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Where did 2017 go? Into Backchannel

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From July through Thanksgiving this year I worked with Steven Levy, Jessi Hempel, and their team at Backchannel as an editor — an opportunity that became available while executive editor Sandra Upson was on leave. I’ve been around enough online media shops to recognize the fine hum of a great editorial outfit, and this was definitely the feeling at Backchannel, which now operates as a sort of magazine-within-a-magazine at Wired.

I’ve actually been writing for Backchannel since Steven and Sandra started it at Medium — and I’m proud of early pieces I wrote for them on the nature of the blockchain and corporate programming languages. But this was a chance to edit and write at the same time, which has always been my favorite mode of work. As this gig concludes, I want to share a brief recap of the stories I wrote this year — if for nothing else, to help me find them again!

The Fashion App Founder With a Pocket Full of Visas
Purva Gupta talks about what it’s like to be an immigrant leading a startup. (11/22/17)

Taxes on Tech Need an Overhaul — But Not Like This
Taxing stock options on vesting is probably a dumb idea, but let’s talk about ways tax policy could encourage companies to make good on options’ original spread-the-wealth promise. (11/15/17)

The Lean Startup Pioneer Wants Everyone to Think Like a Founder
A conversation with Eric Ries about his new book, The Startup Way. (11/8/17)

The End of the Cult of the Founder
The Silicon Valley founder is uniquely ill-prepared to deal with complex political, social, and economic problems. (11/8/17)

Why Artificial Intelligence Is Still Waiting For Its Ethics Transplant
A conversation with Kate Crawford. (11/1/17)

Burning Memories: Rethinking Digital Archives After the Napa Fire
What artifacts survive, what information endures, and what can you do? (10/25/17)

This Techie Is Using Blockchain to Monetize His Time
Does charging people for your time using a personal digital currency make any sense? Evan Prodromou talks about his “EvanCoin” project. (10/18/17)

Google Home, Alexa, and Siri Are Forcing Us to Make a Serious Decision
Be careful which digital assistant you hire — because firing them isn’t easy. (10/11/17)

Silicon Valley’s Trillion-Dollar Numbers Game
Why do so many startups tout their “total addressable market” when it’s a largely fictional metric? (10/4/17)

Firewalls Don’t Stop Hackers. AI Might
A conversation with DarkTrace CEO Nicole Eagan. (9/27/17)

The Unbearable Irony of Meditation Apps
Can your smartphone possibly help you focus and breathe? (8/30/17)

Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
The ’90s web was easy to fathom and participants flocked. Cryptocurrencies, not so much. (8/9/17)

Artificial Intelligence at Salesforce: An Inside Look
Salesforce’s goal is “AI for everyone” — or at least every company. (8/2/17)

Silicon Valley’s First Founder Was Its Worst
What today’s startup world can learn from the (bad) example of William Shockley. (7/19/17)

How Google Book Search Got Lost
Google’s first “moonshot” project ended up way more mundane than anyone expected. (4/11/17)

Inside Dropbox’s Identity Overhaul
How an innovator in cloud storage designed and developed its new collaborative document authoring system. (1/30/17)

Repetition ain’t the way

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I pretty much stopped writing on this blog about a year ago, and never wrote up why.

Last year I relaunched Wordyard as “The Wordyard Project” with a new design, lots of energy, and a focus on the topic of identity and personal authenticity in digital media. I felt like I had a lot to say that I’d stored up during the years I spent editing Grist, and I began writing. I had fun! In particular, I was obsessed with writing one piece I’d been thinking about for ages — about Lou Reed, the song “Sweet Jane,” hearing Reed play that song at the Web 2.0 conference a decade ago, and how all of that related to life on the Internet as I’ve lived it for the past 20 years.

So I wrote that piece. Then I kept writing. But I lost steam. It seemed to me I was repeating myself. Looking back at the posts from that period now, I don’t think I was. But that’s how it felt.

That was the personal dimension. At the same time, in the wider world, I understood that blogging was a very different beast in the mid-2010s than it had been a few years before: not “dead” but less and less an environment where writers were congregating and software developers were innovating. I didn’t want that to be true, but it was: The conversational aspect of blogging had largely been assumed by Twitter and Facebook. If you aimed to build traffic on a blog today, you had to treat it like a publishing venture — keep pumping out lots of posts and promote them tirelessly on social media.

All of which, at that point, felt to me like more repetition.

