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If by some bizarre twist of fate you have a life that doesn’t revolve around new-media entities like BuzzFeed and their impact on journalism and advertising and content in general, then this probably won’t interest you. But for anyone who does pay attention to such things, the idea of an interview between Gawker and BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith and founder Jonah Peretti about the site’s deletion of posts involving advertisers is like a candle flame to a moth — in other words, pretty irresistible.

The actual facts being referred to in the interview — that is, the posts that were deleted and BuzzFeed’s justification for why it did this, as well as editor-in-chief Ben Smith’s admission that he made a mistake — has been written about quite a bit (including a post by me). The interview post, however, is so gigantic and disjointed and rambling that I found it hard to follow, so I tried to pull some of the really interesting parts out.

The interview was triggered by the deletion of two posts, both of which were removed by Smith in what he later admitted was a breach of the site’s standards guide. Those deletions and the attention they drew in turn convinced the site to review all of the posts that had been deleted in the past. At the beginning of the interview, Peretti and Smith talk about why some earlier posts were deleted, including the hundreds that Gawker writer Keenan Trotter wrote about last year:

Jonah: This was a period where we didn’t have a deletion policy. If you were an editor and you wrote something and then you thought later, oh, this is kind of dumb and I was to delete it, you could delete the post.

Ben: And that was fine. And there’s not huge numbers of them, but there’s a fair number of those, there were posts that were dup—

Jonah: Duplicates, or errors, or text tests, or stuff like that.

Which is church and which is state?

According to BuzzFeed, the Dove post and the Monopoly post were deleted because they were “hot takes” and the site is trying to cut down on those, not because they involved an advertiser. But Smith admits that there were a couple of posts that were deleted that did cross the boundaries between editorial and advertising in an unpleasant way, both of which involved Pepsi and were written by Samir Mezrahi. And the discussion of this decision-making process is interesting. One post was a humorous take on what might be under Pharrell Williams’ hat:

Ben: It was actually a great post. There were many hilarious things under his hat, including doge. And Samir had taken the GIF of doge coming out from under Pharrell’s hat. Or, I’m not even sure if he’d seen it. But I got a complaint from the creative side that editors were taking their stuff and remixing it and not crediting their post or Pepsi. It was a confusing situation. Not—it was just a confusing situation. And I said to him, hey, we’re working, our creative team—which at this point is across the hall—is working with Pepsi on this social stuff, so don’t take their stuff, don’t use it in an editorial context. Church and state.

Jonah: One of the concerns is the impression that an editor was posting positive things about a brand because they were an advertiser. And that’s something I think, you know, as we grow, I don’t have much experience with church and state stuff. But as we grow, you start thinking, ok, if someone really loves pumpkin-spice lattes and they write a whole post about it and then it turns out that Starbucks is an advertiser, does that create the impression that they were influencing editorial, even though they had no idea that someone was an advertiser, and so there was—

The second post by Mezrahi was a critical one about accounts you should unfollow on Twitter, and that included Pepsi. What is most fascinating about this whole situation is that — as Smith points out — when Mezrahi posted about the soft-drink company, the Twitter account for Pepsi was actually being operated by his BuzzFeed colleagues across the hall. In other words, staffers from the advertising and marketing part of BuzzFeed, the part that operates like a digital ad agency, were in charge of the account that he was criticizing and/or praising. And this is what Smith and Peretti seemed most concerned about — that this would look bad.

Ben: It depends how you look. But when the priest wants to reach over—I’m sorry, I’m [unintelligible], block that metaphor. When church, when edit, what is our rule about edit playing in our advertising? Not in advertising in general, not around advertisers, but specifically with advertising being created across the hall by people at our company. And this is something I had never in my life considered, but seemed actually like a thing that we should absolutely not do. So we deleted the post, which at the time was what we did with posts that were inappropriate.

Keenan: What was the problem? Say more about what the problem was.

Ben: That you had an editor who was engaging specifically with things that were created—specifically with stuff that our creative team was working on, twice that week, with the same project.

Keenan: What’s wrong with that, exactly? What do you mean by “engaging”? It was clearly critical of it.

Ben: Well, no, the first one he was promoting. The second one, he was critical but—maybe the post is lost, but there was other celebratory stuff in there. He was just, like, touching it, you know? He was writing about advertising that was created by BuzzFeed that he knew, or that I believed, that was…

Ben: It’s obviously an appearance issue. It’s something that I feel really strongly about, it’s in our standards, you’ve probably seen it. There’s an exception to that, which is news. If there’s an ad on BuzzFeed, if there’s an ad—you know, if The New York Times carries an open letter, and it’s news, New York Times reporters will write about it as news. But the bar is at least as high, and probably a little higher, I think, just for—because, what are you doing? It seems really obvious to me.

The downside of having an internal ad agency

A lot of critical reaction to the interview has made BuzzFeed out to be some kind of horrible monster for having an internal ad agency that designs or crafts content for brands like Pepsi — and even in some cases runs their Twitter account during certain events — and for having a policy that supposedly prevents BuzzFeed from writing about advertisers. But that’s not really what Smith is saying at all. The policy appears to be not to write either positively or negatively about specific advertisements that either appear on BuzzFeed and/or are created by BuzzFeed’s in-house staff, because it might create the appearance of a conflict of interest:

Ben: So basically, in our standards, it says, “Please do not write positively about advertising that appears on BuzzFeed. Please do not do ad criticism about ads that appear on BuzzFeed. If it’s newsworthy that’s an exception to this rule.” That feels appropriate to me. Well, I don’t know, do you guys do that? Have you ever written about, like, this is a gorgeous banner?

Keenan: I just don’t see what the problem is with criticizing advertisements on BuzzFeed.

Ben: I don’t think in principle it is [a problem], I think anybody who doesn’t work for BuzzFeed should do it. But I don’t want our editors engaging in either criticism or, what we do much more, celebrations, of advertisements that are on BuzzFeed that are created by our creative team.

Keenan: But what is the scope of “advertisements”? Does that mean the brand, or—?

Ben: No, it does not mean the brand, it means specific campaigns, it means, they were creating content for this Twitter feed that he was talking about, that week, at the Super Bowl, where he was talking about the Super Bowl. It’s narrow. It does mean the company, it does not mean, hey there’s an ad on another site from an advertiser.

An important principle, flawed execution

What’s interesting to me about this whole debate is that BuzzFeed and Smith are arguably on the side of the angels in this one — at least in the sense of the journalistic ethics around advertising. Yes, they have an in-house ad agency that creates content, but my sense is that they want to maintain as firm a wall between advertising and editorial as possible, which is theoretically what journalistic ethicists would want them to do. And yet they are being criticized for doing so (and admittedly, the way the deletion of posts was handled was flawed, as Smith has admitted).

Ben: To me, it’s just like, you want readers to know that edit and advertising are separate things and that they don’t touch each other. And if that’s reporters, as happened twice in a week, if that is reporters promoting advertising, if that’s reporters criticizing it, no thank you. There’s an infinite number of things to write about, it just feel like, whether you celebrate it or criticize it, you just winding up blurring a line that readers are always struggling to understand in the best of times.

Ben: I think this specific question of advertising that is created by our advertising team is actually a really weird—a strange, marginal case, and a very small one, and one that I had never in my life thought about before, but that once we thought about, and I talked about with my team, we had a long conversation, internal and external, about standards. Starting with this post, we wound up thinking, that is a very strange little case, and it’s one that makes us—I would be very—here’s the real thing, I would be very uncomfortable with a post that was, this ad that I saw on BuzzFeed moved me to tears and I think it’s the most brilliant thing in the world. That would be a very strange thing, don‘t you think, or no? Do you think I should publish that?

There’s no question that having ad agency staff creating content for brands in the same building as the editorial staff writing what’s supposed to be journalism can cause problems. In at least one case, according to Smith, someone moved from creating advertising — where they worked on the Microsoft account — over to the editorial side, where they started writing about the company. The software giant complained, and Smith said at first he rejected their complaint, but then he thought more about it and decided that this shouldn’t occur. And that feels like another case where the site tried extra hard to make the division between editorial and advertising even clearer.

Jonah: He was working on their business, doing work for Microsoft, and then switched to edit and started…

Ben: And started writing about Microsoft. And they complained. And inititally I was like, I don’t care if you complain. And then they said, well wait, this guy was making ads for us last week. And that felt to me, OK, that’s a really legitimate, strange situation. So we’re going to make a rule that in the very unusual cases—there’s one woman now, she’s a designer who crossed from advertising into editorial—we’re going to have a six-month cooling off period where you can’t write about ads. So that was the other one.

So what’s the bottom line here — is BuzzFeed some kind of evil empire bent on distorting or perverting journalism? I don’t think so. If anything, it seems to have bent over backwards to try and appear as ethical as possible, to maintain a line between editorial and advertising, or church and state as the old metaphor goes. Is it confusing to have a single company both creating ads or doing social marketing for brands and also doing journalism? Sure. And I get the feeling that Smith and Peretti are both trying to figure out how that works exactly. But at least they are being public about it.

I meant to write about this when it happened, but I was busy getting ready to fly to Italy for a conference (I know, I know) and so I didn’t get the chance. But I think Clay Shirky pointed out something interesting in a recent conversation with New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan about what the future holds for traditional media entities like the Times — and it’s something that I confess had not really occurred to me. Namely, the idea that instead of declining slowly over time, print advertising revenue could suddenly hit another cliff and go into free fall.

The subject came up after Sullivan posted a column about the Times’ continued reliance on the print side of its business, something that still generates over 70 percent of the company’s revenue — as it does for most newspapers. According to the public editor, more than a million people still buy the Sunday paper each week, a number that has declined from 1.8 million in 1993. The average age of a print reader is 60.

The suggestion from Times executives was that print would likely be around for some time, and that print subscribers and advertising would also likely continue to generate a large chunk of revenue for some time. But in an emailed response to the column, Shirky suggested a “darker narrative” — in a nutshell, he said he expected the pattern of print-revenue decay, which is currently fairly slow, to accelerate.

“The people you quote — Baquet, Caputo — seem to be betting that the current dynamics of slow decline form the predictable future for your paper. I doubt this, and the alternate story I’d like to suggest is that print declines will become fast again by the end of the decade, bringing about the end of print (by which I mean a New York Times that does not produce a print product seven days a week)”

And why does Shirky think the decline of print-advertising revenue will pick up speed again? Because he argues that there is a kind of cliff approaching when it comes to the willingness of advertisers to support the paper financially when its readership in print continues to dwindle. Beyond a certain point, expensive ad campaigns won’t make sense given the small number of readers:

“Both your Sunday and weekday readerships are already near important psychological thresholds for advertisers — one million and 500,000. When no advertiser can reach a million readers in any print ad in the Times (2017, on present evidence) and weekday advertising reaches less than half a million (2018, using the 6 percent decline figure you quoted), there will be downward pressure on CPMs.”

This is the part that hadn’t occurred to me — that advertisers have a psychological point beyond which it isn’t worth spending much on a print campaign. And although I don’t know for a fact whether Shirky is right about the numbers, the argument itself seems plausible. And as he goes on to point out, even as revenue is declining sharply, the costs of producing the print product will not. The problem with print, he notes, is that “the advantageous returns to scale from physical distribution of newspapers become disadvantageous when scale shrinks.”

“The ad revenue from a print run of 500,000 would be 16 percent less than for 600,000 at best, but the costs wouldn’t fall by anything like 16%, eroding print margins. There is some threshold, well above 100,000 copies and probably closer to 250,000, where nightly print runs stop making economic sense. This risk is increased by The New York Times’s cross-subsidy of print, with its print+digital bundle.”

Is Shirky right about a second cliff? I don’t really know. But I think his argument should be required reading for newspaper executives who still believe that the decline of print advertising revenue and readership will be a gradual sailing-off-into-the-sunset kind of affair. It could be anything but. Sullivan said she plans to post more about her conversation with Shirky, so hopefully this discussion will continue.

Even as Facebook tries to convince news publishers like the New York Times to publish directly on its platform — instead of just posting excerpts with links to their websites — the company continues to demonstrate why that is such a Faustian bargain. On Tuesday, for example, the social-networking behemoth announced some new tweaks to its news-feed algorithm, and warned that publishers might see a decline in “post reach and referral traffic” as a result.

