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0	0	0			Charlie Kirk's alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme (The Verge) The Verge: Charlie Kirk's alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme — The suspected shooter left a hodgepodge of extremely online taunts. … Tyler Robinson, apprehended last night in connection to the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk … 2025-09-12 19:25:00 UTC The Verge
0	0	0			ICE agents fatally shoot man after traffic stop in Franklin Park (Chicago Tribune) Chicago Tribune: ICE agents fatally shoot man after traffic stop in Franklin Park — A federal immigration agent fatally shot a man in northwest suburban Franklin Park Friday morning after the agency says the man tried to flee a traffic stop and struck the officer with his vehicle. 2025-09-12 18:50:04 UTC Chicago Tribune
0	0	0			'Why are yall sad?' Teachers, firefighters, officials on leave or fired over Charlie Kirk posts (The Hill) The Hill: ‘Why are yall sad?’ Teachers, firefighters, officials on leave or fired over Charlie Kirk posts — Related Video: GOP Lawmakers Urge BIG TECH To ‘Ban For Life’ Users Celebrating Charlie Kirk's Shooting — (NEXSTAR) - Teachers, firefighters, elected officials and even a cable news contributor … 2025-09-12 18:40:01 UTC The Hill
0	0	0			Suspect in Charlie Kirk shooting turned in by family friend, Utah governor says (Washington Post) Washington Post: Suspect in Charlie Kirk shooting turned in by family friend, Utah governor says — Authorities have identified a suspect in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, potentially capping a two-day manhunt after the brazen shooting in front of a large outdoor audience … 2025-09-12 18:15:00 UTC Washington Post
0	0	0			Breaking Precedent, G.O.P. Changes Rules on Nominees (Michael Gold/New York Times) Michael Gold / New York Times: Breaking Precedent, G.O.P. Changes Rules on Nominees — Senate Republicans used what is known as the nuclear option to break a Democratic blockade of President Trump's nominees, weakening Congress's vetting role. — Senate Republicans on Thursday bulldozed past Senate precedents and changed … 2025-09-12 18:05:02 UTC New York Times
0	0	0			Georgia ICE Raid Netted Workers With Short-Term Business Visas (New York Times) New York Times: Georgia ICE Raid Netted Workers With Short-Term Business Visas — Last week's immigration operation at a battery plant highlighted a tactic that companies use to bring in foreign workers to establish new operations. — Almost 500 people were detained during a raid of a Georgia battery plant owned … 2025-09-12 18:00:01 UTC New York Times
0	0	0			SITE NEWS: Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency Please clap for Techmeme Techmeme turns 20 freaking years old today. This is our self-congratulatory post marking the occasion. Please share, retweet, and offer your sincerest congratulations. And thanks to so many of you for reading us all these years. Now if Techmeme is new to you, here's a short definition: Techmeme is a news aggregator highlighting the latest news reports that tech industry leaders need to be aware of, placed alongside contrasting perspectives from social media and other outlets. Now that's a little boring, so here's a more grandiose description: Techmeme is the one essential news site for tech founders, execs, investors, innovators, writers, and assorted thought leaders. It achieves this the only way possible: by being an aggregator that links out to the best reports on the latest key events in tech, ranks them, and commingles them with the most notable posts from social media and beyond. It's made possible through a unique approach to curation combining algorithms with a team of human editors. The result is a site industry leaders visit daily to update their priors (so to speak) before diving deeper at more specialized journalistic outlets, newsletters, forums like HN or Reddit, and networks like X/LinkedIn/Threads/Bluesky. Unlike an RSS reader, Techmeme is not something you customize. Rather, everyone sees the same Techmeme, so it is the industry's shared context. Techmeme has remained absurdly consistent A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major and uncontested takeaway is that Techmeme has remained paradoxically incredibly consistent, even as technology, the web, and news have changed so profoundly. In 2005 Techmeme was a free, single-page website, continuously ranking and organizing links from news outlets, personal sites, and corporate sites, and it remains so in 2025. Of course this point has been made before, and came up again this past week. But underpinning this consistency is the fact that tech news and commentary on the web has itself maintained a certain base-level consistency: most publishers and companies still (thankfully) publish to the open web, even if much of the article text is paywalled. Most of the more interesting tech news stories still appear first on news web sites (more on this below), even as the publications known for tech scoops have changed over the years. While blogs as we knew them in 2005 have declined, bloggers and would-be bloggers are still publishing, just to social media sites, or to their newsletters, or “blogging” at established news media sites. In fact, a few of the