One of the first things we learned about publishing online from the earliest days — when Hotwired ruled, Suck.com flourished, and Salon (a “Web ‘zine”!) fledged — was the imperative of repetition. I remember my colleague Andrew Ross talking about how the Web was a little like radio. He meant you could be a little more casual; you could, when news broke, just ring up an expert for a quick Q&A without waiting to assemble a more definitive story. He was right. But it was also like radio in the way you needed to remember that people were probably tuning in and out all the time, and you were going to have to repeat yourself a lot to be heard.

I’ve been writing reviews and news stories and features and columns and blog posts all my life. There are times when cranking it out is effortless, and other times when it just feels impossible. When I go through a spell of those impossibles — as I did toward the end of my days writing theater reviews, and again toward the end of my years as Salon’s managing editor, and again in autumn 2014 — I know that the best thing for me to do is to move on, change things up, try out something new. That works. But when I do it, I’m also always gnawed by the suspicion that maybe I’m just running away from what I Should Be Doing.

It’s a tough one: On the one hand, as David Byrne once sang, “Say something once! Why say it again?” On the other hand, that song is titled “Psycho Killer,” and maybe the narrator is…unreliable.

So I put Wordyard on hold, where it’s been ever since. Around the same time I also started writing some reasonably ambitious pieces for Steven Levy at Medium’s Backchannel, and those kept me busy, and felt rewarding in a different way, and let me focus on simply writing as good a piece as I could without also thinking about how to get people to come read it.

Am I going to return to any kind of posting schedule here? I honestly don’t know. I’d like to. I’m a big believer in the IndieWeb movement’s “POSSE” principle — publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere — meaning, you have a site that you own and cultivate and then you share your work in all sorts of other venues as you wish. I dream of software to make that even easier than it already is. (I like what the folks at Known have accomplished in this direction already.) I have all sorts of ideas for experiments in this area. Let’s see how far I get.

In the meantime, what I am doing today is taking that “Sweet Jane” piece and reposting it on Medium, where maybe a somewhat different bunch of readers might see it. It still says so much of what I want to say.

Dear publishers: When you want to switch platforms and “redesign” too? Don’t

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In my work at Grist, I had a rare experience: We moved an entire publishing operation — with a decade of legacy content, in tens of thousands of posts — from one software platform to another. And yet, basically, nothing broke. Given the scars I bear from previous efforts of this kind, this was an exhilarating relief.

I promised my former colleague Matt Perry (then technical lead at Grist, who bears much responsibility for our success in that move, along with my other former colleague Nathan Letsinger) that I’d share notes with the world on what we learned in this process. It’s taken me forever, but here they are.

Say you run a website that’s been around the block a few times already. You’re going to move your operation from one content management platform to another. Maybe you’ve decided it’s time to go with WordPress. Or some other fine system. Or you’re lucky enough, or crazy enough, to have a developer or a team of coders who’ve built you a custom system.

Then you look at your site’s design: the templates, the CSS, the interface, the structure and navigation all the stuff that makes it look a certain way and behave a certain way. You think, boy, that’s looking old. Wouldn’t it be great to spiff everything up? And while you’re at it, that new platform offers so many exciting new capabilities — time to show them off!

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? You’re already taking the time away from publishing, or community-building, or advocacy, or monetizing eyeballs, or whatever it is you do with your site, to shore up its technical underpinnings. Now is surely the perfect moment to improve its public face, too.

This is where I am going to grab you by the shoulders and tell you, sadly but firmly and clearly: NO. Do not go there.

Redesigning your site at the same time you’re changing the software it runs on is a recipe for disaster. Here Be Train Wrecks.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead then; do your redesign and your platform move at the same time! Here’s what you may find.

You’ve just split your team’s focus and energy. Unless you have a lot of excess capacity on the technical side — and every online publisher has, like, technical folks sitting around with nothing to do, right? — your developers and designers are already stretched to the limit putting out everyday fires. Any major project is ambitious. Two major projects at once is foolhardy.

You’re now stuck creating a big new design in the dark. That new platform isn’t live yet, so you can’t take the sane route of implementing the new design in bits and pieces in front of real live users. Your team is free to sit in a room and crank out work, sans feedback! Good luck with that.

You’re now working against the clock. Back-end platform changes are full of unpredictable gotchas, and almost always take longer than you think. That doesn’t have to matter a great deal. But the moment you tie the move to a big redesign project, you’re in a different situation. More often than not, the redesign is something that everyone in your company or organization has an investment in. Editors and creators have work with deadlines and must-publish-by dates. Business people have announcements and sales deals and marketing pushes that they need to schedule. The stakes are in the ground; your small-bore back-end upgrade is now a major public event. This is where the worst train wrecks (like that one at Salon over a decade ago that still haunts my dreams) happen.

