Edited: I’m really disappointed to see all the accusations of sloppiness and plagiarism in this book. I’ve not chosen to change my original rating, but I will be interested to see how it all plays out.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster and Netgalley for the advanced copy of this nonfiction book. This is a wonderful work of research addressing the digital revolution in media and its specific impacts on BuzzFeed, Vice, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Thank you to Jill Abramson for writing a meaningful and important book. It was fascinating to go behind the scenes at the start of the newer companies (and shocking) and somewhat heartbreaking to watch the struggles of the mainstream papers. I am a print and digital Washington Post subscriber and consider it my local paper and feel very grateful to read the paper every morning (and thanks Jeff Bezos for that). I feel like it makes me smarter. I am also a newly returned print and digital subscriber to The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, which I signed up for after a lapse, after the murder of the Capital staff last summer. I think reading this will make me more aware of the tactics that all these companies now use to grab your eyes and hopefully be a little smarter about my own engagement. Also, it gave me some sympathy for The Washington Post who I had seen “lowering” their standards (for example, clickbait-y type things online, sponsoring speaker events with advertisers) to compete in this new world; I understand better that they really have no choice. I highly recommend this book, although it can be a bit dry in parts, it’s very thorough and all important.