Coming Content

What’s in queue, what isn’t, and some changes in focus.

In this post I’m going to cover (1) which stories I expect to publish over the balance of 2024, (2) some editorial adjustments I’m making, and (3) a few notes on previously planned stories that I’m declaring at least partial bankruptcy on.

One major takeaway is that I’m going to shift away from ludicrously in-depth stories to focus on a more regular cadence of medium-length posts. 

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(NB: There’s an enormous wall between my client and journalism work. I’ll never cover a past or current client, or one of their competitors, without due disclosure.)

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Planned Posts

Though I make no promises as to the order in which these will come out, I’ve made good progress on the following and I hope to publish all before Christmas:

• On The Good Apples. While I try hard to distinguish between broken systems and individual journalists, I don’t do enough to highlight the many positive examples of individual journalism. I have a nice story about how a journalist replied to a criticism of mine, and on what I took away from the exchange.

• How To Read / Misread Scientific Papers. Academic studies are often misinterpreted by journalists and the public alike. It’s not just a question of general IQ or good faith, but also a specific type of niche literacy. Why do authors frame their results like they do? How should we parse both individual articles and metastudies? How do the best scientists and clinicians do it? 

• The Consensus Paradox. At the heart of journalism and its relationship to society is Lippmann’s “Problem of Knowledge”. I’ve sketched out an essay about the implications of that problem, and about the specific forces that make it so difficult for us to agree on a shared view of reality. 

• The Corporations We Hate. A look back at 2024 coverage of five companies (Ticketmaster, Red Lobster, Facebook, Pioneer, and RealPage) and what it means to criticize capitalism in a way that actually enlightens the reader.

• The End of Memetic History. Most misinformation and bad history is just a collection of bad memes (in the original scientific sense of that word). How do these memes spread? Why isn’t journalism more effective at limiting them? And what would a real defense against them even look like?

• Community Notes. As an applied sequel to that last post, a look at the growth of Twitter’s/X’s project to apply community moderation to tweets. Plus thoughts on where the program is headed in the short-term, where it could/should ultimately go, and how it fits with past attempts to “annotate the internet”.

Then additionally a few posts from my Israel and Ukraine trips, as outlined below. 

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Editorial Adjustments

One major issue with cadence here is that I too often bite into stories that end up taking, uh, a bit more time than planned. Compared to a typical 10-15 hours, some sneak up to 50 hours or so, or in one painful example to over 1,000.

I’ve sometimes convinced myself that these very deep dives are the most useful things I could focus on, in part because few others are dumb enough to invest the kind of research time required to cover said stories at the same resolution. And I suppose that’s still a valid stance from some point of view. But also, more relevantly:

1. Most readers don’t actually want something that long

2. Those stories often take so long that I miss their main attention window

3. This scope creeps pushes other posts back by months

So just net-negative overall. Which is why I’ve decided to drop them in favor of:

• Feature stories of ~3,000 words, each with a TLDR summary. Basically still meaty and with lots of context for those who want it, but also easy to quickly parse.

• “Short takes” roundups of 3-5x smaller stories at ~500 words a pop, where each can be read independently (though sometimes around a common theme).

• Essays on news dynamics, which I’ll try to keep to around 1,500-2,000 words.

In a perfect world I’d like to get one piece out each week, rotating between those buckets. In keeping away from more sprawling stories this may be reasonable.

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A Partial Bankruptcy 

Lastly, a handful of stories and projects that I’m either dropping outright or only planning to publish in some reduced form. 

I. The Daily Error

Earlier this year I’d announced a new “daily-ish challenge to find a New York Times error within one hour and explain it within 500 words”. 

The idea behind it was twofold:

1. I think lots of people underestimate the total volume of mistakes the NYT makes (even if they’re only within a limited percentage of their published stories¹). So I thought it might help to illustrate just how easy these errors are to find.

2. I thought readers might appreciate more snack-sized posts.

But basically the response was that this wasn’t a great idea. Many readers didn’t like the idea of a narrow focus on the NYT, and lots already have enough daily emails coming in. Feedback and metrics both imply that y’all prefer posts of medium length versus either insubstantially short or inconveniently long ones. So I’m killing this.