In its post about the new changes, Facebook tried to soften the blow by pointing out that referral traffic to media publishers has more than doubled in the past 18 months, and that it is always trying to help publishers find the right audience for their content by “optimizing how it is discovered and consumed.” The problem, of course, is that no one really knows what Facebook means by terms like optimization. Does it mean choosing the most high-quality content? Showing users what they want? Some combination of both? It’s unclear.

What is clear is that news publishers — and media companies of all kinds — have no real choice when it comes to dealing with Facebook, regardless of the terms of engagement. The social network is one of the largest digital platforms in existence, with a global audience of more than 1.4 billion, and it is also the way in which a majority of younger users find their news. Choosing to avoid Facebook simply isn’t an option if you want your content to be found.

Unfortunately, how Facebook feels about your content can differ from one moment to the next. Fans of the social-gaming company Zynga know this all too well: games like Farmville were once worth hundreds of millions of dollars because they were promoted by Facebook — but that vast audience disintegrated almost overnight when the social platform changed its algorithm.

What’s ironic about the latest negotiations with publishers is that news companies got much the same treatment not long ago: several outlets created “social reader” applications that built up millions of readers, until the social platform changed its mind again and downgraded their content, and those readers vanished.

(This is just an excerpt. You can find the rest of this piece at Fortune)

Updated at 4:21 ET on Friday, April 10

Not long after this post was published (thanks a lot, Ben) BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith admitted that he had made a mistake in removing both the Dove post and the Monopoly post referred to below — saying he “blew it” by asking editors to delete those posts, against their better judgement and in contravention of the site’s own standards and practices guide. He said he reacted impulsively and was wrong to do so, and that neither removal had anything to do with advertisers being involved. Both posts have been reinstated with notes that say they were “inappropriately deleted amid an ongoing conversation about how and when to publish personal opinion pieces on BuzzFeed.” I think Ben deserves a lot of credit for admitting his error so quickly and publicly.

The brouhaha

If you’re not glued to media Twitter the way I am, you might have missed a seemingly minor kerfuffle — or perhaps it was more of a brouhaha — about a post that BuzzFeed removed concerning the recent Dove soap campaign aimed at making women feel better about themselves. Writer Arabelle Sicardi wrote a critical piece for the Life section about the company’s approach and BuzzFeed editors took it down and left in its place a note saying it wasn’t the right “tone” for the site (that note appears to have also been removed). After much criticism from journalists, including a piece at Gawker’s media blog, editor-in-chief Ben Smith posted a tweet with the text of a memo the Life editors sent around about their decision to remove the post (thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive, the original post is available here if you want to read it).

No more hot takes

In a nutshell, Smith argued that the piece was removed because BuzzFeed is trying to do fewer “hot takes” — that is, personal posts about the writer’s response to some event or news (I asked whether it would have stayed up if the writer had sought out others with the same views, but haven’t gotten a response). As more than one person pointed out in the aftermath of this decision, whatever the merits of the original post might have been — and many people thought it was more than fair — removing an entire post due to its content is explicitly forbidden in BuzzFeed’s code of conduct, which I wrote about when they first released it publicly. It specifically says “Editorial posts should never be deleted for reasons related to their content, or because a subject or stakeholder has asked you to do so.”

The siren song of advertising

To make matters worse, Dove happens to be an advertiser with BuzzFeed, creating the impression that the site took the post down because it was critical of an ad partner (Smith says he didn’t know Dove was an advertiser until the Gawker story appeared). And that’s not the only incident of its kind — another post, which was critical of the board game Monopoly from Hasbro, was also removed after Hasbro and BuzzFeed announced a partnership related to the game. And according to several sources, the “robots.txt” file that tells search engines what files or pages to avoid when their indexing robots are crawling the site specifically refers to the post about Monopoly, as well as a post about chips — meaning those posts would not come up in a Google search on that topic.

It does look peculiar that 2 out of 39 lines here http://t.co/tAnIkugXH7 concern Monopoly and Lay's potato chips. pic.twitter.com/2sYI7ijnrc

— Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) April 10, 2015

Much of what BuzzFeed has done so far could be either mistakes in judgement or simple errors, including the removal of the Dove post (although the robots.txt file is much harder to explain). Is it BuzzFeed’s right to do whatever it wants to maintain the “tone” it is looking for in its Life section? Of course it is. And it’s possible that the standards that editors are trying to uphold in that section are different than the ones that it is trying to encourage or stick to in the News section of the site. But it’s not clear whether that’s the case — and even if it is whether any readers will be aware of that difference. And while I don’t think the vast majority of readers will either notice or care, those who do notice might start to wonder how much they can trust the site as a news source.

That trust is something BuzzFeed is trying to build up, presumably, so that people (including advertisers) will take it seriously as a news entity as it tries to expand into foreign reporting and investigative news. And just like Rolling Stone magazine with its flawed investigation into the UVA rape story, BuzzFeed risks losing some of the trust it has banked by not being transparent about what it’s doing and why. It’s possible that there won’t be any short-term repercussions as a result of such behavior, but long term it could be harder for the site to argue that it is a reputable news entity — if in fact that is something it cares about, which I think it is.

Washington Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron isn’t exactly a raging digital-first zealot as far as newspaper executives go, so it’s refreshing to see just how blunt he was in his assessment of the industry in a recent speech he gave at the University of California. Some might argue — as my friend Chris Anderson, a CUNY journalism professor, did in a tweet — that much of what Baron is saying amounts to time-worn clichés and things that everyone should know by now. And I think there’s some truth to that. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who need to hear them anyway.

One of the most crucial points is that the forces of change that have been disrupting and transforming the media industry for the past decade or so aren’t something that can be argued with, or reasoned with, or held at bay through the powers of persuasion. They are like a fast-moving glacier or global climate change — a force of nature that you can either figure out how to adapt to or be swept under by. Trying to hold it at arms length is like King Canute commanding the tide to stop.

“As we make this move, the first casualty is sentiment. The forces at work don’t care about how we prefer to do our jobs, how easily we adjust to change, how much we have to learn. They don’t care about any extra workload. This transformation is going to happen no matter what. And there is only one realistic choice available: We can do what we must to adapt and – ideally – thrive. Or not — in which case we are choosing to fail. If this pace of change unnerves you, there is no consolation. Things will only get faster. And for those who resist the change rather than embrace it, there will be no forbearance or forgiveness. Their destiny is to be pushed aside and forgotten.”

