The Best of CJR
10+ most popular CJR articles, as voted by our community.
Monitoring the press, tracking the evolving media business & encouraging excellence in journalism since 1961.
CJR on Facebook
Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook
One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With…
CJR on LGBTQIA
Five tips for journalists on covering trans and nonbinary subjects
Get over the pronoun hump. Do it now. I’m annoyed that we’re still talking about pronouns. Not to sound salty, but I came out as genderqueer in the year 1999, when trans politics were still playing…
CJR on Mastodon
Journalists want to recreate Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.
Ever since Elon Musk completed his $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source…
CJR on Media
Journalism has a Davos problem
On Wednesday—Day Three of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—the digital newsroom Semafor came out with the third installment of its “Davos Daily” newsletter, a one-stop template for how…
CJR on Moneyball
“Everything clicks for a different reason”: Why journalism analytics are so hard to interpret
In 2004, journalist Michael Lewis published Moneyball, a bestselling book about how baseball general manager Billy Beane was able to turn around the flailing and cash-poor Oakland Athletics with a…
CJR on Podcasting
Is the podcast bubble bursting?
Shared by 78, including Vincenzo Tremonte, Mark Kaigwa, Charlie Oliver, Thomas Power, Marvin “Polymath but really Just Generalist” Liao
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
The Substackerati
Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?
The infinite scroll
For the sake of this exercise, please imagine it’s another gray midday in winter, months after the end of the World Series and still weeks from the beginning of spring training. The afternoon is…
Facebook is eating the world
Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more...
Very Online
Five journalists on covering the internet in search of meaning, not viral trends
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web that make you smarter, tailored to your interests. is one of more than 10k sources we monitor.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets 5 links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, add to reading list, save to «Made me smarter», «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
How can I report a problem?
When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
Who uses Refind?
100k+ smart people start their day with Refind. To learn something new. To get inspired. To move forward. Our apps have a 4.9/5 rating.
Is Refind free?
Yes, it’s free!
How can I sign up?
Head over to our homepage and sign up by email or with your Twitter or Google account.