II. Elon Musk / Ian Urbina 

Quoting a piece from early 2022: 

Flash back to Christmas. I was in Milan, working on an update to my Elon Emeralds story and a sequel to my Ian Urbina / music royalties piece—just to address some FAQ and Twitter criticisms—when I unexpectedly ended up in the ER.

I’d connected with both Elon and Ian in the Christmas leadup to get most of the inputs I needed. I then took Christmas Day off to relax, watch my Packers play, and sleep off what felt like a respiratory bug. But, well, that breathing issue ended up sending me on a particularly horrifying hospital visit. I wrote the above when I finally got back to Canada for medical follow-up, and then…never got back to either. 

While I think both stories still hold up fine as published, I basically failed to address reader challenges in the detailed way I prefer to (and think all journalists should). As a deeper point of failing I also for some reason saw them as a pair to update together when really they weren’t. (The update to the Elon story is just clearing up a single anecdote, whereas the Ian one is much more sprawling.) 

Anyway, I’ve put both back on my list. The second one was so long ago now that it will almost certainly be uninteresting to most readers. Even so, I think it’s important all the same to at least sketch out a few replies for accountability’s sake.

III. Israel v. Palestine 

I spent some six weeks in Israel at the end of last year, and had planned on covering the following:

1. Infrastructure in Gaza. What exists, what doesn’t (and why), the recent history of dealmaking, and the logic and impact of Israeli restrictions.

2. The IDF and casualty minimization. Official policies, how they’re enforced, how they fit with humanitarian law, and how violations are/aren’t policed.

3. The settler issue. The aftermath of removing Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005, what’s happening in the West Bank now, and how locals (across borders and political lines) feel about the future.

4. The Christian question. A history of how and why western evangelicals support certain conceptions of Israel, and how this affects politics and policies today.

5. The helpers. A glimpse into the volunteer networks that have emerged within Israel to assist internal refugees—and what life looks like for the displaced.

Yep, I bit off too much. While I did cover the fifth one in a solo post, I’m going to just do a single roundup post to cover my findings on the rest, along with a handful of related reflections on developments since. 

IV. Ukraine

A friend and I entered Ukraine on Christmas Day 2022. While the trip was a one-off to the usual mission here (I certainly have nothing critical to say about the many ridiculously brave local war reporters there²), we went in to drop off humanitarian supplies with a generally open mind as to writing about what we encountered.

There are two stories in particular that I still want to post in full: 

1. An interview with a survivor of the Bucha Massacre, as a first-person account of the horrors that happened during the early days of the occupation.

2. A combined story of three volunteers we met, as a glimpse into the impromptu networks of citizen volunteers who’ve made astounding personal sacrifices to keep their country together. This will also include the happy conclusion of the Christmas project we did there, which some of your lovely donations supported. 

While these pieces will take a bit more time as we collect updates and go through some more translational work, I’m determined to finally get both out there. 

As to the stories we couldn’t cover in full, I'll just say that: (1) the human capacity for kindness and hope and resolve in virtually all circumstances is staggering, (2) not a single person we met wasn't profoundly affected by the war, (3) given the choice between safety and community, more chose the latter than you might expect.

Also, while I have mixed thoughts as to whether I’ll ever do more first-person field reporting (and how it fits the mission here), I should note that I don’t currently plan on reporting from any additional warzones anytime soon. 

(The last bit was for my mother. Though I also mostly mean it. I think.)

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1. In my test runs I ran into an error in about 20% of the NYT stories I reviewed. But this was a limited data sample, and there’s a big bias in that I was picking headlines based on the likelihood of flawed coverage. One counterpoint though is that I only know what I know, so I could have read stories with errors that I just never noticed. Even so, my best guess would be that 80-90% are fine, with lots of them being truly excellent. One point I always try to make clear is that the average NYT reporter is actually quite good! The problem is that the systems that ought to limit overall errors don’t work well enough, which leaves readers unsure whether what they're reading is in the 80-90% or the remainder.

2. By happenstance we ended up sitting down at a cafe in Kharkiv with a member of the AP team behind the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol. The courage involved in making that was especially heroic.