For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.

In other actually good news on the media, The Atlantic is (finally) profitable! Mostly because they went hard on subscriptions.

Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:

A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes.

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement. It’s exciting to receive increased attention in the present, but it may have little effect on your impact in the future.

I would say that this is true for me as well. Tweeting never got me much, even in the “olden days”. But I’ve made lots of real connections (and even got hired) because of this slow, steady blog.

Speaking of Cal, I just started on his latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and I’m really liking it so far. From the intro:

I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.

This is a really great post by Ben Werdmuller. On the surface it’s about Building Engineering, but it’s mostly about good leadership and how to build successful products. I very much agree with his conclusion:

The most interesting and successful organizations have an externally-focused human mission and an internal focus on treating their humans well. That’s the only way to build technology well: to empower the people who are doing it, with a focus on empathy and inclusion, and a mission that galvanizes its community to work together.

There’s some great advice throughout, so I recommend reading the whole thing!

Austin Kleon has a really interesting post on the word “meek” in the Beatitudes. In short, “meek” doesn’t mean “weak”:

Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the sense of a welcoming stillness is the opposite of this.

That definition reminds me of my earlier post On kindness and decisiveness. I should’ve thrown a “meek” in there!

I found the article I Asked Experts for Tips to Navigate LinkedIn’s Cringe Factor surprisingly helpful, not just for its advice but also because it articulates well why LinkedIn can feel so weird sometimes:

LinkedIn users are trapped in a culture of professionalism and all that comes with it. The person you are with your boss or a client is probably not your truest self. This setting makes posting — or even just creating and maintaining a profile — feel extra high-stakes and, in turn, contrived. On LinkedIn, there is no dancing like no one’s watching.

Also:

The goal for most people on LinkedIn is not to be a creator, it’s just to live to fight another day in the working world.

In other interesting LinkedIn news I was going to link to earlier, also see Facebook and X gave up on news. LinkedIn wants to fill the void:

Finding a home for news publishers in 2024 isn’t about finding a perfect fit, but rather finding one that’s close enough. The traffic fire-hose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back. And LinkedIn is not the secret to infinite page views. But it might be fertile ground to build an audience with manageable issues.