Category: Site Related

Out, Damn Internet.

I’ve an ambitious goal for 2023: Write more out loud. I write (by hand) every day in a journal, but that’s more of a personal practice, a meditation. This year I want to get back to writing publicly, and last week, I managed to write four days in a row, a rare streak over the past few years.

I was all fired up to continue my new habit this morning, but my internet provider has decided that it’s a good day to remind me what life was like in the days of the dial up modem. Something’s awry with my connection, and without broadband, I can’t properly write.

No, that’s not quite it – without broadband, I can’t properly think.  I have dozens of active tabs open when I write, and I’ll often make on the fly phone calls to sources as well. Cell service sucks where I live, so I use WiFi calling. With these two main inputs offline, I’m stuck staring at a blank page. For me writing isn’t so much placing one word after the other as it is a record of active inquiry, of engaging with the Internet and reporting back what I’ve found (and how it’s changed or informed my point of view).

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The Next First Day

Today is the first workday of the new year. For most of us, that means the slow roll of the holidays is over. Today we answer all those emails we left unattended, resume work we left on hold in early December, and start filling up our calendars with meetings we’d rather not attend.

I’ve chosen a different path this year, for me, an uncertain path. I’m resolved to write here more frequently, even if what I produce isn’t exactly consistent with whatever it is I do for a living. The past four years have been strange – I started a political media company with a dear friend, it triumphed and it failed and it continues to this day. I learned more than I thought was possible, but my writing stagnated. I’ve decided to return to this blank space filling slowly with words – to prioritize it, to make it more important than the meetings and the unsent emails and the work left on hold late last year.

It’s a risk.

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Predictions ’23 – The Summary

I’ve used the image above for many years, mainly because I love how surprised the guy looks as he gazes into the crystal ball. Or maybe he’s just sat on something unpleasant. In any case, it pretty much sums up my approach to this, my 20th edition of annual predictions. I sit down, I might have an adult beverage on hand, and I just write until I feel like I’m done.

While reviewing my ’22 predictions (I did pretty well!) I promised to do something new: One post per predictions, ten posts total. But as I began that promised work, I realized it would test the limits of even my most dedicated readers (I see you, kids). So instead I wrote three long form posts, each with three or four predictions apiece. The first focused on AI, the second on advertising, and the third on markets, with a bonus call related to the ’24 election. Having now written all of them, I’m going to summarize them briefly in this “master post.” Grab your own favorite beverage, have a wonderful New Year, and read on!

  1. ChatGPT finds a business model. Because of course it will. Which leads to…
  2. Google launches a ChatGPT-inspired search interface. Because paranoia. Related…
  3. Microsoft launches “Enterprise Explorer” – because there isn’t a big company CEO who doesn’t want some AI to play with.
  4. There’ll be a war between the duopolies of Google/Facebook and Amazon/Apple. Grab your popcorn.
  5. Netflix will triumph. I know…but the next one’s even more far fetched…
  6. Twitter will rebound. (I’ll leave it there for now)
  7. Crypto will go sideways in ’23. But that’ll be a good thing.
  8. Tesla will continue to tank, and not because of Twitter.
  9. Tech IPOs will make a comeback by EOY.
  10. Trump will pull out of the ’24 presidential race.
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Writing

Time was, I sat down nearly every day of the week to contemplate a blank page – and a few hours later, more or less, I’d hit “publish” in the WordPress backend, and a few hundred (or thousand) new words would appear on this site.

It’s been a while since I’ve done that. I love writing, a process I’ve often called “thinking out loud,” and my relationship to this site was one of the most productive and important connections to the world I’ve ever had. But it’s atrophied, badly, and not a day goes by when I don’t miss it. I’m writing today not because I’ve had some insight or itch to scratch – I’ve had a million of them over the past few years, and developed an annoying habit of ignoring them all. But to be honest, I’m writing today because I can’t stand the tumbleweeds and dust bunnies dancing around this place. My email signature – the one for battellemedia.com, anyway – still has a link to this site, and this morning I considered taking it off.

Instead, I’m writing this, both a mea culpa and a promise to all of you who followed my work over the past few decades. First, the apology: I’ve met dozens of you in the past year who’ve asked me what happened to my writing, and it both pleases and pains me to hear that question. It’s something of a mystery to me why I stopped – I still write three pages a day in my personal journal, why did I fall out of practice in the public realm? Certainly my move to New York four years ago, starting another company, wrestling with my own demons as it relates to what I feel is worth paying attention to – all of that contributed. But I think in the end I just lost confidence that I had anything interesting to say. So to those of you who still believe I might, and who’ve encouraged me to start up again, I am sorry for my absence, and I will strive to make amends.

