Tag Archives: Yahoo Tech

Once again, I’m writing for the business section

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As I trust you all have noticed, I’m still writing for a Yahoo news site. That was not what I could have guaranteed in mid-February, when Yahoo announced plans to “simplify” and “focus” its content strategy–which resulted in the folding of several digital magazines and the exit of my friend Dan Tynan as Yahoo Tech’s editor in chief.

Yahoo sign at W. 43rdI knew then that my Tech colleagues David Pogue and Daniel Howley would move over to Yahoo Finance, but the people at Finance had to make their own decisions on whether to bring over freelance contributors. Fortunately, Tech kept on running with a smaller staff, and about six weeks later, I got the answer from the Financial folks I was hoping for.

(When I wrote about my five years of full-time freelancing, I should have added that this occupational strategy can subject you to moments of fear that a large fraction of your future income is about to vanish–that, in fewer words, you’ve just become Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff. You need a core of self-confidence or at least stubbornness to get through times like that.)

A month into writing for Yahoo Finance, I’m covering most of the same topics and at about the same frequency–with my word count slightly padded by the stock-quote links that are part of the house style at Finance. But a few things have changed at the margins.

With my editors based in New York instead of San Francisco, I can no longer kid myself that at 5 p.m. I’ve got another two hours to finish a story. (Weirdly but appropriately for somebody with my newsprint-stained career, both the NYC and S.F. offices are in buildings once occupied by newspapers.) For the same reason, I’m more likely to see my editors in person–Yahoo’s space in the New York Times’ magnificent old building is only a 15-minute walk from Penn Station.

Finance has also been doing a lot of work with live video, so you may see me in one of those streams the next time I’m in Manhattan–for instance, when I head up for CE Week at the end of the month.

The distributed-workplace banter has moved from HipChat to Slack, which rates as an upgrade overall. Slack doesn’t clutter my inbox with notification e-mails, and it’s also the Wirecutter’s chat system of choice. It looks like my phone will lose an app, while my MacBook has already gained one–it’s easier to switch between different teams in Slack’s OS X app.

If you have any other questions about my latest affiliation, please see me in the comments.

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Changes with my Yahoo and USA Today columns

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Astute readers should have noticed that my Yahoo Tech column did not run as usual this Tuesday. At least, I assume they did, even if none actually e-mailed to ask about its absence.

Yahoo Tech columnistBut in case any such curiosity exists, what happened is that management there decided that having me write one long story a week on Tuesday had stopped being a good fit.

On the one hand, the frustrating failure of tech-policy news to break exclusively on Mondays often meant I had to wait most of a week to offer my input. On the other hand, we weren’t running any other weekly columns. The original concept, as David Pogue explained in his introductory video, was to have five columnists who each wrote on an assigned workday–but various forms of attrition left me the only one still on that newspaper-ish schedule.

So instead of seeing one long story from me each Tuesday and then maybe an extra item, you should expect to see more, shorter posts every week. Next week, for instance, should feature three posts from me, counting the one I filed Friday that hasn’t been posted yet.

Meanwhile, over at USA Today my column will be a little shorter starting this weekend: We’re going to drop the tip-of-the-week item that ran at the end of each Q&A segment. I liked coming up with those info-morsels, but they were too easy for readers to overlook, given that we had no easy way to advertise them in the headline.

That doesn’t mean I’m out of the weekly-tip business–but if I resume writing such a thing, it would probably be somewhere else online.

Back at USAT’s site, you’re also more likely to see me use my space to offer my perspective on a major tech event–see, for instance, my recent reports from the IFA tech trade show and the Web Summit conference.

Any other questions about how I’ve been making my living lately? Ask away in the comments.

 

My ongoing struggle to make comments suck less

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One of the most common four-word phrases in journalism (after “the CMS from hell”) must be “don’t read the comments.” A lot of newsrooms treat reader comments as the equivalent of the town dump: They’re something you need to have, and you want to spend as little time as possible there.

Comments formI, however, am one of those weirdos who reads the comments–and not just when I see a bunch, but on almost every story I write. Part of that is because I enjoy seeing people make fools of themselves while attempting to argue. But most of it is because I don’t mind seeing what people think and usually enjoy answering a reader’s question–if not to their satisfaction, in a way that sane readers of the comments thread will regard as astute.

