
Hello again • Joshua Topolsky - shawndumas
http://joshuatopolsky.com/post/123817628197/hello-again
======
dredmorbius
First: Josh ran Vox Media and The Verge, and most recently, Bloomberg's online
media.

This, particularly, stands out::

 _And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my industry._

 _The reality in media right now is that there is an enormous amount of noise.
There are countless outlets (both old and new) vying for your attention,
desperate not just to capture some audience, but all the audience. And in
doing that, it feels like there’s a tremendous watering down of the quality
and uniqueness of what is being made. Everything looks the same, reads the
same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs. In both execution and
content, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the rat race for maximum
audience at any expense. It’s cynical and it’s cyclical — which makes for an
exhausting and frankly boring experience._

 _I think people want something better, something more meaningful. Something a
lot less noisy._

I've been thinking about this a lot as well (check recent HN submissions, and
discussion under the "Media" flair at
[https://dredmorbius.reddit.com](https://dredmorbius.reddit.com)), and also
reviewing some old lectures of Dana (Donella) Meadows.

She makes two points that are key, one pertaining to the importance of media,
the other to changing systems.

First: systems _cannot_ work properly where the data they're fed is
unreliable, and _especialy_ where it is _deliberately_ distorted or falsified.
Which is increasingly happening in media.

Second: the most effective way to change a system _is to change its goals._
And the goal of most media, presently, is _advertising_. Hence the pursuit of
marketshare, the homogeneity of content, the outright gaming and manipulation,
and the lack of incisive, deep, _relevant_ reportage.

Meadows' Twelve Leverage Points addresses this (and other influences) in more
depth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points)

If Tapolsky's going to change that, he's got his work cut out for him. And he
should be starting at the tail end of Dana's list.

------
CmonDev
TL;DR (between the lines): the money was good, performance was good, but the
management was not flexible enough; off to make a next startup (animated
parallax HTML5 pages are to be expected).

