Writing Review for Week of July 23, 2018

Another week of heavy non-writing work, but two good essays and one news announcement isn’t a bad haul.

The death and life of the tech press

This was a response to a recent Columbia Journalism Review essay about the need to completely rebuild the tech press from scratch. I feel as though this vastly overstates the problem, which is essentially that tech has grown to affect every facet of human existence, and it is really the non-tech press who need to raise their standards. In addition, I argued for the importance of dynamic range in the coverage of tech. A small startup is worthy of more praise than a massive behemoth tech company, and the level of criticism should expand as companies grow.

Alphabet earnings and the jaws of antitrust

Alphabet made huge profits, despite a massive fine from the European Union. There really is not much left to be done here by antitrust authorities, given that Alphabet’s business model is so strong. Indeed, the true headwinds are probably nationalistic competitors from China like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, who are expanding rapidly among the next billion internet users just as Google and Facebook are looking inward to handle GDPR and other scandals.

Unlock wants to rebuild your feed through a decentralized paywall

This was a seed funding announcement for a new blockchain protocol startup in the paywall space. Given that I have covered subscription media quite extensively in the past, it’s interesting to see these new models are rising up and attempting to make it easier to implement these systems.

Photo by PACAF used under Creative Commons.