Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
The 19th celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday. CEO Emily Ramshaw’s reflective post is quite lovely, but also announces a very bold strategy: On our fifth anniversary, we’re launching our first-ever endowment campaign, with a goal of raising $20 million over the next three years to protect our financial
Technology
[Herman Martinus] I recognize a lot of the sentiment here. Twenty years ago, I ran an open source social networking startup and tried to differentiate ourselves by saying many of these same things. "Bear won't sell. I'm not building this to flip it to the
Culture
[Adrian Hon] I was today years old when I learned the original meaning of an "adventure playground": "The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and
Technology
[Ross Douthat and Marc Andreessen in The New York Times] This podcast conversation with Marc Andreessen is very revealing. It's particularly fascinating to me that what I experienced as "America finally having a much-needed moral awakening" presented to people like Andreessen as "radical Marxism"
Technology
[Taylor Lorenz at UserMag] This is like something from a cyberpunk novel: "The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It's a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users
I was out buying eggs when I saw a video of Elon Musk giving a Hitler salute at the inauguration. In the movies, this stuff is highlighted and separated: punctuation in itself instead of an event that you see in the background of your everyday life. Hannah Arendt talked about
Nobody should have to move to another country to be themselves. However, I’ve spoken to multiple people who feel they need to move away from the US in order to avoid harms caused by the new administration’s executive orders that target trans people. Exactly how to do this
The last time this man was in power we wound up with one of the largest civil rights movements ever conducted in the United States. There is so much light; so much bravery; so much fairness and equity and rebellion in so many. Those are the people I believe in.
Technology
[Mike Masnick at TechDirt] On Zuckerberg's claims about why he's changing Meta's fact-changing policy: "If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck
Notable links
[Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic] I completely agree with the points Ethan makes here. The TikTok ban was a spectacular own-goal for all kinds of reasons. In particular: "[...] This is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the
I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how. The arc
AI
[Matthew Green] I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI: "[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot