A year in covering the strangers on the other side of personal technology
Did you read the story about the Russian porn actresses who were unexpectedly outed by facial recognition software? I didn’t write it, but I read it. In 2016, I became deeply invested in reporting on why people should be more careful about how much information they volunteer to strangers who see them through apps, websites and sensors. So naturally I wanted to find a new way to keep that Russian story going — the women’s tribulation helped make the case. Imagine my surprise when a source who works with a bunch of Russian companies invited me to meet the founders of the company whose application was used to de-anonymize those performers.
That’s not really why I opened with that story, though. I just wanted to illustrate that this was the year I really started to wrap my head around ledes. I’ve only been in this journalism game for about four years and my only training has been on the job, but the basics have started to click this year.
At least, I think that they have. No one watches what I write especially closely, so this self-assessment has not been held accountable to external criticism.
Additionally, I became deeply invested in writing to convince regular people to take privacy seriously. Once your life becomes data, it can be infinitely copied. Plus all the bloat from tracking makes the web slower and more expensive:
With that in mind, let me list out some of what I think were my best stories of the year (presented with the stories I am most proud of higher up), and then offer a few pieces of self criticism at the end and one kinda-sorta optimistic prediction for all of us in this game (feel free to skip down to that part — I won’t be hurt).
My best jawns
This story about the challenger to Nielsen ratings represented my best single piece of work this year, I think. I kept coming back to it, over and over again. Really, the reporting was just one phone call, but when I learned that NBC had found a way to make roughly apples to apples comparisons between traditional television ratings and that of on demand television, I needed to know how it worked, in detail. If you don’t know, I promise the answer will freak you out. NBC’s provider is a scrupulous company, but there are lots of bad ones out there. Once you know what your phone can do, it’s hard to trust it anymore.
This story lit up the internet. It’s filled with (very easy) jokes, but I’m proud of it because it was born of good planning and managed to work some substance into a story that could have condescending. The campaign at UT-Austin went viral when it was announced a year prior to this story. I followed up just before the organizers actually executed the previously announced plan.
Does the internet scare you? This Union Square Ventures backed startup has a plan that could re-balance the power between technologists and web users. Who knows if users will adopt a completely new internet, but the team building it makes a good case. Strangely, this story really caught on with right-wingers — not something I anticipated.
A lengthy story that falls in the category of “boring but important.” I did a deep dive into New York City’s efforts to go green. The city is already one of the greenest places in the world (packing people in saves a lot of energy), but officials believe it can do much much better, and technology has shown the way. Big data may be scary when it tracks us individually, but it’s also inspiring how helpful data collection at the building level can be in reducing energy consumption.
File this under “boring but weirdly controversial.” This story still irks old school podcasters, which — I’ll just say it — is crazypants. You guys, if this story makes you mad: please go to therapy. Please.
Once upon a time, I very strongly believed that the right to document activity and to comment upon activity that took place “in public” was essential to freedom of speech. I am beginning to think that world has changed and some of these principles should evolve. I don’t think that some things that happen “in public” online are quite so public as everything that happens in public IRL.
The story is about an STD, a tech company and a blog. I’m proud of it because, right after the piece came out, Genius added a “report” feature to its service, so community members could flag jerks.
Google came out with AMP this year, which makes posts show up much faster on mobile. That’s nice, but it’s also kind of weird because usually that’s the kind of development handled by the internet collectively, via the W3C.
In a lot of ways, this is similar to the podcasting story above, the difference being that public radio did what it did to nudge the collective process along. It’s not at all clear that Google intends to cede control of what it’s created to the entire internet, once the web’s consortium catches up.
Also, bad Facebook. BAD.
Bitcoin, the stateless currency native to the internet, has the potential to upend sovereign money. What happens, though, if nations just put out a crypto version of their currencies?
It turns out that it would be totally feasible to do so, as some technologists have described. Central bankers have been paying close attention to this new kind of money. It could happen.
Pokémon Go was one of the most significant tech stories of the year. Yes, the game is fading. That never mattered. It doesn’t even matter that the game isn’t very fun (it isn’t). What matters is what it proved.
In that spirit, I went out one night at the height of the craze to find out if an augmented reality game that forces people to walk around makes it easier to strike up conversations with strangers. In short: it does.
This was my first FOIA story. The Smithsonian would dispute that, because it argues that FOIA does not apply to it, but it still honors the requests.
I wanted to do a follow up story on a new gadget in use at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, but its executives very passive aggressively refused to share the data with me (they never directly said no — they just repeatedly ignored the relevant questions in repeated emails).
So I FOIA’ed for the information. It took a while, but I got it.
Hardly anyone read this story, which is too bad. I tried to shoehorn it into the election hype cycle, but I think that was a poorly chosen frame (maybe I am better at ledes now, but I don’t get them all right).
This story isn’t really about Trump or his supporters at all. It’s a story about how mobile carriers make money selling data about their users to other companies. We accept that media companies spy on us like crazy because we don’t pay for the news and entertainment we consume online (by and large).
But isn’t it wrong for companies that we pay (a lot) for services to spy on us? I think so. They already got their piece.
Enough. There’s more I’d like to share but this is getting ridiculous. I wrote four to six stories a week, so I’ve covered a lot of stuff. I tried to focus this list on stuff that isn’t just interesting, though, but also reflects doing some aspect of this work well. Something more than just showing up (which is part of the work, of course).
Critiques and goals
I spent the entire year as a staff writer for Observer, which shut down the New York Observer newspaper right after the election. I only had one byline appear on another site all year, a big difference from last year (and the year prior to that) when I wrote as a freelancer for lots of places.
For my stories that are more daily reporting, I want to focus them in a lot more. Posts like that should be about just one thing. My tendency is to, for example, learn that Symphony Advanced Media pays people to let them listen over their cell phone’s microphone, but then go on to write about the company’s business plan, goals, obstacles and upcoming features. Instead, I need to focus in on that one key thing and write a tight post around that one point the reader really needs to learn.
To that end, I want to make myself spend more time self-editing and tightening up my work. In short: I hope I write better in 2017. Also, more analysis and more humor.
Beyond the daily bloggy stuff, I really hope to do narrative stories, stories that are actual stories, not just descriptions of cool things and why they matter. It’s tough, because tech companies don’t want you to write narratives, because narratives have moments of failure, doubt and mistakes. There are no mistakes in Greater Silicon Valley! Still, I want to do these stories. I will do them.
This was the year I finally interviewed Chad Dickerson, a major milestone for a writer who cut his teeth focusing strictly on Brooklyn tech. As an addendum to the goal I listed above, I also want to focus more on the characters of people making stuff and not just the stuff they have made. We’ll see how that goes over.
To close, optimism
I am not known for being the most optimistic person, but I want to close with a ray of sunshine thru the gloom of 2016. 2016 was rough if you look at it overall and it’s also been rough if you only look at the year in journalism. There’s been a lot more closing down than there has been opening up. If all that wasn’t bad enough, then there was Peter Thiel’s successful vendetta against Gawker.
When I started writing full time, I thought we were in a golden age of journalism. Maybe we still are? There’s a lot of experimentation and a lot of ways to get paid a little something for writing, but on balance it’s a tough way to make a living today.
So I’m writing the following not as an expert in news, but as someone with a pretty good track record of guessing what the future holds, but you’ll have to trust me on that one, I guess.
So here’s my prediction: it’s going to be bad for a little while longer, but then the news will find a way to make money again. I don’t know how much longer it will be, but I am personally betting it won’t be so long that those of us without major responsibilities won’t be able to hold on. A new business model is coming. When that new business model arrives, there should be a new boom in investment in this industry and those investments will pay off this time. Sustainable companies will make their way out the other end of those investments, places where a person can have a career.
It doesn’t matter what the new business model is. What matters is the collective unconscious has really started meditating on this problem (Ryan Broderick made a near-term prediction for 2017 that squares with this position about 15 minutes into the latest Internet Explorer podcast). Once the hive mind focuses, problems get solved. That’s what humans do best.
So, if you love this work, as I love this work, there’s a perfectly respectable future ahead for you if you can just hang on. So hang on.
