There was a time when it felt like Facebook could save journalism. There was also a time when you could only access the platform with a .edu email address, the Newsfeed didn’t exist and there was a ‘Wall’ on your profile that was basically just a .txt file that anyone could edit or even delete completely.

Which is to say—things change.

Continue Reading Facebook’s supposed TL;DR feature sounds pretty awful for publishers

I love Seattle. I love it so much. I can’t imagine living anywhere else in the world. I also tend to be a bit defensive. When people criticize the things and places I like, I jump. Can’t help it.

With Sinclair Broadcasting’s KOMO 4, our ABC affiliate in Seattle, debuting the trailer to their sequel to Seattle is Dying—a news program so into shaming those most vulnerable that FOX News picked it up—I had a lot to say. Others I respect did as well.

Continue Reading Seattle is not dying, and we all want the same thing

Working in sports and social media is weird. The amazing and mystifying things you see on your favorite teams’ feeds aren’t always a result of someone’s brilliance or creativity—sometimes it’s another team trying something and someone in the building being like “Hey, why don’t we try that?”

All the while, you’re not quite sure if it’s smart and impactful or just something that looked cool and we’re all just following one another hoping for the best.

That was where I was on YouTube and teams following the Cubs’ lead on producing a ton of content for the platform. About this time last year, I was at the MLB Marketing Meetings in Portland listening to how the Cubbies produced outstanding documentaries on Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game, their progressive scouting efforts and players’ off seasons. (Hint: they threw a ton of resources at the endeavor.)

Continue Reading This mundane iOS feature is getting me into YouTube

Anything that puts money in journalists’ hands, I’m in favor of. Hell, anything that puts money in any hard-working folks’ hands, I’m in favor of. But given the industry has had its ass kicked—with writers bearing the brunt of it—you can’t blame anyone jumping to tab something as the potential savior for journalism.

Enter Substack. The premium newsletter platform is all the rage these days and, if you follow any number of journalists on social, odds are you also follow a journalist who’s been laid off—and, after that, started a Substack.

Continue Reading Substack is a step for journalism, but in what direction?

This year has had some days. And the wild thing is, we’re all stressing so much about whatever tragedy was just plopped in our laps on a recent weekday afternoon that we never consider letting our imagination run wild at what fresh hell might about to be detonated.

So while we were all bracing for Amy Comey-Barrett’s nomination to a lifetime on the Supreme Court to become official—with the Democrats playing their expected role of a decades-old rounded-down speed bump with plenty of space to the side—news came down that ACB’s colleagues-to-be handed down a decision that would make it harder to vote in Wisconsin.

Continue Reading Let them find out – pack the court

If you ever hear that an athlete doesn’t read what people write about them, don’t believe it. They read it. At the very least, their dad or their brother or their wife reads it—and they pass it along. Blog post, newspaper, even the occasional tweet. It gets in front of them.

That’s why Colts QB Philip Rivers’s colorful and candid comments yesterday made the rounds.

Continue Reading If you want to get to know someone, read what they write

The crowd present for the first Saturday at a just-opened public park in Seattle was about what you’d expect. For one, bike parking was in high demand as my fiancée and I rolled our Radwagon ebikes up to Fritz Hedges Waterway Park on Seattle’s Portage Bay. Ours were third and fourth Radwagons—a Subaru Outback in bicycle form—inside about a 25-foot radius.

“This is really nice,” an older man in flannel shirt said to his significant other as they strode out the metal dock overhanging the water.

“We need more of these,” she responded.

Continue Reading New parks are awesome, obviously

Being into golf isn’t original. It’s been around forever. Old people love it. A lot of young people, too. In American culture, it borders on being ubiquitous—particularly given certain demographics.

So as I spent a chunk of this year getting back into a sport I played a lot when I was younger—a bunch of rounds with my brothers, a nice new driver, even an official GHIN handicap—I couldn’t really do the natural fallback people do these days when they’re newly passionate about something, trying to share it with others and saying stuff like “Have you tried this thing called golf? It’s amazing!”

About everyone’s tried it. Not everyone loves it.

Continue Reading In praise of ‘No Laying Up,’ a digital media empire done right

This week, I’d been looking for an easy subject for a blog post to get back in the swing of things. That’s like half of blogging, trying to get back in the swing of things when you’re not. Anyway, I was watching the Packers game at my sister’s place and her fiancé suggested we play a random mobile game I hadn’t heard of.

It was ‘Among Us‘, which Wikipedia describes as “an online multiplayer social deduction game.” If you have no idea what that is, hey, right there with you because we didn’t actually all end up playing it.

Continue Reading ‘Among Us’, Proud Boys and the (sometimes dangerous) power of exposure