There sure are plenty of perks that come with working in media in NYC. You get free shit slung at you from every direction! Why just the other week we were invited to eat for free at a restaurant where LAN Airlines was planning a surprise publicity stunt in which every customer would be given a free roundtrip airplane ticket to "a destination of their choice" in South America. We were invited to sit at the LAN VIP table and share this truly exciting news with our readers! Wouldn't you enjoy reading about people you don't know getting fabulous prizes? more ›

Ten years ago we had to explain to the olds what a blog is, and this headline in the Times implies that in another twenty years we'll have to explain to the kids what a blog was. A NIGHTMARE. In an article titled, "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter," the Times points to a Pew study from December about Milliennials' Internet use, and concludes that blogging is so over, because it's all about Facebook and Twitter. Then the article goes on to contradict the headline's premise that blogs are on the wane. Some things never change, like editors' determination to match the facts to a trendy title. more ›

Are you a die-hard baseball fan? Does the concept of watching every single game in a season not fill you with dread, confusion and self-loathing? If so, then you are the perfect candidate for MLB's Dreamjob program. more ›

A Carnegie Mellon research team specializing in human-computer interaction is conducting an experiment to see if they can create "an automated system for producing quality journalism using an army of untrained workers." Using the Amazon.com "Mechanical Turk" crowd-sourcing marketplace, the experiment, dubbed "My Boss Is A Robot," will attempt to produce a 500-word article on a newly-released scientific paper. An automated software system will use the unskilled workers on Mechanical Turk, assigning them tasks like reading the abstract and identifying the most interesting aspects. Hm, this all sounds very familiar...: more ›

Listen up: If you take your passion for Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship to an extreme that includes impersonation and anonymous online commenting, you might get sentenced to six months in prison. Lawyer Raphael Golb, who was found guilty of charges including identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment when trying to defend his father's theory on the Dead Sea Scrolls' origins. Golb's attorney Ron Kuby was outraged, saying he'd appeal and added that Manhattan DA Cy Vance's office essentially "asked for a term of up to four years in an Upstate prison for first degree blogging." Hey, you do the crime, you do the time! more ›

You can take away a man's freedom, but you can't take the will to blog: a little less than a month since starting his year-long prison sentence at Rikers, everyone's favorite twitter user, Lil Wayne, re-emerged on Friday with a new blog (and better editing skills). He explains that the site was set up so he could thank his F's (fans, friends and family) for sticking by him, and also so he can directly respond to fans who send him mail (and made the critically-aborted Rebirth a hit): more ›

Archbishop Timothy Dolan is on the information superhighway—the leader of the New York Archdiocese has a blog called The Gospel in the Digital Age, where he tackles things like sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (today's entry is an op-ed he submitted to the NY Times, which declined it) and baseball—"It’s been hard for this bishop to be against angels, but fortunately that crisis of conscience has passed with the Yankees 5-2 victory last night over the Los Angeles Angels, giving them their 40th American League pennant and sending the Bronx Bombers back to the World Series." more ›

Six months into her job at an NYC law firm, a woman who would only identify herself as "Karin" was terminated. She relocated to St. Louis, Mo., and began studying for the bar exam while staying busy with a food blog, STL Meal Deals. Money was tight; she was living on $405 a week from unemployment benefits from New York, so she thought she'd try generating a little side money by signing up for Google AdSense, which pays bloggers to host ads on their sites and sends checks when their earnings hit $100. It was a pittance that would cost her dearly. more ›

The judge presiding over the trial of legendary philanthropist Brooke Astor's son told potential jurors to go off the grid if they are selected. Supreme Justice Kirke Bartley said, "I understand there is a temptation to review [news] stories. You are not to conduct research...particularly on the Internet... Blogging, BlackBerrys, whatever," are not allowed. The lawyer for Anthony Marshall, who is accused of conspiring to take millions from his ailing mother's estate, said, "There have been reports from all over about jurors Twittering and blogging." In the meantime, the 82-year-old defendant was using a cane: "I’m a little wobbly, that’s why I’ve got the cane. Sometimes I can get around without it, but when I do something like this, I really need a cane.” more ›

In a world of Julia Allisons, personal blogs about personal relationships have become the norm; the Reality TV of the internet. But what happens when these tell-all bloggers grow up? For better or worse, they continue their sagas online. more ›