Part of the sentiment that needs to be done away with, Baron says, is around the permanence of print. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many newspaper executives continue to see their print operations as the jewel in the crown — despite the fact that they are making less money all the time, and have fewer readers. Although print still makes up a substantial proportion of a newspaper’s assets, Baron says, publishers have to disabuse themselves of the notion that print will always exist.

“We can start by discarding the lingering notion that paper will remain for long a big part of what we do. It will not. For a while, yes. But it will not last. Let’s also abandon the idea, still common in newsrooms, that what’s on the front page is more important, has greater value, carries greater prestige than what we disseminate on the web. It isn’t more important. It is a statement of our values, a defining and tangible representation of what we see in the world. We want to be smart about the front page. We want to be careful. It is important, just not more important than what’s on the web.”

Baron goes on to talk about how newspapers need to lower the barriers — both physical and psychological — between the business side of their companies and the editorial side, since all parts of the business need to co-operate in order to survive. Newsrooms must “participate in creating products that appeal to advertisers, boost readership, and deliver satisfying results for both,” he says, without abandoning the principles of independent and honest coverage. And newspapers have to think differently about how they tell stories as well, he says — instead of thinking instinctively that traditional forms are inherently superior to new digital alternatives.

Is any of this revolutionary or even surprising? Not really. Not to anyone who has been paying attention over the past few years, or to anyone who has seen a newspaper balance sheet. But I don’t think the Washington Post editor was talking to those people. He was talking to the vast middle layer of newsroom managers who think that if they nod towards the web and talk about “engagement” or pageviews now and then, their job is done. It isn’t, of course. Whether they feel it or not, the glacier is in motion, and they will be swept under unless someone convinces them to pay attention. It’s not clear to me that even speeches by people like Marty Baron will accomplish this, but it’s worth a shot.

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that the sudden death of Gigaom last month hit pretty hard. Not just because I spent five years of my life there, but because I felt that we had built an amazing team, and had done some really first-class work covering all aspects of emerging tech and the networked economy. So it’s great to be able to say that a big chunk of the Gigaom team — including me — are joining Fortune magazine next month, where we will be able to continue that work.

As Om put it in his post about the news, the death of one thing often creates new forms of life from the pieces that are left behind, and I hope that Stacey Higginbotham, Katie Fehrenbacher, Jeff Roberts, Barb Darrow, Jonathan Vanian and I will be able to do exactly that for Fortune. Here’s what the magazine said about our arrival:

“Six of the journalists from the tech web site Gigaom will be joining Fortune in the next few weeks. These journalists are leaders in covering an interconnected group of technologies — cloud computing, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, social collaboration, energy technology — that are profoundly remaking the foundations of global business. Readers of Fortune increasingly recognize they need to master the implications of these technologies for their companies, or face disruption by others who do. We intend to be their guide — in print, on the web, and through our conferences.”

Fortune is a great journalistic brand, and I have a lot of respect for the folks who work there, including editor Alan Murray and writer/editors like Dan Primack, Adam Lashinsky, Leena Rao, Erin Griffith, Philip Elmer-Dewitt and Andrew Nusca. Grafting pieces of other media outlets onto a new host is never an easy task, but I have no doubt that we will be able to make it work — and not just make it work, but take Fortune and Time Inc. to new heights of smart technology coverage. Onward!

There’s an old adage in journalism that says: “Any story that looks too good to be true probably is.” And yet, respected media entities repeatedly print news stories that turn out to have been exaggerated wildly or completely fabricated. Why? Because in many cases the desire to tell a great — or important, or scandalous, or fascinating — story trumps journalistic principles. In the latest example, Rolling Stone magazine reported a blockbuster story about campus rape at the University of Virginia that appears to be almost completely untrue.

After months of criticism of the piece — which told the story of a sexual-assault victim named Jackie and her attempts to get the university to take action against her attackers — the magazine agreed to submit its work to an independent review by the Columbia Journalism School in New York. The review board’s report was released late Sunday night, and it contains a litany of journalistic malfeasance on the part of the Rolling Stone writer and her editors.

Among other things, the reporter involved in the story apparently failed to do even a minimal amount of checking to determine whether Jackie’s account of the assault could be corroborated, such as trying to track down and confront the individuals she identified, or trying to verify some of the obvious details of the attack. And that continued to be the case even as the story went through multiple levels of editorial oversight. As the report puts it:

“[This] is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all.”

Why would an institution like Rolling Stone — which has made a name for itself in the past with deeply reported features like the piece it did on former NATO commander Stanley McChrystal, which got the general fired — take such a risk? Former New York Times editor Bill Keller argued in an interview with the Times that the pressure from the internet to engage in “clickbait” exacerbated the problems with the story, and there is some truth to that. Even though Rolling Stone is a monthly magazine, it is part of a much more competitive media landscape than ever before.

But the real reason why the magazine and its editors failed to perform some of the most rudimentary journalistic tasks is the same as it has been in almost every previous example of such malfeasance — including the New York Times’ reporting on the case for intervention in Iraq in 2003, and the more recent Newsweek blockbuster feature on the secretive inventor of Bitcoin, which also turned out to be almost completely fabricated. And the reason is that the writers and editors in question desperately wanted the story to be true.

Campus rape is arguably a huge problem in America, and an extremely painful one, and stories like the one told by Jackie are all too commonplace: male fraternities as a breeding ground for such behavior, campus officials overlooking or downplaying such incidents, victims being blamed for their own assaults, and so on. Jackie’s tale was the perfect synthesis of all of these sub-themes, and as such it could be counted on to be both a massive attention-getting device and an important political and cultural document. The perfect combination. The report says:

“The problem of confirmation bias – the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones – is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here.”

This desire to have a story be true is such a powerful drug that it can overcome even the most hard-core and deeply-ingrained journalistic instincts of senior editors at institutions like the New York Times, Newsweek and obviously Rolling Stone. It can convince a writer that checking a source’s report isn’t worth it, and it can convince editors not to bother requesting such a check. In the case of the Rolling Stone feature, interestingly enough, having more editors apply their expertise to the story may have actually exacerbated the problem rather than curing it, according to former Columbia journalism professor Bill Grueskin.

There’s one other aspect of the Rolling Stone controversy that stands out, and that is the almost complete lack of repercussions for any of the writers and editors involved in the story. The magazine should be congratulated for asking for — and then making public — an independent investigation of its practices, something that happens all too infrequently. But how could it then decide to absolve its staff of any penalty for their failure, and on top of that say it doesn’t plan to change any of its editorial processes?

