Dispatches from the media apocalypse
In saving news, culture is key.
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ProPublica’s new “50 states” commitment builds on a decade-plus of local news partnerships
"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica." Hey, that's where I work! The article continues: "Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its mission. The latest iteration of that is the 50
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Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline
"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants." There's a chicken and egg problem
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As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple News be a lifeline?
"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020." And publications are becoming dependent
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The IndieWeb’s next stage?
"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable." This is what we were trying for with Known: something that felt social but was fully under the user&
ShareOpenly is now on Tedium
I adore the way ShareOpenly has been added to Tedium: You can see it for yourself on all its posts, including this great one about the decline of the ball mouse. Its founder, Ernie Smith, told me: “figured I had to have fun with it”.
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Share Openly: A simple icon for a new social sharing service
A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this. I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons, which we eventually decided against, but feel really warm and human. Jon'
A new Ani DiFranco album is something to celebrate
I’ve been following Ani DiFranco for decades. I’ve seen her play live around twenty times: she always brings a kind of joyful, progressive energy that leaves me motivated and buzzing. She has a new album out, and it feels like a return to visceral, honest form. It’s
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Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away
"Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them." There's no doubt that there's a lot of value in being in the same
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Google’s broken link to the web
"A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models." This has the potential to be a
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Mozilla Foundation Welcomes Nabiha Syed as Executive Director
This is great news for Mozilla, for everyone who uses the internet, and for everyone who cares about ethics, privacy, and human rights. We need a well-functioning Mozilla more than ever - and that much-needed presence has been absent for years. The spirit in the following quote gives me a
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Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Targeting Texas Public Education
"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors