Reads from Zefyr Lisowski, David Gessner, Susie Cagle, Brendan I. Koerner, and Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner.
tiktok
Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era
“The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.”
The Albanian Town that TikTok Emptied
“’It’s like the boys have gone extinct,’ say women in Kukes. They’ve all left for London, chasing dreams of fast cars and easy money sold on social media.”
The Struggle Is Awesome
“Erin Azar’s back-of-the-pack antics made her a TikTok star—and inspired millions of runners to forget about speed and just get out there.”
BookTok Is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform
“When I scroll TikTok, I see creativity, joy, pleasure, energy, and a contagious enthusiasm for books.”
Very Online
CJR fellow Karen Maniraho talks with five very online journalists — Ryan Broderick, Jason Parham, Taylor Lorenz, Rebecca Jennings, and Rusty Foster — about what it’s like to cover tech and internet culture today, how they navigate through viral moments and algorithms, and how they look for meaning in a constantly noise-polluted, chaotic space. Because […]