If the trust of readers is one of the most valuable currencies we have in the current media landscape — as I would argue it is — then Rolling Stone banked a substantial amount by agreeing to the public review, but has spent all that and more by failing to take even the most rudimentary steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

There’s a great interview over at the Nieman Journalism Lab with Tom Standage, deputy editor for digital at The Economist, in which he talks about the value proposition that the magazine — whether in print or online — tries to keep in mind when it comes to serving its readers. And it boils down to a single thing: namely, that the Economist wants its audience to feel like they have learned whatever they need to know about a topic by reading its coverage, regardless of what format it appears in.

“We sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. You can never finish the Internet, you can never finish Twitter, and you can never really finish The New York Times, to be honest. So at its heart is that we have this very high density of information, and the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time, then we’ll tell you what matters in the world.”

Ultimately, what the Economist is selling is an illusion — the illusion that you only need to read one thing in order to learn everything about a topic or an event. But that illusion can be very powerful, and very appealing. I remember a friend of mine saying some time ago that one of the main selling points of a physical newspaper is that you can finish it, and he’s right. There’s something very satisfying about getting to the end of a newspaper or a book and thinking “Okay, I’m done now.”

Links ruin the illusion of completeness

Where I disagree with Standage in his approach is when he describes why the Economist doesn’t link out to either other media outlets or even external websites in its digital offerings, like the daily update called Espresso. In effect, the reason for not doing that is an extension of the argument he makes about convincing people they only need to read one thing. Linking to other websites or sources of information would ruin the illusion of completeness, and then readers would be worried that they weren’t being completely informed. So the magazine doesn’t do it.

“Another aspect of it is that we don’t do links. The reason that we don’t do links, again, if you want to get links you can get them from other people. You can go on Twitter and get as many as you like. But the idea was everything that you need to know is distilled into this thing that you can get to the end of, and you can get to the end of it without worrying that you should’ve clicked on those links in case there was something interesting. So we’ve clicked on the links already and we’ve decided what’s interesting.”

As someone who believes in the fundamental value of links — and has often criticized traditional media outlets for their attempts to pretend that they have produced the sum total of all necessary information — I’m not sure I can agree with Standage on his approach. I understand why it makes for a saleable product for the Economist, and I understand why it might be appealing to readers. But I still think it leaves something out, and something critically important, which is the ability to check, verify, expand on and test the assumptions in a particular piece.

If media entities don’t take advantage of the web’s ability to link to supporting sources of information, or to give readers their own resources to check a hypothesis — if all they do is publish a giant chunk of content with no links in it — then what is the point of putting it online in the first place? It might as well have stayed in print, because it isn’t taking advantage of the medium.

According to a recent report in the New York Times, Facebook is working with a number of media outlets — including the Times itself — on a deal that will see them publish news and other content directly on the social platform, instead of just linking to stories on their websites. Facebook’s interest in these kinds of deals has been mentioned a number of times in the past, including in a piece by the late NYT media writer David Carr, but this is the first time we’ve gotten any real details. Initial launch partners reportedly include the Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic.

If you follow any journalists on Twitter, you might have heard the term “Faustian bargain” used more than once to describe this kind of arrangement when the New York Times story first appeared. Faust, of course, was a legendary German scholar — immortalized in a play by Goethe — who was unsatisfied with his career and wound up making a deal with the devil: Unlimited wealth and fame, in return for his soul. That might be overstating the downside of Facebook’s deal a tad, but it is definitely a double-edged sword — and one media companies shouldn’t take lightly.

For a media outlet, the benefits of publishing direct to Facebook are fairly obvious: By doing so, they get strategic access to Facebook’s more than 1 billion active users, some of whom spend hours every day on the social platform. That kind of audience reach is like the Holy Grail for publishers, most of whom are lucky if their readers — even the ones who pay for the content they consume — spend more than a few minutes on their site at a time. Any traditional publisher, even the New York Times, would jump at the chance to have Facebook’s engagement engine applied to its content.

In addition to reach, it appears that Facebook is offering media outlets the ability to have their content appear more quickly as well, since loading external sites can take some time within the Facebook app and readers find this irritating, to the point where they often don’t click on those links again. In a sense, what Facebook is offering is a little like the “fast lane” that Internet providers like Comcast guarantee to providers such as Netflix — a way of smoothing the path so that their content reaches the audience more efficiently (whether this is fair or not is a separate question).

Facebook also has another powerful thing to offer, and that is its news-feed algorithm — and this is where the company’s appealing offer starts to look a lot more like a Faustian bargain. While Facebook could presumably use its news-feed ranking algorithm to recommend more stories and content from its partners (an aspect of the deal that other publishers are undoubtedly also thinking about), the details of whose content gets recommended and when would be totally under Facebook’s control.

The all-powerful Facebook algorithm

This is part of why Facebook as a news source is a concern not just for media outlets, but for individual users as well: the functioning of the Facebook algorithm — the way it chooses which things to show you and which to hide — is so arcane that many users aren’t even aware that it is occurring. And so the view they have of the world is being distorted in some way, but they don’t really have any idea how or why. That’s more than a little troubling, and the new arrangement Facebook is talking about would expand that problem even further.

The media industry has been down this particular road once before: Several years ago, so-called “social readers” were all the rage — applications from outlets like The Guardian and the Washington Post, which allowed readers to consume content without having to leave Facebook. Those applications quickly gained millions of users because Facebook promoted them, but then the social platform changed its mind (and its algorithm) and stopped doing so, and their readership was reduced to virtually zero almost overnight.

The unfortunate reality of dealing with Facebook is that, like Google, its algorithm is a black box. The only ones who know how it works — and ultimately control its outcome — are CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox, the executive in charge of the news-feed. They say they want high-quality content because that’s what their readers desire, and therefore it increases “engagement.” But who decides what content matches that description, and who it is going to be shown to, and when? Facebook.

It’s not just about control either — it’s also about who ultimately benefits most from the kind of arrangement Facebook is proposing. If media outlets can get some data from the social platform about their readers and their demographic breakdown, interests, etc. then it might arguably be worth it, but then there’s the long-term cost: If consumers find more of their news appearing on Facebook without having to click to find it somewhere else, who will they start to see as the source of news? Facebook.

