or industry? How do people get wildly upset about something they just heard about? Isn't that the job of bloggers?

This is now a proven aspect of Twitter. The Pew Research Center studied Twitter users and found "the reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys." And they're not just excitable and wrong, they're also [...]

The Catholic God allegedly dictated an entire Holy Bible to his Jewish and early Christian followers before vanishing from this planet forever, but God's chosen leader of His church in Rome will be closing down the @Pontifex Twitter account less than three months after beginning to use the free social networking service. The inexplicable hullabaloo began in 2011, when Joseph Ratzinger sat in his flowing silken robes and tapped out a tweet on an iPad. But, like so many people who fail to make a splash on Twitter the first time, he drifted away and then started another Twitter account at the end of 2012—this time documented by [...]

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow Americans, and even you, Mr. President:

On this fortuitous evening, we come together in a highly ritualized, deeply esoteric sacred performance within the inner sanctum of our nation's high temple. The president's words will be parsed by an inverse pyramid of humanity, from a mass of dimwitted Politico commenters bobbing like frantic ill-informed ducks upon the surface to the industrial sludge filters at the bottleneck bottom, monstrous catfish like Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer, slurping up and then expelling the reactions to the president's prepared text, which have already become worn out punchlines on Twitter.

At home, the citizens [...]

"Netflix made a bold move releasing the full season of House of Cards at midnight, but I think it's actually a bad one. I like watching shows all at once — when they're not brand new. Releasing 13 episodes at midnight is like a 'rush to the fish' — someone out there is going to watch the whole thing at once and ruin it for everyone. It's like Netflix painstakingly made a complex 13-course meal, meant to be enjoyed with friends and spirits over a long, lazy afternoon, but put each course in a chafing dish at Chipotle and served it in one giant burrito of sadness. [...]

Venn diagram review of "LA RELIGIEUSE" and "VIC+FLO ONT VU UN OURS" #Berlinale twitter.com/szacharek/stat…

— Stephanie Zacharek (@szacharek) February 10, 2013

This year, the Tribeca Film Festival hosted a conversation between Will Leitch and Dana Stevens on how social media—and Twitter specifically—has affected the work of film criticism. On the subject of sharing thoughts after screenings, Leitch emphasized that he has always set aside time for reflection after a film instead of rushing into forming an opinion, while Stevens jokingly remarked that, for professional critics, pre-tweeting before a review feels like "stealing from yourself."

In light of [...]

"Most of my buyers are averaging four offers before they have one accepted," my new real estate agent in the Bay Area said yesterday. "It can be an emotional and stressful time."

Probably! And especially if you're moving from a still-depressed housing market, which is roughly the area between the Eastern Seaboard and San Francisco. But, as NPR is reporting as I type these words, the American housing market (in the coastal elite cities) is "fast changing." From causing the collapse of the Earth's economy just five years ago to a breezy NPR feature about an insane couple putting in offers at 2 a.m. after driving by a new [...]

"I grew up in the days when blue meant Salt & Vinegar and green meant Cheese & Onion, so I am as frustrated as anybody by the confusing crisp shelves. We’ve seen more and more customers bringing up their own frustrations about crisp packet colours in the past few months, from letters to Tayto to endless of conversations on Facebook and Twitter. We know it’s a real issue with the public. Customers instantly identify snack flavours by colour so why confuse shoppers by putting Cheese & Onion in blue packets and Salt & Vinegar in green packets? With our petition we hope to standardise packaging across the market to the [...]

The concept of people typing Dadaist humor on Twitter has existed since Twitter got its first big batch of smart-ass users in 2007, at that year's SxSW. Twitter was suddenly the place to get breaking news on inconsequential online-media events. Also, it was full of banter and inside jokes and drunken jabbering. It became fun, because a lot of bored funny people now had a way to narrowcast every oddball thought to people who might appreciate that kind of nonsense.

Only last year did anyone refer to this as a certain thing, Weird Twitter. My own Twitter feed has always been weird, because I follow a lot of [...]

As you may have seen on Twitter yesterday, Burger King was either sold to McDonald's or taken over by crazy people. Both would be an improvement, as Burger King has a reputation as "the fast food that even fast-food lovers don't like at all." There has always been something off about this hamburger franchise business, especially the marketing. That's why cynical people looked at the supposed hacking of @BurgerKing and figured it was just another desperate try to get anyone to care about the perennial No. 2 hamburger brand.

No seriously, which demons did you confront via social media this weekend? Meghan McCain, for one, was busy. My only beef here, I guess, is that when you want to get into it with someone, you actually have to call them. The whole "call me" thing just doesn't work. (via)