notable indie tech bloggers from 2005 remain so today (hat tip to Gruber, Om, and Simon!) Consistency has not come easy Unfortunately for us, an array of trends has made this consistency quite challenging to maintain. Foremost among these is that crawling news sites has become much more difficult in recent years. Scanning the full text of news articles is important for us because the algorithms that alert our editors to news and organize our home page rely on analyzing that text. While it's challenging enough that a great deal of news is now paywalled, a more serious challenge is that with the rise of LLMs, many websites now simply block all bots except for a small number of search engines. And so in 2025 we find ourselves continuously in conversations with publishers about opening their news to us. Because Techmeme is generous with links and actually sends referral traffic, publishers are typically mortified to learn their front-end team has inadvertently knocked them off of Techmeme, and in most cases quickly arrive at a remedy, but the process adds a lot of friction to an undertaking that was rather seamless in 2005. (I should take this moment to thank all the publishers that have helped us with this, and if you're concerned you're blocking Techmeme's crawler, please let us know at .) Another challenging trend for us has been the decay, fragmentation, and walling off of the social networks where news was shared and discussed most frequently. A decade ago a broad slice of newsmakers and commentators would share and discuss news links on Twitter, retweets would distribute links unhindered by a time-on-site maximizing algorithm, and an open API with generous limits enabled third parties like Techmeme to discover and link to tweets. Today, X's algorithm effectively suppresses links, many users involved in news have left, and the API to access what remains is now prohibitively expensive for us and many other organizations. While some news discussions have migrated to other platforms, in terms of usable signal for surfacing news, what's available for us across all networks appears lower than what we enjoyed a decade ago. This outcome isn't entirely negative, however: fragmentation of social networks means the overall ecosystem is more resilient against the decay of any one network. Some commentators find the newer networks more attractive or welcoming than yesterday's Twitter or today's X. And we now have more networks theoretically poised to break out and surpass the Twitter of yore, including, of course, X itself. (More on those in the next section.) And best of all for Techmeme, we're one of the few places on the internet coherently melding commentary from all the networks in one place. The final challenging trend worth mentioning here has put the squeeze on one source of revenue. As we all know, Google's and Meta's immense success in ads means many marketers rely on a very small number of platforms for their ad buys. We've been lucky enough to attract great advertisers over the years, but those sales often need to originate from buyers who are themselves Techmeme readers, quite often the CEO or someone very senior aiming to reach peers who are also Techmeme readers. This helps keep the ad quality high, but at times it has narrowed the funnel. (Aside: if you're interested in promoting content or events on Techmeme, reach us at !) A surviving and thriving tech press makes our consistency possible One reason our consistency surprises people is because so much has changed in media the past two decades.Yet occasionally I encounter people in tech who speak as if a sort of media rapture has occurred, and we've all been transported to an entirely new and unrecognizable plane. The world they depict is based on a few strange new ideas that I want to examine here. The ideas are promulgated in a number of places, but primarily through the tweets from an assortment of industry notables. If you spend enough time on tech Twitter, you've encountered all of the following. It's worth stating up front that there are kernels of truth at the center of all of these claims, some substantial, some not so much. But broadly speaking, these notions are either total or partial nonsense, despite being effective engagement bait. Let us now dive in! “Tech journalism today is just resentment-fueled score-settling against the wealthier tech class”: The motivation for this is the fact that some reporters and editors really are ideologically hostile to corporations, and their tendency is to focus on the negative. This focus of course comes much easier in recent years given the many aggressive moves by tech companies which have now amassed unprecedented power. But the output from these reporters are narratives still based on facts. And then at the same time, many more reporters occupy different positions on the ideological spectrum. Fundamentally, reporters are careerists whose craft is building narratives based on facts, and the companies paying for the most consequential journalism are profit-seeking outlets often supported by subscribers who work primarily in business. Bloomberg and The Information are not here to destroy Silicon Valley, obviously. They exist to make money through fact-based storytelling. “Tech journalism is dying”: This idea is an extrapolation