Welcome to the new Werd I/O

I relaunched my website on Ghost. Here's why.

Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS

404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Who's reading Werd I/O? Community survey 2025

I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you! I love writing here, but I’d love to know how I could serve you better. So every year I ask my readers to fill in a short survey. It doesn’

Bounce lets you move your followers from Bluesky to Mastodon

[Cameron Faulkner at The Verge] Bounce is a game-changer for the open social web: "Bounce is built on the work of Bridgy Fed, which makes your Bluesky posts visible on Mastodon and vice versa. Using Bounce will bridge your accounts, in case you haven’t already set up Bridgy

The Darkest Day: A fantasy Doctor Who season

I can’t help myself. I’ve loved every moment of the rebooted Doctor Who on Disney+, but it appears to have hit a bit of a pause while Disney considers whether to renew its co-production. With its future unclear (although I’m certain it’s coming back before too

Letter to Arc members 2025

[The Browser Company] Arc is my primary browser, and I'm feeling like that's a choice I should never have made: "The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

[Ava Kofman in The New Yorker] Curtis Yarvin is a pathetic little man: "As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months

Building a newsroom technology culture

A quick note before we begin: This post reflects my own views on newsroom technology leadership, not necessarily those of my employer. I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for

What I've Learned from Ten Years with Coral

[Andrew Losowsky] Running an open source community platform for a decade is no small feat - particularly one as storied and supported as Coral. Andrew Losowsky's reflections on its first decade are inspiring. "Among so many conversations, we brought commenters into newsrooms to speak with journalists, moderators

Sahil Lavingia's DOGE diary

[Sahil Lavingia] I personally don't think his decision to join DOGE was defensible, but there are lots of interesting details in Sahil Lavingia's diary of the 55 days he worked there. For example: "I was excited to help in-source VA's software, but I

The Substack Election

[Lauren Egan at The Bulwark] If I was Substack, this is exactly what I'd be doing. But then again, if I was Substack, I wouldn't have paid Nazis to post on my network. "The company sees an opportunity. Its employees have been meeting with congressional

12 years of Ghost

[John O' Nolan at Ghost] This is a lovely reflection on 12 years of Ghost, the non-profit, open source publishing platform that powers independent publishers and allows them to make a living on their own terms. "Over the years, we've focused consistently on building the best