Painful as it may be, and demanding of enormous self-restraint, the intelligent approach is to move all your data over on the back end first, while duplicating your current design on the new platform. Ideally, users won’t notice anything different.

I’m fully aware that this recommendation won’t come as news to many of you. It’s simple science, really: Fiddle with only one variable at a time so you can understand and fix problems as they arise. I’m happy to report that this approach not only makes sense in the abstract, but actually works in the field, too.

(Of course, you may wish to go even further, and eliminate the whole concept of the site redesign as a discrete event. The best websites are continuously evolving. “Always be redesigning.”)

And … we’re back

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be-prepared-to-stopA brief note here to acknowledge that this site has been mostly dormant for a couple years there while I worked a full-time-and-more job.

My time at Grist was happy indeed — but splitting my life between Seattle and the Bay Area finally became too much to handle. So as of the end of last month, I’ve stepped down from my job as executive editor, though I continue to work part time editing some great writers there.
[Read more…]

‘How to Be Yourself’: My Ignite talk about authenticity

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Ignite talks are an exquisite form of self-torture for which you voluntarily stand in front of a crowd and give a five-minute talk timed to twenty slides that advance, inexorably, every 15 seconds.

At the end of last year I gave one of these talks at NewsFoo, and the kind folks who organized that event provided some great video.

My theme was a topic I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by — “reality hunger,” the “authenticity bind,” and the nature of personal identity in the digital age.

Here’s my five minutes:

What’s with the references to RuPaul? At the conference I had the good/bad fortune of immediately following Mark Luckie onstage. Luckie’s talk on “Why RuPaul is Better At Social Media Than You” was way more fabulous than mine could ever be, as you can see:

There’s some great stuff in nearly all of the other Ignite talks from NewsFoo. They’re all here.

Missed stories: About that Horace Mann School article in the Times

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I attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., from 1971 to 1977. I’ve generally thought well of the school as a great environment for a brainy, socially awkward kid like me to learn and grow. I became a writer largely based on my experience there, I learned to love journalism there, and I learned almost as much from my peers as I did from my teachers.

Horace Mann was, plainly, a place of great privilege. (My parents paid a fortune to send me there, and I remain deeply grateful for that.) I took a crazy-long trip each day from my central Queens home to the northwest corner of the Bronx to attend. I did that because the school embraced unorthodox teachers who inspired students. Also because it made ample room for the weird kids. It helped them find other weird kids to share their weird alienation and feel a little less alienated.

Now there’s this. The article is, I believe, thoughtful, fair, and sensitive. The author is a few years younger than I am, but his account accurately reflects the school I remember.

Except, of course, for the part about a decades-spanning pattern of sexual abuse of students by teachers, a pattern that it seems the school largely ignored and that I knew essentially nothing of during my student years.

I’m not a victim myself. I experienced no molestation, or anything even borderline or ambiguous, during my six years at H.M. Still, in the wake of this article, I find myself spending a lot of time and thought re-examining my own past — as I’m guessing are the great majority of my classmates and everyone else who had anything to do with the school in those years. (There have already been extraordinary conversations both in private e-mail and in the public comments on the Times story, and they’ve challenged my assumptions and stretched my thinking on the matter.)

So here’s what i’d say if I could punch a hole in time and send a message to myself on the day, almost exactly 35 years ago, that I graduated from Horace Mann:

You’re not going to believe this, but 35 years from now, H.M. is going to be on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The humongous article will tell the world, in voluminous detail and with pained concern, about a “secret history of sexual abuse” at the school. Some of the events have already happened, while you were here; most are still to come.

It’s a story about troubled people abusing power, about changing mores and standards, and also about institutional failure and betrayal. A big story, I’d say. And — sorry to break the news — but you missed it.

You were the editor of the Record! You and your friends prided yourselves on attempting to tell the full story of life at the school in print every week! You published exposes of pot-dealing and polled the student body of drug use and thought, in those post-Watergate years, that you were ripping the lid off the truth. But you missed something bigger and more consequential.

I guess you couldn’t have done otherwise. You’re all of 18 years old. You think you know everything — but you’re smart enough to realize how wrong you are, too.

So now that you know this, I want you to think about two lessons.

One lesson for your work: The story you think you’re living is almost never the story of your time that the future will write. For journalists this is, and should be, humbling. It should make you ask questions every time you think you’ve told the truth about a situation. What’s the next layer down? There’s always another one. Never believe you’ve gotten to the bottom of anything. Even if you’ve done a good job, the world keeps rethinking everything. And those decades-spanning changes in how we think and live are the ones will make your head explode. Expect it.

Also, one lesson for your life: Eccentricity can be inspiring. What many of your Horace Mann teachers did, with their arrogance and their mystique and the cults that some of them spun around their subjects and themselves, can be amazingly effective at persuading monkey-minded adolescents to buckle down and care about science, literature, math, Latin, or music. The cult of learning can be beautiful — but it can also be a stalking-horse for something destructive and dangerous, ugly and evil. When seductive eccentricity crosses a line into control and victimization, it becomes a curse, and it can wreck lives.

Like a lot of your teenage friends, you’ve done a pretty good job of distinguishing between these kinds of eccentricity and avoiding the kind that could hurt you. Good for you. But not everyone is as confident or as fortunate. Kids can’t reasonably be expected to draw all the lines that adults, by rights, ought to be drawing for them. It’s up to institutions like schools (and churches, businesses, and governments!) to organize themselves in a way that leaves room for creativity while protecting the participants from abuse. Power always requires accountability. There are no exceptions.

That’s hard. But it’s something adults owe the children they’re raising. Try to remember that!

And then, if I can run this conceit out one more step, I think my newly minted Horace Mann graduate self would probably say something like this in response:

Thanks for the feel-good message on graduation day! There’s not much I can do with what you’ve told me, is there? Shouldn’t you have used your time-lord powers to dump sermons on the Horace Mann trustees?

Teach me this trick and maybe I can deliver you some wisdom in your retirement home. In the meantime, I’ve got a suggestion to throw back at you.

Yeah, I do think I know everything. But I also know I’m actually still a kid. I don’t yet know who I am, but you do, right?

Forget about Horace Mann. You live 3000 miles away from the place now, anyway. You should take all this introspection and turn it on that future world you’re living in.

I know that one of the things that happens to people as they get older is that they become more willing to just go along with the patterns in their lives, to accept a “that’s the way the world is” complacency. Fight that, will you?

You can’t do anything about what happened decades ago. But look around now, in your “now.” Find the stories that are the ones that one day, you’re going to wish somebody had told sooner. Tell them.

Point and match to the 18-year-old. What could I possibly say in response to that except, “I’ll try”?

Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory: my take at Grist

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We interrupt this long blog-silence (more on which soon) to note that if you wanna know my take on the Mike Daisey/Apple/This American Life thing, I’ve just posted over at Grist on it.

My career started with writing about theater and specifically solo performance, moved into technology coverage, then took a turn into ethics and accuracy in journalism, and is now focused on sustainability and the environment. So Daisey’s story touched pretty much every one of my nerves.

Here’s an excerpt:

The temptation to round corners, to retouch images, to make a story flow better or a quote read better, faces every creator of non-fiction at every single moment of labor. And we all do it, all the time. We do it by varying degrees. We slice out “ums” from quotes. We leave out material we deem extraneous. No matter how much we verify of the facts that we think are salient, we can never verify everything.

But there are some compasses we can follow and some precedents we can observe. We don’t create composite characters (see: Janet Cooke) — or if we do, we explain exactly what we’re up to. We don’t say we’re reporting from one city when we’re sitting in another (see: Jayson Blair). We don’t simply invent stuff because it makes such great copy (see: Stephen Glass). We don’t invent a fake persona because it “makes people care” (see: Amina Araf).

The distinction between cosmetic changes and substantive fabrications is relatively easy to make. Storytellers get into trouble when they start to write themselves blank checks to “improve” on reality because the ends (in Daisey’s case, “making people care”) justify the means (in Daisey’s case, making shit up).

The whole thing is here.

My next chapter: Grist

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After a wonderful couple of years writing Say Everything and another great couple of years building and launching MediaBugs, I’m returning to the world of editing: Starting today, I’m the executive editor of Grist.org, the pioneering green news website with the irreverent attitude.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me, after I left Salon four years ago, that I would ever take this kind of job again. It would have to be a very special organization: one that was trying to accomplish something important in the world; one that valued old-fashioned journalism and newfangled digital innovation; and one where the odd set of talents I’ve accumulated across my motley career could actually be put to work in useful ways.

Grist turned out to fit this bill in an almost supernaturally precise way. I first got to know the work Chip Giller and his team were doing there a decade ago at Salon, where we had content-sharing agreement, and I’ve continued to be fan of what they’ve built over the years. Now I have the privilege of taking Grist’s editorial helm at a moment that’s more critical than ever for the future of the planet — and more fluid than ever in the evolution of media.

Can you tell I’m excited?

It’s been a long day, so I think I’d better turn in — but not before pointing you to the sprightly post Chip wrote to welcome me to Grist, and the little note I wrote to introduce myself. There was also a brief press release with some kind words from my former colleague and sometime boss Joan Walsh.

And for those of you wondering about MediaBugs: It’s very much an ongoing project, though obviously I’m going to have less time to devote to it myself. I’ll be posting more here soon on its future, as well as offering a full report on its progress to date and some of the lessons we’ve learned from it.

Recent work: NY Times’ 9-year-old terror error; local news ethics; Wikipedia

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Sometimes your labor on a bunch of projects comes to fruition all at once. Here are some links to recently published stuff:

Corrections in the Web Age: The Case of the New York Times’ Terror Error — How did a 2002 error in the New York Times wreck a KQED interview in 2011 about John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”? And what does the incident tell us about how newsroom traditions of verification and correction must evolve in the digital age? MediaBugs’ Mark Follman and I put together this case study and it’s all here in the Atlantic’s fantastic Tech section. If you’re wondering what the point of MediaBugs is or why I’ve spent so much of the past two years working on it, this is a good summary!

Rules of the Road: Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism: I spent a considerable amount of time last winter and spring interviewing a whole passel of editors and proprietors of local news sites as part of this project for JLab, trying to find the tough questions and dilemmas they face as old-fashioned journalism ethics collide with the new shapes local journalism is taking online. It was a blast doing the interviews and fun assembling the results with Andy Pergam, Jan Schaffer and everyone else at JLab. It’s all on the website but it’s also available in PDF and print.

Whose point of view?: In the American Prospect, I used Wikipedia’s article on Social Security as an example to explore how Wikipedia’s principle of “neutral point of view” can break down. Here’s an excerpt:

Wikipedia says virtually nothing about the system’s role as a safety net, its baseline protections against poverty for the elderly and the disabled, its part in shoring up the battered foundations of the American middle class, or its defined-benefit stability as a bulwark against the violent oscillations of market-based retirement piggy banks.

This is a problem—not just for Social Security’s advocates but for Wikipedia itself, which has an extensive corpus of customs and practices intended to root out individual bias.

Chris Gulker, 1951-2010

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I know some of you have been following, as I have, the posts by Web pioneer Chris Gulker about his illness over the past couple years. Over the summer, Chris told us that there was nothing more to be done about his brain tumor, and he proceeded to settle his online affairs in the same thoughtful and careful way he seemed to approach everything he did. He died last night. Of course, you can read about it on his blog.

It’s a trip we’ll all take sooner or later, but few of us venture to do so as publicly as Chris did. His posts chronicling his state of mind and health in recent months and weeks have been graceful and courageous.

I wasn’t a close friend of Chris’s, but I tried to keep up with him over the years, because I owed him a great debt (which I talked with him about last year): he is more responsible than any other individual for turning me on to the Web fairly early, and the Web has been at the center of my work ever since.

In September or October of 1994 Chris showed me the Electric Examiner, the SF Examiner’s Web playground that he ran off a Sun server sitting in an empty hallway behind the Examiner’s press room. I said, “This is cool. I’ve heard HTML isn’t that hard — can I, like, do something here?” He told me that, if I knew FTP, I could just download an HTML guide and be off and running. I already had Internet access through the WELL, so that’s what I did. And he was right: It really was easy! Anyone could do it. I got excited about that, and I’m still excited. A few weeks later the Examiner staff went on strike and I had the chance to use that HTML knowledge as part of the San Francisco Free Press effort. Soon after that I built my first personal website, and within a year I’d left the Examiner (as Chris had) and moved to the Web.

Chris went on to a long career at Apple and Adobe. He was also a top-notch photographer, and one of the very early bloggers. Rudolf Ammann’s article traces some of his very significant role. Rudolf (with a tiny assist from me and some others) also built a Wikipedia page about Chris. He will be missed by me and many, many others.

Here’s Dave Winer’s post about Chris’s passing.

UPDATE: Here’s a full obit for Chris at InMenlo. And Rudolf Ammann has a page with lots of other links to reminiscences and articles about Chris.