You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about...

Upworthy is barely over two years old, and it’s among the top 50 most visited sites in the United States. But its perception among the self-involved media discussion class is entirely defined by its headlines. Those headlines typically reference a...

First, some disclaimers: I’m writing this as I sit a few feet away from Medium’s NYC team. (I even asked them for tech support while writing this!) Ev Williams, founder of Medium, is an old friend of mine, whom I became a fan of as I was the first...

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most Americans. Whether it’s a radio broadcast, a local TV station going to commercials, or the...

Oh, there’s been lots of chatter on the Internet this week! Where all did our conversations show up? Well, I’ll tell you. Pegged to the release of Jessica Valenti’s new book Why Have Kids, I (somewhat inexplicably!) participated in an NY Daily News...

I was very happy to see this morning that Fred Wilson had shared his thoughts on inclusivity, building off of my earlier post You Can’t Start the Revolution From a Country Club. Fred gets to the heart of the matter: I have learned the power of...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve been talking about here. My August column for Wired, talking about Microsoft’s return to its...

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my...

Lots of nice responses to my plea to stop publishing web pages yesterday! Here’s some highlights: Dave Winer said I should credit him for a lot of the ideas in the post. I’m eager to grant his point, so please do know: Dave articulated a lot of the...

Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps. The most popular of those apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr and others, are primarily focused on a single, simple stream that offers a river of news which users can easily scroll...

Congrats to Matt Mullenweg on ten years of blogging. I say it half-jokingly every time someone I know observes the decade anniversary of their blogging, but there really are key lessons about this medium that I didn’t figure out until I’d been doing...

If there were one lesson I’d want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I’ve said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you’re in, know the history of those who’ve done your kind of...

On Sunday, I interviewed Nick Denton at SXSW about Gawker Media, commenting culture on the web, and a good bit of the history of professional blogging. In advance of the conversation, I began a conversation with Elizabeth Spiers, Choire Sicha,...

Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it’s remarkable how much money they’ve been able to funnel into the coffers of the liberal media institutions they...

Andy Rooney died last night. I find myself crestfallen about this because I’d spent the last few years trying, off and on, to get in touch with him for the chance to thank him for his influence on my work. I’d even hoped to interview him for this...

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece called if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen, about how your thoughts, ideas and conversations need a place to live permanently over time if they’re going to inspire a useful discourse. And while...

Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?“, the driving inspiration behind much of what happens on the modern web. It was...

Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it...

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some...

Here are some articles that have recently gotten attention amongst media obsessives. They are all fundamentally flawed: A list of the Top 25 newspapers on Twitter from Journalistics An expanded list of 200 U.S. newspapers, sorted by their Twitter...

From the list of “things I thought I’d never see”, Karl Pearson-Cater (he and I were colleagues about a decade ago) posted a great job listing at MinnPost, which lists the following requirement: You know the difference between an “em-dash” and an...

Today, in a Wired interview about Instapaper, Marco Arment offered up: “People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we...

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine...

There’s an odd tendency in web culture to see all features as obvious, even inevitable. While most of the artifacts of our computing experience have been invented recently, in living memory, we treat them as if they existed centuries ago and that the...

In my blog here, I’m mostly a textual dude. I’ve made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I’m a writer. But today, today! We’re going all futuristic streaming internet video with it. If you like it, then maybe...

The short version: Gourmet Live, the new iPad app that reimagines Gourmet as a sort of massively multiplayer magazine, is live. I’ve been working on this for the past six months, and I’m enormously proud of it, so if you’ve got an iPad, you should go...

Even more fun news! Today, I’m thrilled to announce the other big project I’ve been working on: Activate. It’s a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (you know him not just as one of the most established names in tech/media consulting, but also...

I’m not a Democrat; I don’t much care about the scorekeeping of who has more seats in any given chamber of Congress. But I do think there are things that need fixing in this country, and one of the most important is acknowledging when things are...

Just a quick roundup of some recent conversations I’ve been having around the web: Fast Company interviewed me about applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to government. I’m always happy when I can mention my love of New York City and pop music while also...

People who are into journalism and newspapers and the web and the death of print have been all a-twitter over the NY Times story today about the triCityNews, a little alt-weekly in Monmouth County, New Jersey. I spent a good bit of time in Monmouth...

In his post this weekend, Rex Sorgatz points out that “mainstream media is hard”. It’s a truth I know firsthand — I used to work both in the music industry and at a newspaper, and still get the chance to work directly with the people at the largest...

I’ve been wanting a portable magazine reader device for ages (everyone focuses on ebooks, but my attention span is too short) so I have to point out Texterity’s magazines for the iPhone, especially because so many magazines that I like are already...

From eWeek’s “Upcoming” section, which I’d praised a few weeks ago, comes this interview with Java creator James Gosling. The key quote, for me: Of Google, Gosling said: “I guess part of me has almost a moral problem with, ‘What do you mean the...

The New York Times is removing the payment barrier from its TimesSelect content. Hooray! I pundified* incorrectly about this two years ago when they launched TimesSelect — go look and marvel at my foolishness! Update:Andre points out that this is...

I’d intended to post a correction to this NY Times story’s recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermittent blogger, Jason Kottke has already done the legwork. For my part, here’s Greg Knauss’ post...

I hate the abbreviation “MSM”. It’s almost always used by those who are lacking in perspective. We’re all either too lazy to actually differentiate between the technologies and types of media, or just don’t know much about media beyond our emotional...

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to write posts for some of our dozens of company-run blogs. I’m particularly pleased with two that went up today: Step Away From Your Computer: As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging,...

Another great Wall Street Journal online debate: Is ‘Web 2.0’ Another Bubble? David Hornik and Todd Dagres’ excellent back-and-forth was unfortunately overshadowed by the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, but it’s well worth the...

It’s almost like all I do is talk about blogging all day. Debbie Weil hosts the Corporate Blogging show on VoiceAmerica’s business channel, and the other day we recorded a pretty interesting hour-long conversation. From Debbie’s description of the...

In case it isn’t obvious enough by now, contemporary newspapers should be thinking of information presentation in the context of applications, not just as documents. Or, to re-use an idea I first wrote about five years ago, sometimes journalism is...

About a month ago, Fortune‘s Jeffrey O’Brien interviewed Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, and pulled the conversation’s most memorable quote for the headline: “Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more...

I don’t know exactly what the significance of this realization is to me, but I thought I’d share. The debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer about Microsoft and innovation, on the Wall Street Journal’s website, is the best thing I think I’ve...