By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>

Oct. 12, 2016: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail.com.

1. Yahoo: We were just following orders: Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the Washington Post, eviscerates Yahoo (rightly) for secretly letting the government read your emails. It’s a sordid tale of corporate cravenness, especially when balanced against the far-more principled stand of Apple.
2. Can an app making staying in touch too easy?: “Engagement” is a word heard constantly in newsrooms. But is there a downside to creating apps that promise to engage ever more easily? Are they leading to commoditization of “warm feelings,” as suggested by Kaveh Waddell in his piece for The Atlantic. Are they perhaps even increasing disengagement? Interesting reflections in a piece about a new app called Thoughts.
3. When social media becomes a newsroom’s digital strategy: The strained relationship between newsrooms and platforms such as Facebook has been mostly framed in a binary way — good or bad, in or out. But Greg Piechota of the Harvard Business School takes a much more nuanced view — or views. A newsroom’s relationship with platforms should be part of a broader business strategy, and levels of engagement with platforms should vary accordingly, he writes. An interesting look that encourages editors to take a much hard look at what they really want before they decide on how to deal with platforms.

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Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.