(That’s also why you can usually find me showing up in reddit comments about my stories, much as I used to watch Slashdot to see if any of my work was getting picked apart there.)

Last year, I heard some advice about comments that’s stayed with me: At the Online News Association conference in Chicago, the Texas Tribune’s Amanda `Krauss said that having a story’s author open the discussion by posting the first comment helped make the resulting conversation more civil. She had other advice that journalists can’t easily follow without major CMS tinkering (for instance, changing the “Like” button to a “Respect” one), but this first-comment thing is something any writer can do.

Question is, what should that first comment be? Here’s how I’ve handled that at recent Yahoo Tech columns:

• Sharing a how-to recipe that would have been too involved to cram into the story itself. Example: my review of the KnowRoaming SIM sticker, in which I used that first comment to explain how to stop a “SIM Toolkit” app from taking up full-time residence in your phone’s notifications.

• Using that space to revise and extend my remarks by describing the philosophical underpinnings of my outlook on the subject, as I did in Tuesday’s column about the impending expiration of some USA Patriot Act provisions that enable the NSA’s bulk surveillance. Reader replies to that: zero.

• The old standby of posing a question to readers about a key issue of the story, most recently seen in the column about Apple Watch app rules where I opened the comments by asking readers if they’re bothered at all by them or basically trust Apple to look out for them. Reader replies: three.

Explaining a story’s sourcing or just naming the people I talked to on the record who didn’t get a quote in the story seems like an obvious move, but I haven’t done that yet. Maybe next week?

I’m not sure I’m making a huge difference–I’m sure it won’t for readers who have already sworn off comments–but this practice only takes a few minutes and it helps ensure I won’t ignore the comments later on, or at least until a post gets featured on the Yahoo home page and promptly gets overrun with 2,000 comments. That seems a worthwhile use of my time.

Yahoo.

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When I saw the surprising news that longtime New York Times personal-tech columnist David Pogue was leaving the paper to head up a tech-news site at Yahoo, I figured the next details I’d see about his new venture would come on my one-time rival’s Twitter feed–or maybe at Jim Romenesko’s journalism-news site.

Yahoo Tech logoInstead, I heard about it from Pogue himself when he asked if I’d be interested in joining this operation. A few weeks of e-mails and phone calls later, you can now see my byline atop a lengthy guide to Facebook’s privacy and security settings at Yahoo Tech’s holiday guide–a preview of what will open in January.

I’ll be writing a weekly column about tech policy in all its forms. By that we mean not just the laws and regulations enacted in Washington, but the terms and conditions that companies enforce on their customers and each other–as well as the norms we come up with on our own.

I’ll be doing this on a freelance contract basis, not as an employee, so you can still find me at USA Today’s site on weekends (now with an extra disclosure sentence when I need to critique one of Yahoo’s consumer services). I’ll also continue writing for most of my other current outlets if they can continue to put up with me.

One, however, will get unfortunately squeezed out: my year-old gig blogging about tech-policy issues at the Disruptive Competition Project. I’ve really enjoyed the chance to unpack issues like the smartphone subsidies, retransmission fights and e-book DRM, but I would be bonkers not to take a chance on writing about them before an immensely larger audience.

At Yahoo Tech, the CMS seems non-toxic, we should have a lot of latitude to experiment with different kinds of reader interactivity, and I’ll be writing alongside some talented people (including my friend Dan Tynan). And Yahoo as a company is not only putting serious resources into getting “original voices” on its site but looks a lot less lost at the plate. Letting its subscription to the CEO of the Month Club lapse in favor of giving Marissa Mayer the job seems a good call.

Finally, after having competed with Pogue for so long, it should be fun to cooperate with him. David’s long been an astute judge of user interfaces and user experiences (I’m still kicking myself for not thinking to start a campaign to end useless voicemail instructions), he’s willing to wade into comment threads whether they’re supportive or not, and he’s a legitimate showman who has literally made tech coverage sing.

I just hope this new gig doesn’t require any singing from me.