Disclosures

It’s customary to start a disclosure statement with a list of all the financial ties you might have to the companies you cover. But I hardly have any to discuss. My investments remain exceedingly dull: a handful of Vanguard Group mutual funds.

(Before a rollover into an IRA, my Post 401(k) had a small stake in the Berkshire Hathaway Stock Fund. It never included Washington Post Co. stock; make of that what you will.)

My regular clients since I went freelance in 2011 ought to be more relevant. The list:

Discovery News, where I reviewed gadgets and social media from 2011 to late 2013;
The Consumer Electronics Association (now the Consumer Technology Association), for which I wrote a weekly post and did a monthly podcast from late 2011 through late 2012;
USA Today, where I started writing a tech-support column at the end of 2011;
The Computer & Communications Industry Association‘s Disruptive Competition Project blog, where I wrote about tech-policy issues in 2013;
Yahoo, where I started writing a policy column for Yahoo Tech at the end of 2013 and then covered tech-policy issues and did the occasional review at Yahoo Finance from late 2013 through late 2019;
Wirecutter, where I began maintaining a series of guides in 2014.

Discovery was my top income source in 2012, followed by the Disruptive Competition Project in 2013. Yahoo took that spot from 2014 through 2019 and constituted the majority of it (the only such client in my self-employed history) from 2014 to 2018. In 2020, my income was sufficiently diversified for no client to constitute more than 20 percent of the total; in 2021, no client accounted for more than 30 percent of the total.

Money’s come in from these less-frequent clients, ranked by my total take from each: Questex’s FierceVideo and FierceWireless trade publications, Fast Company, PCMag.com, U.S. News & World Report, The Parallax (funded then by a sole sponsor, the security firm Avast), Ars Technica, Al Jazeera (overdubbed interviews on its Arabic-language channel, itself funded in part by Qatar’s government), Light Reading, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s Trajectory magazine, Consumer Reports, the long-dead Sulia, Urban Land, Tom’s Guide, Manifest‘s government-tech publications, IDG (a series of sponsored Twitter chats in 2013), Reader’s Digest, CNN (its old Money and new Underscored sites), the Pew Charitable Trusts (a feature in their quarterly magazine Trust), The Washington Post, Boing Boing, Forbes , Vox Media , The Atlantic Media Group (CityLab and The Atlantic), the Virginia Economic Partnership (a nonbylined feature on 5G frontiers in their quarterly magazine), Glitch’s now-defunct Glimmer, VentureBeat, Washingtonian, Motorola Solutions (one ghostwritten story), The Points Guy, The Magazine, BattelleMedia (a non-bylined piece for a Procter & Gamble newsletter), ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Lumension Security (a chapter for an e-book), SmartBear Software’s Software Quality Matters, PBS NewsHour’s Rundown, the Columbia Journalism Review, Alhurra (overdubbed interviews on this U.S.-government-backed Arabic-language channel), the History Channel (an interview for its “101 Gadgets That Changed The World” special), Fifth Domain, Make:, Al Araby (overdubbed interviews on that Arabic-language channel), Ubergizmo, redesign | mobile, and Air & Space Magazine.

I’ve also taken speaking fees from Google, the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, Edmunds.com, ShowStoppers, the Capital Cabal and the Riderwood Computer Club. WordPress.com’s WordAds program adds incidental income, as have licensing fees for a couple of my Flickr photos and the occasional stipend to take part in a survey or focus group. Since May 2019, readers paying for extra posts and access at the creator-funding site Patreon have contributed more. I’ve had some Amazon affiliate links here but they never yielded a penny, and I don’t even know if they work now.

I’ve had an increasing share of my travel costs covered in return for speaking at events: Edmunds’ 2012 Hack Day; 2013’s PR Summit in San Francisco; the 2013 Influence HR conference in the same city; a 2013 panel about social media at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Shepherdstown, W.V. training center; Tech.Co’s 2014 and 2015 Celebrate conferences; the 2015 National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas; 2015’s Incompas conference in San Francisco; the 2016 Connected Conference in Paris (meetings booked around that by sponsor Business France touted France’s startup potential, not that I came away entirely sold); the 2016 and 2017 Viva Technology conferences in Paris; Web Summit in Lisbon every year since 2016 as well as that company’s Collision conference in Toronto in 2022; 2017 and 2018’s CES Asia in Shanghai; 2019’s Pay TV Show in Denver; 2021’s Seatrade Cruise Global in Miami Beach; TechChill 2022 in Riga, Latvia; Dublin Tech Summit 2022; BackMarket’s BackForum in September 2022; TechBBQ 2022 in Copenhagen; and MWC Las Vegas 2022. The Consumer Technology Association also got me a discount on CES lodging in 2012, 2013 and 2014 for leading show-floor tours. And TV Land covered Amtrak fare to New York and back for a 2013 interview on its “Best Night In” show.

