News
Welcome, BuzzFeed Business
BuzzFeed just launched their new business section, which will be edited by Peter Lauria, formerly of Thomson Reuters. BuzzFeed gets a lot of guff sometimes, but I appreciate that they integrate serious, reported pieces in with their goofy, fun lists. The business section’s new staff includes former reporters from The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times Group. Welcome!
Smart Phone Smart Shopping
An app to help you vote with your dollars. Scan an item and Buycott will show you its corporate family tree. Join user campaigns to help you avoid products with GMO or buy products that support causes you believe in. Made me think of Josh Eidelson’s rule for supporting boycotts: he does it when the workers have called for a boycott of the company.
Women and Financial Knowledge
The Times interviewed Billfold pal Helaine Olen, Julie Nelson, the chairwoman of the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Tahira K. Hira, a professor of personal finance and consumer economics at Iowa State University and a few others about how women know more about money than what the financial services industry claims. It’s on point.
Gates Back on Top
Bill Gates is the richest man today.
An Investigation of Installment Loans
ProPublica and Marketplace looked into the world of installment loans and investigated how lenders make money off of selling high-interest loans to low-income Americans.
Unnecessary Surveys
Uh … why is this question even being posed to anyone?
Markets in Everything When There Shouldn’t Be Markets in Everything
“Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned. The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.”
The TIME Cover is Upsetting, But the Video, Oh God the Video
By now you have probably seen this week’s cover of TIME and run away screaming. The story, by Joel Stein, is behind a paywall, but I have taken a look at it and in case you were wondering, yes, it’s what you expect it to be.
A Village Wins the Lottery
One of my favorite things as a reader is to see a short, newsy story reported in the newspaper turn into a nice, in-depth magazine feature a year or so later (I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things I do outside of this blog is work at Longreads).