In some ways, dealing with Facebook is actually worse than Faust’s deal: The German scholar chose to cut a deal with Satan primarily because he was vain, but media companies are forced to work with Facebook whether they want to or not, because the platform plays such a huge role in how millions of people come into contact with the news. With that kind of clout, news entities can’t afford to not be on the network, but the more content they put there, the more they risk losing even more control over their business — and the only one in a position to dictate the terms of such a deal is Facebook.

In case you’ve been in suspended animation, Apple finally announced the details of its new wearable computer — known simply as the Apple Watch — at a recent event (if you call it the iWatch by mistake, you will be haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs). Much of the attention focused on the luxury options, such as the gold-plated one that sells for $15,000. But assuming Apple can also reach a fairly broad consumer base with its lower-priced models, how should news and media outlets be thinking about delivering their content to a watch? Or should they even bother?

Some media companies have already answered that question by rushing to have their news features ready for the launch: CNN has a news-alert service for the watch — which Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned in his announcement — that shows the same kind of notifications iPhone users can get on their devices, and other companies have either come out with similar alert features or said they are working on them, including the New York Times and National Public Radio.

According to CNN’s description of the Watch app, users can tap on a news alert to see the full story, or click and have the story appear on their iPhone — or they can tap on a news alert about a video, and have the video start playing on their phone. The apps from the New York Times, NPR and Breaking News apps appear to follow a similar model, with a short alert users can click on.

These first few iterations of news apps suggest that what many news organizations have chosen to do is to take their existing news alerts for the iPhone and reproduce them on the Watch. But is this really the best approach? Does anyone really want to tap on a news alert and see the story appear on their Watch? For that matter, given the sheer amount of apps that users might get notifications from — such as Twitter or Facebook or simple text messaging — are users even going to want news alerts?

Don’t alert me, bro

Even if news alerts are part of the mix for Apple Watch users, it’s not clear that simply duplicating existing iPhone alerts is going to work. Not only are many phone users (including me) already irritated by notifications, but a watch is even less conducive to interruptions because of its size. Many have started talking about the “glance” as the new atomic unit of attention when it comes to a watch — but how much information can a news organization convey in a single glance at a tiny screen?

Jack Riley, head of audience development at The Huffington Post UK, spent a month looking at exactly those kinds of questions as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard — not just as they pertain to the Apple Watch, but the whole new class of “wearables” of which the watch is a part. His report appeared at the Nieman Journalism Lab, and made some interesting points about how media companies should be looking at these devices and the kinds of things they need to consider.

One of the first points Riley makes is that a user’s attention and behavior when wearing or looking at a watch are much more fragile than when they have their smartphone out and are busy looking at it. Since the main benefit of smart-watches for many users is the ability to get rid of both their phone and its annoying distractions, news companies are going to have to tread very carefully through this minefield. Riley describes what Joey Marburger of the Washington Post digital team said about his Pebble:

“My logic was like: I can silence my phone and I’ll tailor notifications that come to my watch. I don’t have to use my phone in a meeting, or pull out my phone and be rude — I’ll just check my watch. What I learned very quickly is I was being more rude, because it looked like I was constantly checking the time.”

Circa co-founder Matt Galligan and editor-in-chief Anthony De Rosa have both talked many times about how sensitive they are when it comes to alerts on their app, which notifies users whenever a new piece of information comes in about a developing story that they have decided to “follow.” There is a definite psychological impact, however small, every time a user gets an update — and if there are too many, or they aren’t properly targeted or relevant, then a user will ignore them or turn the feature off.

A giant noisy ocean of content

What something like the Apple Watch makes abundantly clear, with its incredibly limited screen real estate, is the central conceit of almost every news organization — from CNN all the way down — which is that users will only ever need their app or service or alerts, and therefore it doesn’t matter how they treat them. In reality, those alerts and apps are just a tiny piece of flotsam in a giant, roiling sea of content that is streaming at people from a thousand different sources.

So the first thing news entities will have to come to terms with is the idea that their news alerts are just going to be adding to the noise for many users, and so they will need to be a) hugely relevant and b) very infrequent. As Riley points out, news isn’t — and never will be — the driving force behind the adoption of a new technology like the watch. He quotes the Washington Post’s Marburger again on this point, who says “No one’s going to buy a smartwatch because they get better headlines.”

Another big challenge for news companies, which Riley also discusses, is the monetization issue. That might seem like a big enough struggle when it comes to smartphones, and the way that content consumption occurs on them, but that pales in comparison to the difficulty of monetizing content that appears on a screen the size of a watch. There aren’t going to be any banners or pre-roll video ads here. That means the Apple Watch has to be seen as an extension of an existing brand-awareness program.

The bottom line is that while the Apple Watch might be seen as attractive by news companies — like any high-end technological device that is going to sell millions of units and be used by a fairly wealthy customer base — there are a number of factors that make it unwise to rush into the space without thinking through some of the challenges ahead. Some media companies will undoubtedly do so anyway, of course, and so we will be able to learn from their inevitable failures as well.

As the smoke begins to clear from the shut-down of my former employer and the rubble that was left behind starts to take shape, a number of nagging questions remain. That’s an understatement, of course; pretty much all that remains are questions, some financial and some emotional. But from my personal perspective, one of the most nagging is: Does Gigaom’s failure mean the model the company was based on — a three-part structure composed of advertising-supported editorial, events and subscription research — is fundamentally flawed, or was it just poorly executed?

A number of news articles, including one by Peter Kafka at Re/code and another posted on Tuesday by Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times, have described the debt and related cash-flow requirements the company faced, which appear to have become too onerous for the board and the company’s creditors to stomach any further (more details have emerged since).

Although revenues at Gigaom’s research arm were growing, what seems to have happened is the gap between those top-line revenues and the bottom-line cash flow or profits of the division grew too wide, and investors stopped believing that the company would ever get there, or weren’t willing to spend any more to fill that chasm. And without a plausible road to profitability, there was no hope of an exit that would justify the $40 million in cash and debt the company had raised.

So was the failure of the company a result of a fundamental flaw in the three-legged research/events/editorial model? I don’t think so, despite the rather tangible evidence to the contrary — evidence I am forced to confront every time I look at my dwindling bank balance. I didn’t just champion the Gigaom model because I happened to be working there, I actually believed (and continue to believe) that it can work, and that if done properly it can create a much better foundation for a media company than just relying on advertising.