Under certain circumstances, I’ve taken travel from conference organizers or sponsors: the IFA trade show in Berlin from 2012 onward as well as IFA’s Global Press Conference from 2016 through 2019 (show hosts paid); Techonomy 13 in Tucson (sponsor Ford paid); the CyberTech 2016 conference in Tel Aviv (sponsored by the America-Israel Friendship League and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs); CEATEC 2019 in Japan (organizers paid); a press trip to Estonia in 2021 sponsored by Enterprise Estonia; Qualcomm’s 2021 Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii and 2022 Automotive Investory Day (the latter only involved lodging); and WithSecure’s Sphere conference in Helsinki in 2022.

It may be more enlightening to note the technological ties I have. The limited range of software, hardware and services I use every day is likely to inform my coverage, in one way or another, and you should keep that in mind as you read my work. Please don’t interpret all the following as endorsements–I made these choices for reasons you might find irrelevant or worse, depending on your situation.

Home broadband comes courtesy of a Verizon Fios connection with 300 Mbps uploads and downloads.
We don’t pay anybody for conventional TV service, having dumped our satellite service in 2009 in favor of over-the-air and Internet delivery (including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sling TV streaming).
For wireless, I have a Google Pixel 5a Android phone on T-Mobile.
Computers I use around the home: a 2020 M1 Mac mini, a 2017 HP Spectre x360, and an iPad mini 5 in active use, plus a 2011 ThinkPad x120e (with Ubuntu Linux on board instead of Windows 10) gathering dust under a pile of papers.
I use Google Apps accounts to host my home and work e-mail, Twitter constitutes a huge chunk of my professional communication, and I use Facebook for personal networking and to market my work. I also subscribe to various online services, notably from Google and Microsoft (mail and file storage), Flickr (photo sharing), Evernote (note taking), and Private Internet Access (virtual-private-network connectivity).

What else about where I’m coming from? You might as well start with this: In general, I like playing with technology. My earliest memories of dealing with electronics involve taking a screwdriver to my dad’s broken calculator and being fascinated to discover the wiring inside. It wasn’t too many years later that I sat in front of a personal computer for the first time (a TRS-80, for those old enough to remember), looked at the blinking cursor on its screen and thought “hmm, what next?” I remain interested in turning on a new device and seeing what it can do.

But if you see me use a computer today, you probably won’t have to wait long to hear me curse at it. My fascination with the possibilities of technology has not made me overly forgiving of its failings. I hate having to wait as a computer locks up for no apparent reason, decipher inscrutable error messages or puzzle through interfaces designed with militant ignorance of such established principles of design as consistency, discoverability and efficiency.

Conversely, I can be more tolerant about aspects of technology besides usability. I’ve never qualified as an audiophile or videophile and in general will accept a good-enough product that’s cheaper or available now over a more expensive or not-yet-shipped ideal version. In some cases, perfectionism is outright dangerous: If you required an alternative browser to provide perfect compatibility with every big-name site back in 2004, we all still might be using Internet Explorer.

And on that note: I hate abuse of power and control freakery, whether it’s Microsoft choking off browser competition in a prior decade, Apple dictating what gets into its App Store in this one or big entertainment companies’ ongoing insistence on customer-hostile usage restrictions on digital media. The computer is among the most amazing general-purpose tools ever invented; why would you artificially constrain its utility?

If you’re curious about my politics, the preceding paragraph should make it clear that I worry about abuse of power by corporations, not just the government. I vote accordingly. My history in recent presidential elections: Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama, Clinton, Biden. I don’t regret those choices, aside from wishing I could have written in somebody else for vice president in 2004.

Anything else you’d like to know?

Last update: 11/6/2022