Bodyguards
The New York Times’ Jason Horowitz reports on the roles of former Obama campaign titans David Axelrod and Jim Messina, who are lined up on opposite sides in the United Kingdom’s upcoming national elections. He writes, “As more former aides turn their affiliation with the president into lucrative consulting arrangements, the Battle of Britain crystallizes a concern among some Democrats over whether those most central to Mr. Obama’s rise should be expected in their private business to stand for his public policies and values. And if they are not, some of the president’s supporters wonder what exactly it means to work for Mr. Obama in the first place.”
Horowitz notes, “while Mr. Messina found former associates generous with their time, Democratic analytics firms have been less so. Several turned down offers to work with him on Mr. Cameron’s race.”
The Federal Trade Commission issued a new report on the data broker industry and is calling on Congress to give people greater protection from the collection and sharing of their digital data.
Micah Lee, First Look Media’s “digital bodyguard,” gets profiled by Mashable. Notably, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports, “First Look controls its own email and chat servers. This gives Lee and the rest of the company control and prevents the U.S. government from going to a third party and subpoenaing First Look’s email records without the company’s knowledge.”
The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, takes her paper’s Book Review to task for assigning Michael Kinsley the job of reviewing Glenn Greenwald’s new book. She writes, “there’s a lot about this piece that is unworthy of the Book Review’s high standards, the sneering tone about Mr. Greenwald, for example; he is called a ‘go-between’ instead of a journalist and is described as a ‘self-righteous sourpuss.’” She adds, “editing ought to point out gaping holes in an argument, remove ad hominem language and question unfair characterizations; that didn’t happen here.”
In Douglas Rushkoff’s recent Frontline documentary “Generation Like,” the media theorist (and PDM friend) expressed concern that today’s teens don’t even know what the phrase “sell out” means.
In Medium, author of the new book It’s Complicated (and PDM friend) danah boyd explains why: there’s no “reigning empire” in the culture business anymore than anyone could “sell out” to.
Skype Translator, offering near real-time audio translation, will be available before the end of 2014, reports Gurdeep Pall, corporate vice president of Skype and Lync at Microsoft. It could lead to big changes in how the world learns, conducts diplomacy, and connects for business as well as friendship.