Next week, the musical world will experience a huge event: eight years after their last album, master of dance music Daft Punk will drop their much-hyped album, Random Access Memories. Music website Pitchfork has honored that with an amazing, immersive feature that evokes the immersive nature of the buzzy New York Times piece, “Snowfall.”

Offering a rare glimpse into the largely private world of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and it achieves it best with strong visual elements that only new media can provide. Taking advantage of HTML5 and GIFs, the layout of the piece flows smartly and shows a lot more editorial flair than the standard feature.

Read more

The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army has had its fair share of huge hacking attempts. With propaganda messages spilling out from outlets like the Associated Press and The Guardian, hacks from the group have become more prevalent than ever before on media outlets.

However, they made a mistake earlier this month: hacking The Onion. The online parody newspaper seemed an unlikely target of the SEA, but the result was very similar to other outlets — multiple tweets promoting Assad and the triumph of the SEA. Most outlets who have been victims of an SEA attack have reacted by merely announcing that it happened.

That wasn’t enough for The Onion’s tech team, which decided to break down every level of SEA’s multilayer phishing attack and describe to the public, in great detail, how the SEA managed to find its way to The Onion’s accounts.

Read more

Would you ever let a subject put your interview on Youtube for everyone to see? That’s what Chad Witacre, the founder of online gift exchange program Gittip requests for each and every one of his interviews — something he likes to call an “Open Interview.”

The philosophy behind an open interview, to Witacre, is supremely simple: as a transparent company with an accessible open source API and clear funding partners, it only makes sense to bring out discussions with the media to the general Internet community and ensure users that there’s literally nothing to hide.

“With journalists I’m much more comfortable requesting openness,” Witacre writes in his article on Medium. “They’re writing for the public record, and it benefits readers and keeps us both honest to have the raw material on record as well.”

Read more

Last Thursday, the New York Times released a bleak report that indicated weak revenues throughout the first quarter of 2013. But bleaker still is the dismal reporting from the paywall: this quarter saw the weakest growth from its digital subscriber base, raising just 5.6% to 676,000 total users.

The new subscriber base for the Times has slowed considerably year-over-year, but this is the first time that growth dipped under 10%.

This graph, developed by Quartz, shows the progression from the last year:

Read more

The Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism announced a new program today aimed at measuring media impact. With $3.25 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lear Center Media Impact Project hopes to help news outlets and journos understand engagement on a deeper level. Sure, journalists can measure engagement by number of retweets or Facebook ‘Likes.’ But just because many people retweeted a headline doesn’t mean that the story will promote change. (Especially if they haven’t even read it.)

“The metrics that have been used for this have been astonishingly primitive,” Martin Kaplan, director of the Lear Center, told The New York Times. The center is in the process of assembling a team of journos, analytics experts and social scientists to figure out how media affects the behavior of consumers. According to a post on the Knight Blog, the project aims to: Read more