I mentioned the Economist in my earlier post, and it continues to be the ne plus ultra of this approach: it has an editorial product that is supported in part by advertising and in part by subscriptions, but it also has a highly-regarded research arm — the Economist Intelligence unit — that contributes substantially to the bottom line, and it does events and offers its members other benefits as well. Politico is pursuing a similar model, offering a free editorial product combined with a subscription-based premium product (Politico Pro) that includes events and other benefits for members.

The principle behind this model is that you bring readers in through the front door — the free, ad-supported editorial side, which hopefully carries its own weight (as Gigaom’s did) but doesn’t make a lot of extra money — and you hope to create a relationship with them based around your expertise. Then you (theoretically at least) monetize that relationship through other means, including events and subscription research. In some sense, the editorial product becomes a loss-leader for the rest of your offerings, a way of finding new readers or customers.

So what failed in Gigaom’s case? Former VP of research Michael Wolf argued in a recent post that the research arm lost its way at some point, and decided to focus on high-volume (but relatively commoditized) products like webinars and sponsored white papers rather than developing a deep expertise in subject areas — and it also targeted large corporate clients, many of whom apparently didn’t renew after their initial trials, instead of focusing on individual buyers and growing more slowly.

This might be naive, but I still believe that the Gigaom research unit and the model it was part of could have worked, and in fact arguably did work for a number of years. From what I have been able to piece together, it sounds like spending — which was undertaken in an attempt to grow that side of the business to a scale that would make it worth all the millions that VCs had invested in it — just out-paced the actual cash coming in. That’s arguably a flaw in execution, not the model itself.

The bottom line is that I don’t think the death of Gigaom should be taken as evidence that the model itself doesn’t work. Is it difficult to execute? Sure. A guarantee of success? Hardly. But I think there is room for another media entity to make a go of it if they wish to, and hopefully we will see more giving it a shot. Advertising and traditional news paywalls are not the only options.

There’s been a fair bit written about what helped to take Gigaom down a week and a half ago, and the role that debt played in the company’s failure (I wrote a personal take on the demise of the company). In a story about the shut-down, Peter Kafka at Re/code reported that sources told him the company borrowed $5 million in a debt round led by Western Technology Investments in 2011 and then borrowed even more debt after that. According to his story, by the end of last year, Gigaom was paying a total of $400,000 a month for rent and debt-service costs.

Thanks to Wong Joon Ian, an investigative reporter working for Coindesk who looked at securities filings from WTI, we have a few more details about the company’s debt load. According to SEC documents, the original loan from WTI was actually $4.7 million, but it came at the end of 2012 rather than in 2011 — and based on subsequent filings by WTI, Gigaom was paying more than $400,000 a quarter to service that single loan.

SEC records show that by the end of last year, Gigaom still had about $2.5 million remaining to pay on the loan, which was set to mature in February of next year. That means that in order to get current with its lender by the end of the loan period, the company would have had to boost its payments to $600,000 a quarter or find some other way of getting an injection of new funds. And it had at least $12 million more in debt outstanding apart from that WTI loan, according to Kafka’s story.

Joon Ian also notes that in an interview, the head of Western Technology Investment said that his firm likes to put borrowers who can’t pay their loans into what he called “friendly foreclosure,” so that they don’t have to file for bankruptcy, thus improving their chances of raising new funding or being acquired. Gigaom is reportedly talking with a number of media entities about acquiring some or all of its remaining assets, including the name and archive of published articles, as well as the company’s mailing list and possibly its events business.

As the Globe and Mail has reported — based on classified documents obtained from an anonymous source — U.S. intelligence officials appear to be mapping the communications traffic of several large Canadian corporations, including Rogers Communications Inc., one of the country’s largest internet and telecom providers. Perhaps the most depressing aspects of this news is how completely unsurprising it is.

By now, we have all been subjected to a veritable tsunami of surveillance-related leaks, courtesy of documents obtained by former U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, a trove from which this latest piece of information is also drawn. These files suggest the National Security Agency uses every method at its disposal — both legal and otherwise — to track every speck of web and voice traffic, including tapping directly into the undersea cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

In that context, the idea that intelligence agencies are snooping on the networks of Canadian corporations like Rogers seems totally believable, despite the fact that a 66-year-old agreement between Canada and the U.S. supposedly prevents either country from spying on the residents of its partner. While the document in question doesn’t say that any snooping is occurring, it seems clear that the behaviour it describes is designed to create a map of those networks in order to facilitate future surveillance activity.

The U.S. has repeatedly argued that this kind of monitoring is necessary in order to detect the activities of potential threats to U.S. security. The problem with this approach, of course, is that no one knows where those threats will appear, or how they will manifest themselves — thanks to the diverse nature of modern international terrorism — and so the inevitable result is a kind of ubiquitous surveillance, in which every word and photo and voice-mail message is collected, just in case it might be important.

One of the risks inherent in the steady flow of leaks from Mr. Snowden and others is that the new reality they portray eventually becomes accepted, if not outright banal. Of course we are being surveilled all the time; of course our location is being tracked thanks to the GPS chips in our phones; of course the NSA is installing “back door” software on our internet devices before we even buy them. At this point, it’s hard to imagine a surveillance revelation that would actually surprise anyone, no matter how Orwellian it might be.

If nothing else, one of our duties in this kind of environment — a duty not just for journalists but for governments as well, and the Canadian government in particular — is to prevent this kind of behavior from becoming banal, to fight the overwhelming sense of “surveillance fatigue” that each new revelation triggers, by shouting our disapproval from the rooftops if necessary.

This is one reason why we should celebrate the existence of leakers and “whistle-blowers” like Mr. Snowden — and even entities like WikiLeaks, despite all the obvious flaws inherent in that organization and its founder Julian Assange — regardless of our partisan political leanings. The U.S. government and its allies may see both of these men as traitors, and their acts as treasonous, but how else are we to discover the innumerable ways in which we are being surveilled against our will?

If our government wants to maintain the trust of its citizens, it should mount its own campaign against these kinds of activities — which are taking place either with its explicit or tacit approval. Just because we are friends and trading partners with the U.S. doesn’t mean we have to submit to their vision of what the future needs to look like.

