Welcome back to the second one of these!

A Media Coalition to Shine a Light on Homelessness

Nearly every single media organization in the Bay Area is joining together next month to coordinate coverage of the problem of homelessness. “We want the full force of the Fourth Estate to bear down on this problem, " said Jon Steinberg, editor in chief of San Francisco magazine.

The initiative so far is pretty loose and it’s not quite clear how news orgs will share resources. Some, like The San Francisco Chronicle, are pledging to veer into advocacy by presenting solutions, while others like local NPR affiliate KQED, will stick to reporting.

Everyone knows homelessness is a huge, complicated, tragic problem, particularly in the Bay Area, and I applaud every effort by the media to tackle society’s biggest problems. I think the concerns about advocacy vs. reporting are a bit silly and there’s no reason a media organization shouldn’t be helping to find solutions to such an intractable social ill.

That said, my optimism is tempered by a healthy dose of caution. Media in the Bay Area, just like everywhere else, has been decimated not just in scope but stature. San Francisco is a particularly odd town for media, with a largely anaemic Fourth Estate and surplus of alt-media that reflects the region’s pseudo-progressive identity politics.

Furthermore, if the issue of homelessness were merely a matter of exposure, it would have been solved long ago. Like the broader housing crisis that literally everyone talks about all the time, this problem has been decades in the making and will require the kind of political will that California, with its yo-yo budget and, frankly, broken system of direct democracy, does not seem well equipped to handle.

Why Fact Checking is Hard

Lost in a tab is a New Yorker piece by Siddhartha Mukherjee ostensibly about the science of epigenetics. I think I’ll skip it after reading a lengthy two-part rebuttal at Why Evolution is True (part 1 part 2) that is damning not just of Mukherjee’s piece but of The New Yorker’s general approach to science writing.

Jerry Coyne, who writes Why Evolution is True and is a professor of biology at the University of Chicago, quotes a number of experts in biology and molecular genetics (including Nobel laureates) who state unequivocally that the science in the article is bad and that the overall picture the article attempts to paint is completely misleading.

Emoji Like Me

A proposed emoji addendum would show women in professional roles beyond painting their nails. Even if you 🙄 at the idea of emoji as a serious form of communication (hasn’t that tired critique been leveled at every form of communication? #EatingASandwich), it’s obvious that the medium should be more reflective of the world. It makes a real difference.

Meanwhile, white people, who prefer not to think about race because it makes us just so uncomfortable, don’t use white emoji. Andrew McGill sampled some data from Twitter’s streaming API and found that the white skin tone emoji isn’t used far less often than darker skin tone emoji. One obvious cause: the Simpsons-esque yellow default might as well be white. But this “may also signal a squeamishness on the part of white people … to use an affirmatively white emoji”. Personally, I feel like deliberately selecting a white skin emoji is akin to saying “White Lives Matter” but also recognize the inherent privilege of just getting to stick with the default.

Sidebar

The Toast is closing on July 1. Running an independent media site in 2016 continues to be pretty grim. Also, an interesting counter to the notion that platforms like Medium or Facebook will save indy media: “We considered making one of those (excellent) deals with Medium, but only briefly, because of our relatively unique community and what it would do to that community if we lost our ability to meaningfully moderate comments”

Who among us hasn’t dreamed of giving it all up to pursue the dream of being a Vine star who makes $50k for a six-second video that’s basically a fart joke? “Influencer marketing” turns out to be mostly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It seems ad execs don’t really know what to pay influencers, influencers don’t know what to charge, no one knows if it even works, and the word “influencer” is basically toxic now (so at least there’s that). The glory days may already be behind us: “Brands are going to start realizing the amount of followers you have doesn’t mean shit.”

“We’re in an amazing black cultural moment. Can we avoid the backlash?”

Om Malik tries to answer the question we’ve been pondering for a year: why is Apple Music so bad? And throws in an intriguing, never-gonna-happen-but-why-not acquisition.

Ars Technica is rolling back an ambitious new redesign after a “show-stopping code issue” appeared when the site went live. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. It’s not all bad in redesign news: new Mother Jones is bangin'

I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, is happening right now, at a giant outdoor amphitheater usually reserved for music festivals. Here are the highlights from Sundar Pichai’s keynote. My read is it seems Google is paradoxically both clarifying its vision for the future of the company while confusing how that vision gets implemented. It’s clear they see human augmentation via a constellation of data collection and storage, AR and VR, and artificial intelligence in what makes for a compelling demo, but without real focused product discipline. So now there are myriad messaging apps, assistants, APIs, even operating systems with a huge degree of overlap.

The Deadpool movie looks like a dumb, fan-pandering turd, but there’s no denying the film’s marketing is on point. A lot of that has to do with the fourth-wall-breaking, meta … whatever of the lead antihero. Here’s how the web series Honest Trailers got Ryan Reynolds on board.

A thorough look by Jean-Louis Gassée at how Intel, once famous for their “paranoid culture”, missed mobile due to its cultural ossification.

Postlight, a digital product agency in New York, released a tool called Mercury to make short work of converting your pages to Google’s AMP format.

How Facebook’s Internet.org failed in India. The plan to bring Facebook to remote and impoverished parts of the world had been compared to Western colonialism (and even defended as such by aloof VC’s) and was subsequently shuttered by Indian regulators for creating a second-tier internet. It’s tempting, and not incorrect, to chalk up Facebook’s failure in India to textbook hubris and inability to understand a foreign culture. However, Indian journalist Rahul Bhatia tells the more complicated story of how ordinary Indian people came to reject the idea and force regulators to act. And the comedy troupe All India Bakchod made an awesome net neutrality explainer.

Finally, some definitive proof as to why girls can’t code.

The Huffington Post 1) spiked a story critical of Uber 2) at a time when Uber and HuffPo were partnering 3) just before Arianna Huffington was installed on Uber’s board 4) then subsequently vowed to hunt down the leaker of the original spiked story. I hope Arianna doesn’t lose any sleep over this.

Video ads are coming to Facebook’s Audience Network, their off-Facebook ad platform. Not only that, they’re coming to the desktop, too (previously, FAN ads were mobile-only).

This seems like it should warrant more than a sidebar link but, alas, there’s basically nothing to report: The FBI can neither confirm nor deny that it has ever wiretapped an Amazon Echo.

Remember that dumb thing about Facebook being accused of being biased against conservative news orgs and how it all blew over oh wait of course it didn’t. Mark Zuckerberg met with a gaggle of conservative media reps to tell them to grow the fuck up listen to their concerns. For their part, right wing figureheads like Glenn Beck and Dana Perino couldn’t resist concern-trolling Zuck about how real diversity means giving equal time to their crackpot nonsense. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal built a great app showing the real problem is Facebook’s Newsfeed being just an echo chamber, regardless of your political leanings.

A computer science professor built a chatbot teaching assistant. And look out yuppies, bots are coming for lawyers.

The Mercury News has an in-depth look at the human cost of ramping up Tesla’s electric car production. Tesla responded by saying they have been cleared of any legal wrongdoing but acknowledge the terrible conditions and abuses of the visa system described and have pledged to do right by individual at the center of the story.

As always, thanks so much for reading, please forward this along to anyone and everyone you think would enjoy it. I adore feedback. Also, I’m still trying to figure out the format for this thing. I feel like this one’s probably too long? Let me know!