from the very real decline of the traffic-chasing ad-supported publications that were more prominent in the 2010s, or from imagining tech news outlets have a lot in common with local newspapers. In reality, outlets like Bloomberg, WSJ, The Information, FT, and NYT, and newsletters like Newcomer, Platformer, and Stratechery are doing rather fine financially. You might even say they've found product-market fit. They're also doing well by any reasonable measure of impact, so much so that even strident tech media critics keep sharing screenshots of news articles from tech reporters. “Citizen journalism is the future of media”: The main problem with this claim is “citizen journalism” is ill-defined. While people don't agree on what it means, let's just agree it's great when nonjournalists contribute accurate information to the information space. And let's agree it's great that many barriers to producing journalism have fallen away. But it's doubtful people just posting observations to social media without doing reporting will displace journalism, and if you don't believe me, well, this is something the marketplace will decide in time. “The best media strategy for a founder is to 'go direct'”: The people repeating this mantra are right about two key things: first, to the extent that you can, it's good to translate your vision into a voice that resonates online, because you can then channel that voice into your marketing. And second, it's usually not worth the effort of trying to get announcements for your nascent startup written up on news sites. But missing in a lot of the “go direct” sermonizing is that the latter point has always been the case! There have long been way too many companies for the media to report on in a way that would move the needle, either for you, or for them. An even stranger idea sometimes bundled with “go direct” is that you should never even communicate with journalists. Of course once you operate at a large enough scale, inbound media requests will turn up, and ignoring these is a lost opportunity at best, and reckless at worst, so this kind of advice is, without exaggeration, malpractice. “YouTube and TikTok are making text-based news media irrelevant”: It's true people spend enormous amounts of time today learning about everything on these networks, and that includes technology, and even tech news. Moreover, podcasts (which are usually also hosted on YouTube), have probably even reduced the pressure to blog for some. But an industry rife with purpose-driven news consumers will continue to demand the speed, informational density, and scanability of text-based media. And so a steady supply of text-based news will continue to meet that demand. “X is all you need to stay on top of tech news”: It can certainly feel that way when you dip into high-engagement subcommunities or witness riveting interactions between newsmakers. In particular, subcommunities like “AI Twitter”, which include many industry notables, are so rife with chatter and gossip that news will often break there, or at least surface there very quickly after breaking elsewhere. But these communities are in fact the exception to the rule. There are big and important sectors of the broader tech industry almost completely absent from X day to day. And there are tech stories attracting considerable chatter on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads that are DOA on X. In reality, the news you see on X is a small slice of the short viral head of a long tail of news and news chatter. And this really shouldn't come as a surprise: most people aren't active X users, even in tech, and very few people actually post with any frequency. “Ignore what's on Bluesky or Threads”: If you've heard this, it's probably from someone popular on X who's gotten dogpiled by the fringe left on Bluesky. And to be clear, these dynamics are real, unpleasant, and something I would imagine Bluesky management considers a problem, since repelling notable posters can crimp overall growth. But the typical experience for a typical Bluesky user is not unlike classic Twitter: people follow people they're interested in and interactions are generally positive. Moreover, in part by not imposing the “link penalty”, enough journalists who joined Bluesky in prior years have stuck around that it often feels like the current home of “tech journalism Twitter”, along with the sort of conversations that extend from that. Threads has gotten a bad rap for similar reasons, though with Meta shepherding millions of users each week to the app, the userbase now feels very normie. A lot of journalists and other news pundits in tech consider this an audience they can't ignore, so you'll find tech news-relevant conversations there as well. So while neither network has surpassed X in terms of tech industry news commentary (and both have a long way to go on AI, VC, and crypto chatter), if you care what people say on X, you should keep an eye on the other networks too. To summarize, a bunch of people in tech with a vested interest in essentially becoming the media are hoping you'll believe the world of news dissemination has turned completely upside down. And then conveniently the corners of the internet where they have a foothold just so happen to be the future! But you should in fact believe