‘Your Problem Is That You Make Shit’ ⇥ medium.com

Kind of in line with the previous link, Joshua Topolsky on the state of big media companies:

Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. All of these things together might help, but even then, you will not be saved by the magical New Thing that everyone else in the media community is convinced will be the answer to The Problem.

Beneath the Snow Falls and Facebook bots, what really makes a media company tick is its ability to deliver great stories in just the right voice. That’s why I write the way I do, and link to articles like these — I hope you, reader, see that. All of this other stuff is just stuff. It’s an extra delivery mechanism. But if all that’s being delivered is crap, the tinsel of the new hotness is immaterial.

On a related note, the Verge — Topolsky’s old haunt — launched a new gadget blog called Circuit Breaker. Its gimmick? The website is, as Nilay Patel puts it, “the backend for the Facebook mobile experience”.