News Genius
Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen has, with others, annotated NPR’s much-shared “Internet is coming to NPR!” memo on News Genius, the news-annotation site attached to Rap Genius, in which Andreessen is an investor.
Andreessen uses the platform to praise NPR (“The memo is dated April 1994 which means that NPR was on to this earlier than a lot of other organizations. That is the same month Netscape was incorporated”), to zing NPR (“‘We know about all of those other services like MOSAIC but we’re not going to give you those.’ This is the kind of attitude, widespread at the time, that has since led to the collapse of credibility of corporate IT in many organizations”) and to remember the old days (“In 1994, large organizations considered it sensible to have only a single PC attached to the Internet. You would have to stand in line to use it, and you would have to be happy you had that much”).
In March, Andreessen contributed to News Genius’ annotation of Newsweek’s entire Satoshi Nakamoto article. News Genius Executive Editor Liz Fosslien told Poynter a good News Genius annotation “really adds to a piece” and is “supposed to be entertaining. To me a lot of News Genius is not just informing but making people excited about the news.”
