For the first time ever, Medium is becoming more than just a blogging platform. The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note taking and journaling with something resembling a private social network. The app is meant to get you writing more, and help you share that writing with friends and fans. And it's part of a much bigger idea about blogging, and a much broader thesis about the state of the internet.

"I don't think we've actually had a launch of anything important since 2017," Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine tells me over Zoom, a few days ahead of the company's biggest launch in apparently almost a decade. That was when …

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Twenty-five years ago, Kevin Lewandowski founded Discogs, arguably the destination online for obsessive vinyl collectors and music nerds of all stripes. It is a marketplace for buying and selling records, obviously, but it's also become so much more. It's a shockingly comprehensive database that covers not just albums and singles, but all the various versions and pressings. It's a really fun rabbit hole to disappear down when you're trying to figure out what obscure pressing of Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste or Psalm 69 you had in high school, because you definitely blasted the cover of "Lay Lady Lay" all the time and 100 p …

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The New York Times Company is in talks"exclusive negotations" to acquire Letterboxd, the social network for film lovers, for around $330 million, The New York Times reports. The Times Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and A24 were all recently rumored to be among those interested in buying Letterboxd.

The negotiations with the Times Company have included the potential for Letterboxd's co-founders to stay in charge but report to a Times Company executive. Letterboxd would likely remain standalone for the "foreseeable future," according to the NYT. The company would also integrate the Times Company's ad tech.

NYT spokesperson Charlie Sta …

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Salon launched 31 years ago as one of the first online-only news magazine outlets, and it announced today in an unsigned post that it's ceasing publication.

The company said that the "business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years," and it decided that its publishing model is "no longer sustainable." It didn't go into detail about why, but many websites are grappling with "Google Zero" and the impact of AI tools. When reached for comment, Salon general manager Amanda Wolfe pointed The Verge to today's announcement post.

"Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happene …

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X, Threads, and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos' case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It's all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise.

It's unclear how viral these posts are, but they're prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed …

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