your own eyes: yes, news has evolved considerably with the internet, but journalists are still very often the earliest to chronicle a lot of what we need to know about how the industry is changing. Not so shockingly, news professionals drive news. And there are networks playing a role in news other than just the one owned by the world's richest guy. So in short, as a lot in media changes, a lot stays the same. And Techmeme's consistency is a product of what's constant in online media. Will Techmeme remain consistent for another 20 years? Honestly, we don't know. Even though we have 20 years behind us, projecting 20 years in the future feels foolhardy. And this has been a tough week to even imagine where our country will be in 20 years. But I can list few general directions we're considering for our continued work over the next few years, and they all build on, and not upend, what we've accomplished: Participation: Recently we've introduced new ways for newsmakers and comms professionals to explicitly tip links. Under every headline on our desktop page an “Add Link Here” button appears when you hover over the news, and we're happy to add any secondary link (LinkedIn posts, tweets, blog posts, etc.) rounding out our aggregation for that story. And while we're fussier about featuring new top-level headlines, we now have a form for tipping those as well. I believe there are many other ways input from users could improve the site and look forward to introducing features to solicit this input. Customization: While every reader of our homepage sees the same Techmeme, for over five years we've offered aggregation services that let companies discover trending or carefully-filtered news in real time. Customers include tech companies of all sizes, including tech giants, as well as VC firms, who are especially thrilled with our portfolio news tracking. If you'd like to find out what we can do for you, email . Expansion: What I haven't yet mentioned here is that alongside Techmeme we operate aggregation sites tracking other news verticals, like Mediagazer for media, and even sites running with no human editors, like memeorandum for US politics. I believe by adding more smarts (particularly LLM-enabled intelligence) across our software platform, adding more quality news verticals over time becomes attainable. It's a tech industry cliche, but I really feel we're at the start of our mission here. So thanks for joining us during our first 20 years, and I hope you'll enjoy what lies ahead. And this concludes our self-absorption — now back to news about other companies! 2025-09-12 17:43:11 UTC
0	0	0			Kirk Killing Suspect in Custody (William Kristol/The Bulwark) William Kristol / The Bulwark: Kirk Killing Suspect in Custody — As we were preparing to send this newsletter, Donald Trump made a surprise announcement during a morning appearance on the Fox & Friends couch: Law enforcement believes it has apprehended the assassin who shot Charlie Kirk on Wednesday. 2025-09-12 17:30:03 UTC The Bulwark
0	0	0			Trump officials to link covid shots to child deaths, alarming career scientists (Washington Post) Washington Post: Trump officials to link covid shots to child deaths, alarming career scientists — The move to link coronavirus vaccines to 25 child deaths alarms career scientists who say the shots have been extensively studied. — just now — Trump health officials plan to link coronavirus vaccines … 2025-09-12 17:10:01 UTC Washington Post
0	0	0			Suspect in Charlie Kirk's killing is identified by officials (NBC News) NBC News: Suspect in Charlie Kirk's killing is identified by officials — Utah Governor Spencer Cox said that a family member of Robinson's reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office. — Officials have identified the person accused of fatally shooting … 2025-09-12 16:45:03 UTC NBC News
0	0	0			Schumer readying to fight for health care in government funding battle (Washington Post) Washington Post: Schumer readying to fight for health care in government funding battle — The apparent red line from the Senate Democratic leader comes six months after Schumer stood down in the face of another government funding battle. — Just now — Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer … 2025-09-12 16:40:01 UTC Washington Post
0	0	0			Man, 34, has tooth implanted in eye to restore his vision (A. Pawlowski/NBC Boston) A. Pawlowski / NBC Boston: Man, 34, has tooth implanted in eye to restore his vision … Brent Chapman can see again after doctors pulled out one of his teeth, flattened it, drilled a hole in it, placed a lens inside and implanted the tooth in one of his eyes. — It seems bizarre, but the complex operation … 2025-09-12 15:45:01 UTC NBC Boston
0	0	0			Charlie Kirk 'killer' identified as Tyler Robinson after assassination in Utah (Daily Mail) Daily Mail: Charlie Kirk ‘killer’ identified as Tyler Robinson after assassination in Utah — The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Listen to the latest on the Daily Mail podcast — The suspect in Charlie Kirk's assassination has been identified as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident. 2025-09-12 15:30:01 UTC Daily Mail
