Taking A Chill Pill, Buzzfeed, And NYT Visuals Are Killer

Hey folks 👋

First, some housekeeping: I am going to be sending my newsletter every Tuesday morning. Monday felt very professional and, therefore, impactful. I’d be a part of starting your week!

But honestly, I am never going to be that newsletter writer who gets up early on Monday morning and peacefully types out insightful observations while sipping a cup of coffee. I really want to be that writer. It’s the writer I imagine Amy Widdowson to be, and she is fantastic, and you should definitely subscribe to her newsletter. But I can’t do it. You’d just get a terrible garbled mess of words riddled with errors, and that would be unfortunate. So for your sake, I need to write this the day before it goes out, and I am just unwilling to sacrifice part of my Sunday. Sundays, for me, are for binging bad TV shows on Netflix.

And finally, I am going to take this newsletter a lot less seriously in tone. I overcompensated in my first two newsletters because I was nervous. Some of you work for quite serious publications that I really respect and maybe want to one day work at. And that’s awesome, and I am super happy you’re here. Please say hi! However, this also may have led anxious old me to spend six hours per issue gathering data, writing, and editing. Oof. That’s unsustainable. I have a full-time job. So this newsletter is going to get a little more raw. What Grammarly doesn’t catch, you might get. ❤️

OK. Glad I got all that off my chest. Onward!

The New York Times did a story on mobility in China. There are no thoughts from me on that. But damn NYT data visualization team, you’re killing it. Just look at how wonderfully that charts sways in concert with the text. Gorgeous.

I believe this is the charting framework the NYT used for this particular story. Maybe one day I’ll learn to code beyond HTML and CSS.

Y'all I am sort of obsessed with the idea of publishers finding their market power in relation to Google and Facebook. In general, journalists and editors, I believe, have a lot more sway over these traffic powerhouses than they believe. That’s part of the reason Crunchbase News has no AMP pages, and it likely won’t unless something wild changes.

But that’s not the point here. The point is that an NYT article on consolidation in digital media gave me an avenue to pontificate about digital media’s place in relation to big tech. Am I wildly off, living in dreamland? You should read the piece and let me know. A lot of you are much smarter than me.

In my last issue, I said I’d be analyzing publications by how many links they display above the fold on their homepages. Since then, I’ve made some progress.

Based on Crunchbase News reader screen-size dimensions for desktop (1920x1080) and mobile (375x667), I’ve taken screenshots of Bloomberg, Axios, CNBC, and the New York Times. Hopefully by next week I’ll have counted out links on each page, uploaded them to Airtable, and give y'all a ranking of publications by link density.

I bought an iPhone XR, and I am sort of in love with the camera, so I’ve been taking more pictures.

Last week, I was in Bend, OR, celebrating my one-year anniversary with my wife. Here’s a really cool panorama of a waterfall we visited that I am very proud of.

You’re the reason I am writing this! Say hi on Twitter or respond to this email. I am also happy to take suggestions on what I should be paying attention to in the media landscape. Stay lovely in the meantime.