New York’s new gun law has a provision that restricts access to data about gun owners in the state, Christine Haughney writes in The Times. That component was included in the legislation in response to the publication of names and addresses of gun permit holders in two suburban New York counties by The Journal News, a newspaper based in White Plains, N.Y. The decision to print that information with an accompanying map outraged gun owners across the nation and prompted a backlash against the paper’s employees. Now some journalists are lamenting the loss of data previously available as a reporting tool.
The Walt Disney Company is doing everything it can to attract consumers to its troubled interactive division, and now has unveiled a new initiative that for the first time allows users to mix and match characters from its various movie fanchises, Brooks Barnes reports. The new venture, called Infinity, is a video game and action figure platform in which players will be able to take characters from “Pirates of the Caribbean’’ and use them, for instance, in a game with characters from “The Incredibles.’’ Previously, the company had maintained rigid walls between its franchises.
The line between editorial content and what’s known as “advertorial’’ content keeps getting blurrier, and The Atlantic magazine has apologized for taking a step across that line, Brian Stelter and Christine Haughney write. On Monday it published an advertisement from the Church of Scientology that was labeled “sponsor content’’ but in every res! pect looked like a regular blog post on the site. It was removed after reporters started noticing it and pointing it out, and on Tuesday The Atlantic said “It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand.â€
The search tool that Facebook unveiled Tuesday puts it deep into the home territory of Google, Somini Sengupta reports. It is also an effort to “elbow aside’’ other Web services like LinkedIn and Yelp, which provide specific information about subjects like jobs and restaurants. The new function, called graph search, was more than a year in the making and was introduced by Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
