Matt Stempeck

April 2012

  • Gloomy Fans Report the First Red Sox Win of the Year

    (Or, A peak into the psyche of one of the most negative fan bases in the country)

    This week’s Participatory News assignment is to report on breaking news via citizen media. Since I couldn’t be in Toronto for tonight’s Red Sox game, I decided to see if I could follow along via Twitter. This report was written entirely from the #redsox and #jays hashtags on Twitter, with occasional glances at theScore’s liveblog. I covered the event from the perspective of fans watching the game live and on TV, rather than relying on direct coverage like MLB.tv, TV, or radio. Almost, if not all, of the information here was attained by following social media. I censored most of the bad stuff, but the tweets below contain some sports fan humor. (more…)

  • Shit Tech Companies Say, When Laying Off Thousands of Employees

    The Next Web pulled together snippets of the press releases tech companies share when laying off thousands of employees. I removed the specific company names (to focus on common language) and created a quick word cloud:

    Word Cloud

    Not surprisingly, the not-great news of “our business has to changed at the scale of firing thousands of people who were once necessary” is frequently spun into “we’re pro-actively realigning our business to be even better in a modern global industry!” There are so many positive words in here! Perhaps the fired employees could benefit from this strategy, as well, by incorporating some of this language into their resumes. They didn’t get laid off, they aggressively realigned their position in a global market.