Beyoncé Redefines the Word “Quiet”


From the Wall Street Journal:

Beyoncé Releases Latest Album—Quietly

Can we please stop this? This wasn’t some kind of stealth release. It was a brilliant use of viral marketing. Beyoncé and a few of her buddies “quietly” advertised the new album to about ten or twenty million of their closest friends, all of whom thought they were being let in on a secret and immediately went out and crashed the iTunes server farm. It was genius. Even if it only works once, it’s genius.

But quiet? Only if you have a five-year-old’s understanding of human nature. To misquote everyone’s favorite America-hating superhero, it was an awfully loud kind of quiet, man.

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Owned by no one—except you.

We just keep seeing it happen: Newsrooms owned by billionaires and corporations are spinning their own narratives, overwriting the truth, following only stories that keep them in the pocket of those with even more power.

Not here. We’re not owned by anyone. We’re not part of any cult that demands our allegiance to a bottom line. We’ve spoken up and spoken out while other newsrooms changed their stories—or cut them altogether—to keep the C suite happy.

Our mission is to find the truth and amplify it. That’s why we’re independent, nonprofit, and, crucially, funded by readers. The investigations on our website will always be free to read, watch, and listen to, but our newsroom is powered by readers who pitch in what they can so we can keep asking the hard questions.

Can you chip in today?

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