0	0	0			The Right Wants a Reichstag Fire (Thomas Zimmer/Democracy Americana) Thomas Zimmer / Democracy Americana: The Right Wants a Reichstag Fire — An audio version of this piece will be added by Saturday morning. — Quickly, before we get started: For the last time, I promise, I want to start with a sincere apology: I am very sorry about the prolonged silence of the past few weeks. 2025-09-12 15:15:03 UTC Democracy Americana
0	0	0			Trump Says He Will Send the National Guard to Memphis Next (Emily Cochrane/New York Times) Emily Cochrane / New York Times: Trump Says He Will Send the National Guard to Memphis Next — The murder rate has dropped in Memphis, but it still struggles with some of the highest crime rates in the country. — President Trump on Friday said that he would send National Guard troops to Memphis, making … 2025-09-12 14:45:01 UTC New York Times
0	0	0			Tennessee Governor Working with Trump to Send National Guard to Memphis (Emily Cochrane/New York Times) Emily Cochrane / New York Times: Tennessee Governor Working with Trump to Send National Guard to Memphis — The murder rate has dropped in Memphis, but it still struggles with some of the highest crime rates in the country. — President Trump on Friday said that he would send National Guard troops to Memphis … 2025-09-12 14:45:01 UTC New York Times
0	0	0			Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Identified as Tyler Robinson, 22: Report (Dan Ladden-Hall/The Daily Beast) Dan Ladden-Hall / The Daily Beast: Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Identified as Tyler Robinson, 22: Report — TURNED IN BY FAMILY — President Donald Trump announced that a person had been taken into custody after a days-long manhunt. — The person arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk … 2025-09-12 14:35:07 UTC The Daily Beast
0	0	0			Confusion, Anger, Relief: Korean Engineer Tells of Week in U.S. ICE Detention (Wall Street Journal) Wall Street Journal: Confusion, Anger, Relief: Korean Engineer Tells of Week in U.S. ICE Detention — More than 300 employees at Hyundai battery plant return home after Georgia immigration raid — INCHEON, South Korea—Cho Young-hee, a 44-year-old South Korean engineer, said his first reaction was confusion … 2025-09-12 14:30:05 UTC Wall Street Journal
0	0	0			Tyler Robinson, 22-year-old from Utah, ID'd as Charlie Kirk shooting suspect after father 'turned him in' — Trump: 'We have him' (New York Post) New York Post: Tyler Robinson, 22-year-old from Utah, ID'd as Charlie Kirk shooting suspect after father ‘turned him in’ — Trump: ‘We have him’ — President Trump announced early Friday that a suspect for Charlie Kirk's assassination was turned in by his father — with law enforcement sources telling … 2025-09-12 14:05:00 UTC New York Post
0	0	0			Trump says he'll send the National Guard to Memphis to address crime concerns (Associated Press) Associated Press: Trump says he'll send the National Guard to Memphis to address crime concerns — President Donald Trump said Friday he'll send the National Guard to Memphis to address crime concerns there with the support of the mayor and the governor. Trump, a Republican, said on Fox News Channel … 2025-09-12 13:40:00 UTC Associated Press
0	0	0			Trump Drug Boat Bombing Takes Darker Turn as Damning New Info Emerges (New Republic) New Republic: Trump Drug Boat Bombing Takes Darker Turn as Damning New Info Emerges — Questions are mounting about President Trump's decision to bomb a small boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. The administration says these were drug cartel members who posed a threat to the United States … 2025-09-12 13:05:00 UTC New Republic
0	0	0			Suspected shooter arrested in Charlie Kirk killing, Trump says (Axios) Axios: Suspected shooter arrested in Charlie Kirk killing, Trump says — The suspected shooter in the killing of Charlie Kirk is in custody, President Trump said on Fox & Friends on Friday morning. … - “With a high degree of certainty, we have him in custody,” Trump said. 2025-09-12 13:01:14 UTC Axios
0	0	0			People killed in US boat strike were not Tren de Aragua, Venezuela minister says (Reuters) Reuters: People killed in US boat strike were not Tren de Aragua, Venezuela minister says — Investigations show none of 11 dead were drug traffickers-Venezuela minister — Trump administration has provided scant information about strike — White House insists those killed were ‘narcoterrorists’ 2025-09-12 12:05:00 UTC Reuters
0	0	0			Why Hakeem Jeffries hasn't been able to bend Democrats to his will on redistricting (Politico) Politico: Why Hakeem Jeffries hasn't been able to bend Democrats to his will on redistricting … After a post-2020 Census revision, only three of the state's 17 congressional districts are represented by Republicans. But up to four Democratic incumbents could face tougher races if those GOP-held seats … 2025-09-12 11:50:00 UTC Politico
0	0	0			UC Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names in antisemitism probe (Nanette Asimov/San Francisco Chronicle) Nanette Asimov / San Francisco Chronicle: UC Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names in antisemitism probe — UC Berkeley has given the Trump administration the names of 160 students, faculty and staff and information about their “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism” to comply with a federal investigation … 2025-09-12 06:10:01 UTC San Francisco Chronicle