One amazing thing that is happening right now (in the western world) is how we have almost reached the point where gender equality is becoming the norm (although the US is lagging behind).
When it comes to gender equality, there are two parts to it. There is the equal opportunity part where, if you want to, you can do it regardless of gender. And there is the equal society part, where, for instance, there are just as many female CEOs as male CEOs.
The latter is obviously much harder to achieve than the former.
Take something like racing. If you…
Just a quick note to journalists covering the #MuslimBan: You are letting the day-to-day minutia distract you from the real story.
Remember what the original Executive Order said? Let me remind you:
When the original ban was first announced back on January 28, 2017, it was to block travel from certain countries in order to give federal agencies the time to review immigration procedures.
And this fact was reported by all the media, big and small. As reported by the Press Herald:
Trump ordered a four-month suspension to America’s broader refugee program. The suspension is intended to provide time to…
As a media analyst, life on Twitter these days is difficult. There is so much negativity, so much bigotry, hatred, abuse, racism, and outright insanity. As someone tweeted a few days ago:
“Social media has been destroyed by Trump.”
And he is right. It has. At least for us working in the media. Twitter has become a cesspool to the point where it has an impact on both my personal mood and my productivity, because I get so frustrated by it every morning.
One of the first things I saw this morning was this:
What the frak?
First of all…
Did you see this news story from earlier this week?
As comedy writer Simon Blackwell put it:
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
You know what’s happening here? We are now just one step away, as another comedian put it, from “forcing certain people to wear a special armband so we know who they are. You know, perhaps a star? A yellow one?”
What the actual frak?
Have we completely lost it? How is this happening in the year 2016? Isn’t this supposed to be the age of enlightenment?
This is so far beyond anything that is even remotely…
Not a day goes by these days without yet another story of a male executive making sexist remarks about women, their role in society and their abilities. And when I say male executive, I really mean old white males who are in a position of power.
Today we came across two such examples. First, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi was forced to resign early (he would have left the company anyway in May 2017). And then GAP launched a campaign where boys are encouraged to dream about their future while girls are apparently only supposed to look pretty.
…
Here is a weird little thing to think about. How big is the New York City really? How big is any city?
Well, we could take out a map and measure the geographic space that it occupies. This will tell you that New York City is about 789 km² when we measure the land of the city itself. And you can then compare that number to the used-land of other cities to get a list of the ‘biggest cities in the world’.
Right?
Nope. Wrong.
The problem is that cities aren’t flat. Most cities have multi-story buildings or even skyscrapers…
Earlier this week, Jessica Guynn, Silicon Valley reporter from USA Today tweeted:
The problem, however, is that this isn’t what we hear from the Instagrammers. Instead, I am hearing from Instagrammers that they are having a harder time with engagement overall.
So how can we have these two very conflicting messages at the same time, and why do we also see this on all the other social channels that have started ranking our streams (like Facebook, Twitter, etc)?
Well, it’s actually quite simple. Think about it like this.
Imagine that you have a big supermarket, where each person buys…
The big news today, of course, is that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been nominated for President by the Democrats. This marks the first time in US history that a major political party has a female leader. And it welcomes the US into what is now considered ‘a normal thing’ in the rest of the western world.
However, many US newspapers seem to be stuck in the old ‘man’s world’ of the 1990s. For some weird reason that I do not understand, all the major newspapers either didn’t prominently show Hillary on their covers, or worse, showed pictures of men instead.
…
There is a fascinating thing happening in our world today, in that we are in the middle of the transformation between the disconnected and the connected. And it has a serious impact on the short term future of our political focus.
If we look at all the latest elections (across the western world), both those already completed and those still underway, there is a common trend across all of them.
This trend is that there is a tremendous growth in xenophobic nationalism, combined with an increase in non-democratic ideals, all for the sake of protecting the past. But, at the…
The always amazing Derek Muller, from Veritasium, recently published a great explainer video about how we are all susceptible to “cognitive ease”.
Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier.
This has a lot of implications in terms of happiness, relationships, and life choices, but for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face with…
Thomas Baekdal
Author, Professional Writer, Magazine Publisher and Media Analyst. www.baekdal.com