We don’t need to live in a world where the locks on our virtual doors have a secret pass-code so that government forces can enter at will if they believe we are a threat to national security, or where our every click is recorded and filed away in a secret location, and our cellphones and internet devices listen to our conversations waiting for us to utter certain red-flag trigger phrases. If our governments believe it is necessary to trade our freedom for what amounts to an illusion of security, we need to do everything in our power to convince them that it this is not a trade we wish to make.

This post originally appeared as an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail

Last week, the place I’ve called my online home for over five years — a site that has been one of the leading tech blogs ever since my friend Om Malik started it in the Starbucks at the corner of Clay and Battery in San Francisco in 2006 — suddenly shut down. Gigaom was always more than just a job for me, and its death has hit me like the loss of a close friend. Like many of my former colleagues, I am still trying to process all of the feelings and thoughts its closure has triggered and understand why and how it happened. I consider this post just part of that process — I’m certainly not claiming to have any definitive answers.

Everyone wants to know why Gigaom failed, and what it says about the online media market. And I feel as though I should know, if only because I was one of the site’s media writers, and I have written so many times about the challenges other online outlets have faced. In fact, I’ve heard from more than one person who sees Gigaom’s death as some kind of karmic retribution for my past criticism of outlets like the New York Times — and perhaps it is. Frankly, it’s as good an explanation as any other.

For me, the business realities and technical aspects of Gigaom are all tied up with my feelings about the place, and about my friend Om Malik, who took a crazy gamble and left his job at Forbes to start a blog, and eventually built what I consider to be one of the best teams of writers and editors I’ve ever worked with. As I have said several times, I have absolutely zero regrets about agreeing to leave a comfy newspaper job and join him in that quest, despite the unfortunate way it ended so abruptly. Was it the best online media business ever? No. But it was a pleasure and a privilege to work there, and I am proud of what we accomplished.

If there’s one thing that bothers me about the site’s sudden closure, it’s that it might jeopardize the careers of or influence how people see my colleagues — excellent writers and editors like Stacey Higginbotham and Katie Fehrenbacher and Janko Roettgers and Laura Owen and Kevin Tofel and Derrick Harris and Kevin Fitchard and David Meyer and Jeff Roberts and Barb Darrow and Kif Leswing and Jonathan Vanian and Biz Carson and Signe Brewster and Carmel DeAmicis. If you haven’t already reached out to hire them, you should. They are rock stars, and they don’t deserve to have their work denigrated in this way, with bank trustees — or their corporate handmaidens — telling them to turn in their laptops and shut off the lights when they leave.

I’ve talked to several media outlets about Gigaom’s death — including Digiday and the Poynter Institute and the Columbia Journalism Review — and that has helped me think through some of the issues around it. Was Gigaom killed by its reliance on outside venture capital, as some have argued? In part, I think it was. As I mentioned in one interview, VC money is a Faustian bargain of the first order: it gives you the freedom to grow quickly, but it also puts pressure on a company to show meteoric growth, and there is a harsh penalty for not doing so — and the media industry isn’t exactly known for meteoric growth of the kind VCs like to see.

One aspect that many people are ignoring, however, is that Gigaom also took on debt, via a financing with several lenders including Silicon Valley Bank, in an attempt to juice its growth even further. In a different kind of market or at a different time, this might have worked — but ultimately the company failed to produce enough cash to service that debt, and that is part of what took it down (Peter Kafka at Re/code has more on that). Creditors are orders of magnitude less accommodating than shareholders or equity investors, and they tend to be a lot more nervous as well. When they want their money, all the happy stories about future growth that startups tell VCs mean less than nothing.

Was Gigaom also killed by the merciless evolution of the online media market? I think to some extent that’s true as well — as I told CJR, when Gigaom started, and even up to a few years ago, having a staff of 50 and 6 million unique visitors a month would have seemed like a huge success. But in a world in which behemoths like BuzzFeed and Vice are the paragons of virtue, with thousands of staff and massive traffic, Gigaom must have looked like a pipsqueak, and that affects everything from advertising to funding.

The other aspect of the business that some media-focused sites aren’t including in their calculations is that Gigaom has never been just an editorial operation that lived and died on advertising. One of the most innovative aspects of the Gigaom model was that it had three legs: ad-funded editorial, events (conferences), and a subscription research arm where analysts wrote reports for corporate clients. I still believe that this model can work, despite what some might argue is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s very similar to the model that a publisher like The Economist uses, for example. Ad-supported editorial helps build a relationship with readers, and events and subscription products eventually monetize that relationship, if everything works properly.

I don’t have — and never did have — access to the in-depth financial aspects of Gigaom’s business (and perhaps I should have, as my former colleague Celeste LeCompte argued in a recent Nieman Lab piece). But my understanding of what happened is that the editorial side of the business was not the problem. Was it hugely profitable? No. But was it doing any worse than plenty of other editorial outlets in terms of revenue or cash flow? No — in fact, quite a bit better than many, as far as I can tell. But ultimately the research arm seems to have failed to generate enough cash to justify the money that investors (and creditors) lent us to build it. Whose fault is that? I honestly have no idea. Was the model flawed, or just the execution of it? Again, I simply don’t know.

Some have argued that Gigaom was guilty of an excess of hubris, and that instead of trying to grow into something so quickly, it should have taken the slower approach of a niche site like Search Engine Land. There is certainly nothing wrong with that idea — sites like Danny Sullivan’s or Jessica Lessin’s The Information, or Mike Masnick’s TechDirt, or even Ben Thompson’s Stratechery are great examples of how small can be good. But that doesn’t mean creating such a site is the only way to go — others would like to reach for the stars, and that desire is a big part of what makes Silicon Valley what it is: an infuriating place filled with hubris and ego, but also a great example of what people can achieve when they push themselves.

Did Gigaom fail in its attempt to reach that goal? Yes. But that doesn’t mean the goal wasn’t worthwhile, or that what we built while striving to reach it was any less great. I would like to thank my friend Om for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, and I would like to thank all of my colleagues for the pleasure of working with one of the best editorial teams on the planet. I am happy to call you my friends as well as my former co-workers. It was a great ride while it lasted. Onward!

If you know things are bad, you need to cut hard and deep, trying to avoid the bone. However, like we’ve seen in The Walking Dead, it’s better to chop off your arm than to become a Walker!