The missing links and unfinished thoughts

The best newsletter job in the world

A lovely profile of Rusty Foster, writer of Today in Tabs, a media gossip and commentary newsletter that earns a nice living for him. He basically is what I'd like to be in 10 years. Why? Because he's writing it from a beautiful water-side location:

From the start, he has written Today in Tabs from Peaks Island, a nearly one-square-mile patch of rocky land in Casco Bay. Reachable only by ferryboat, it has roughly 900 full-time residents. Aside from a few homey dining establishments (including Milly’s Seaside Skillet Kitchen and the Cockeyed Gull Restaurant) and a basic supermarket, there’s not much commerce to speak of.

And he's doing it with the help of an engaged community:

He checks in with a Slack channel that includes reporter friends who give him a sense of what journalists are talking about. A group of Today in Tabs enthusiasts on the social media platform Discord drop off more links — in effect, they are Mr. Foster’s volunteer stringers.

Well worth your time.

How to kill your website

Lee Peterson:

I used to read The-Race for my motorsport and F1 news but I don’t check it anymore for three reasons. 

An interesting look at how an aggregation of decisions can destroy the value of your website, from a pure user perspective.

How to ruin a website in a few easy steps

I used to read The-Race for my motorsport and F1 news but I don’t check it anymore for three reasons. These are ones that I think is how you ruin a perfectly good site. First up is their change to …

LJPUKljpuk

Why the NYT has taken a punt on gaming

I think it's evident that it's better to look as the NYT as a life resource subscription bundle that includes news, rather than as a news site per se. Nothing wrong with that: it's a direct recreation of the way the news bundle used to be.

Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games

Wordle. Connections. Spelling Bee. Ye olde crossword. The ‘Times’ is home to beloved brainteasers that are helping boost the paper’s bottom line. As one staffer jokes, the “‘Times’ is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.”

Vanity FairCharlotte Klein

When did Facebook get overrun by AI images?

Last year, as it turns out:

But the spread of this type of content on Facebook over the last several months has shown that the once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

Puts my piece from Monday in context, doesn't it?

Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real

The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

404 MediaJason Koebler

Time Capsule: 2020

How the BBC's social video team stayed safe during COVID

All the emphasis on wipes seems rather ironic now we know it was airborne.