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The Recount Turns One

One year ago this week, a small group of journalists launched a completely reimagined approach to covering the news. We called it The Recount. Its mission: To be the leading outlet for video journalism in today’s age of mobile, non-linear, on-demand television.
 We started with a single product focused on politics. We called it The Daily Recount, and we envisioned it as a “remix” of the most important news sourced from scores of outlets, from national and international broadcast news to radio to podcasts to digital and social media and more. Our promise was simple: We’ll deliver the news quickly and free of the bullshit and bad faith that was drowning out our national discourse.

Now one year old, The Daily Recount was and continues to be an extraordinary media artifact – each segment is constructed from elaborately sourced samples of sound, graphics, and video clips. It employs no narrator, no “suits on set” —  instead our journalists build an entirely new product from the 24/7 barrage of batshit crazy which leaps from our tangled media ecosystem. My friend and co-founder John Heilemann calls it “hip-hop journalism” – a radical re-interpretation of a standard form, built on the beats, samples, and melodies of what’s come before.

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I feel terrible about this site.

I don’t write here anymore. I write almost entirely on Medium now. It’s not a choice I made to NOT write here, it’s a choice I made to edit NewCo Shift, our new publication. It lives on Medium, but if it were a WordPress site, well, my writing would all be on that site. It’s less about the medium (so to speak) and more about the publication.

As the days go by, and this site gets longer in the tooth, the challenge of updating it and making it current gets bigger and bigger. It eats at me. And I miss the engagement that this place used to have. I know it’s all my fault, and I’m sorry. I don’t have a plan to return to this place, because as much as I love the kind of writing I do here, I simply don’t have the time to do it. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

So, if you followed me here, and have been wondering WTF I’m up to, well, follow me on Medium. And maybe subscribe to my newsletter there. Here are a few stories I’ve written (I do at least one or two a week):

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New Posts…For All You RSS Readers

I’ve been writing a lot at NewCo’s publication, and will continue to do so. But I want to make sure you folks know about that work, so here are links to a couple of  new pieces.

And The Award for the Best Marketing Execution At SXSW Goes To …

I went to SXSW again this year, and IBM really nailed their million-dollar activation.

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My Predictions for 2014: How’d I Do?

2014Each year around this time I look back at the predictions I made 12 months ago, and I score myself with some combination of objectivity and defensiveness. And each year I do pretty well, batting somewhere between .500 and .750, depending on how you keep score.

This past year was different. First off, my predictions were unusually sparse. I started the year in a funk – I was depressed by our industry’s collective ignorance of climate change, and it showed in my writing. I called 2014 “A Difficult Year to See,” because my vision had been clouded by a deep anxiety over why tech hasn’t tackled what seemed to me to be the world’s most pressing problem.

One year later I find myself in a more patient stance. But given the goal of this post is to review how I did, and not how I feel today, let’s get to the score card.

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Around The Kitchen Table, a Better Way To Finance “Secondaries” Is Born

FCCapitalNearly a decade ago I was two years into starting a new company, one that was growing quickly, but at the same time struggling with all the classic problems of a startup. We needed to raise more capital, we needed to hire more of the right people, and we needed to retain and motivate the people we already had brought onboard.

But more than anything, I was personally struggling with whether I could keep up the pace. This was my fourth startup, and I’d been at if for nearly 20 years. At that point in my career, I had serious questions about whether it was worth the time and energy, given that the pay was low (gotta keep burn down) and the hours were insane. I had three young children, all in expensive schools, and a mortgage to worry about. I wasn’t making enough to cover our monthly nut, and I wasn’t certain that the upside of any startup – even one I believed in with all my heart – was worth potentially failing my obligations to my family. After all, I was reasonably established, and I could always go get a higher-paying, more stable job.

So one morning at my kitchen table, I poured out my concerns and dreams to a close friend, Chris Albinson, who just happened to be a venture capitalist. I explained my dilemma – my responsibilities as a father and husband were in direct conflict with my career as a startup founder. I remember Chris asking what I’d need to keep my focus on my startup. At that moment, the reality was, I needed cash. I needed to be able to look my wife in the eye and say “Don’t worry, if this doesn’t work out, we’ll have enough to cover living expenses while I look for another job.”

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