Seattle Post-Times

Dear applicant: We might be idiots

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I've hooked up with a Seattle programmer named John DeRosa, and we're in the early stages of developing a Web product. We aren't sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but we think the concept is strong and we decided to apply for a start-up incubator-like program in Mountain View, Calif., called Y Combinator.

This was a total long shot. They get more than 1,000 applications twice a year, choosing 50 or so fledgling projects for three months of guidance in launching a business. Most of their applicants are hackers young enough to be our children, some of them still in school. I think our idea has huge potential, but it is somewhat unlike what Y Combinator has backed in the past, so we were a little out of place from the start. The application process was not difficult, however, so we thought what the hell.

Well, we didn't make the cut, but the rejection was more than thoughtful — it was downright insecure!

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

Having been in a position myself to deliver bad news via mass e-mailing, I was curious to know how well I've handled similar rejection messages. Thanks to the fact I have an archive of all my personal and professional e-mail dating back to 2002, I was able to find out.

Content factory: race to the bottom

Image by marissaorton via Flickr

Wired has a fascinating look at a growing business — the outsourcing of content creation. That's a fancy phrase for a system of buying stuff from freelance writers, you might think. But what we're really talking about here is nothing like the freelance-writing profession on which national magazines have long relied.

No, we're talking about a lean, mean text machine. We're talking about Demand Media, whose Demand Studios doles out freelance assignments to thousands of writers everywhere — really poor-paying freelance assignments.

In "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," Daniel Roth walks us through a 21st century process by which high-priced search terms define the assignment and creation of content — and whose few human intervenors are paid inversely. This system requires limited human involvement:

How I surf the Web

I now use several browsers to surf the Web on my MacBook Pro:

• Apple's Safari is my default browser. It's the browser that is launched by links in e-mail, and it's what I use for general surfing of news, shopping, and other stuff. For me, Safari is faster than other free browsers, although it is often the last to be supported, or is unsupported, by third-party plug-ins. I also like the fact I can effortlessly sync my Safari bookmarks via MobileMe with my iPhone, on which Safari is my only browser option.

Boeing's dumb flight plan

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Here's longtime Boeing watcher and author T.M. Sell, writing for Crosscut, summing up the decision to open a second 787 production line in North Charleston:

So here's the problem with moving to South Carolina, now. Having essentially junked the careful, collaborative process that made the 777 such a success, Boeing has collected a fleet of trouble trying to sort out the problems of the even-more complicated 787. So the answer is opening up a second production line for a jet that still isn’t ready to fly? And staffing it with new hires? In a state where you’ve already had considerable production problems, problems so bad, your evil, unionized Washington workers have had to fix them? ...

... They’re about to spend around $900 million to save $9 million a year in labor costs.

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• Learning the right lessons from the Boeing calamity (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Formatting text for the Web

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking over some things I had written to help Crosscut reader-contributors prepare their writing for posting on the Web and came upon this. If I do say so myself, it's a cleverly concise primer on inline HTML formatting that you could use when writing for any Web site:

'Newspapers, the mass-less mass medium'

Former ink-stained wretch Alan Mutter, aka Newsosaur, has a great take on the week's grim newspaper circulation reports, which includes this gem:

Despite the obvious, long-running decline in circulation penetration, an amazing number of otherwise intelligent newspaper executives have been spending entirely too much time trying to spin audience numbers instead of acting to save what’s left of their rapidly wasting franchises.

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• Arthur Sulzberger Compares Print Journalism To The Titanic (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Lies Newspapers Tell Themselves About Their Traffic (techdirt.com)

Seattle newspaper circulation drops 16.4 percent

The Audit Bureau of Circulations this week announced figures for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2009, and the year-over-year drop in average weekday print circulation among 379 U.S. daily newspapers was 10.6 percent. That's not strictly due to people simply walking away from print. Over that year, the incentives to subscribe changed, in some cases through price increases and distribution pullbacks. But it's ugly just the same.

So what happened in Seattle? It's difficult, though not impossible, to say.

A year ago we had two daily printed newspapers, and today we have one. Complicating matters, we don't know how many people a year ago subscribed to both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which now publishes online-only as SeattlePI.com.

But here's what we know for sure: Today's Seattle Times average weekday circulation of 263,588 is, by my calculations, 52,085 less — 16.4 percent less — than the 316,673 combined circulation of both papers a year ago.

So while the Times is touting a circulation gain of "an amazing 32.6 percent" and that "84 percent of the non-duplicated daily P-I subscribers are now Times subscribers," the bigger picture of print newspaper circulation in Seattle is somewhere short of amazing, unless you're talking about an amazing drop.

The above chart was assembled by yours truly, who painstakingly pored over news clippings of the past 10 years and plugged the numbers into Excel. Figures are for the six-month periods ending March 31 (spring) and Sept. 30 (fall). Data are from ABC as reported by ABC, both daily newspapers, the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattle Weekly. Due to the wide range of sources required to assemble the spreadsheet, some numbers reflect adjustments after auditing and some numbers are those reported before audit. If anyone has a better collection of Seattle data, I'd love to see it.

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• Seattle Times circulation grows on P-I's demise (crosscut.com)
• Lastest Newspaper Circ Numbers Show Ten Percent Drop (mediabistro.com)

The hierarchy of victimhood

Jack Shafer, Slate's media writer, takes a look at the Balloon Boy case and explains why newsies are such suckers for stories like that — why they forgo the discipline of verification that is supposed to inform good journalism. In doing so, he offers this simple hierarchy to explain newsworthiness:

... in the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything.

... A keen reader of media manners and former Wife Swap participant, [Richard] Heene obviously appreciates that a 6-year-old in peril is irresistible media bait. God knows what fiendish stunt Heene would have attempted if the family's cat had just given birth to a litter of tabbies.

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• Cynical reporters have a soft spot for anybody who claims victimhood. (slate.com)

The end of chairlift conversation as we know it

I no longer ski because it would cost too much to buy boots that don't wreck my widening feet, but now I don't have to. There's a robot that can ski for me, and it will never complain about boots that pinch.

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• Skiing robot developed by Slovakian researchers (telegraph.co.uk)

Crosscut.com emerges from temporary obscurity

The Seattle local-news Web site I helped found, Crosscut, has finally earned 501(c)(3) status and has emerged from a difficult limbo during which Publisher David Brewster pulled off a minor miracle: He kept it alive with almost no money through the transition from an LLC and he grew the readership.

Today Brewster confirmed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the Seattle Foundation, has granted Crosscut $100,000 to get back on its feet. First order of business: a membership drive.

Crosscut was launched as a for-profit venture in 2007, a little too soon to see the full folly of an earnest journalism business supported primarily by advertising. That wasn't the only challenge standing in the way of success, but it was the biggest one.

<digression> I was an investor as well as a salaried employee, so when it became clear a year ago that Crosscut would survive only as a nonprofit, I lost everything — my investment and my job. I was laid off in November 2008. I mention this not only to explain a conflict of interest but to remind everyone that I'm looking for work! (Does this count as one of my weekly "job search activities"?) Like all business failures, this one was highly instructive and a great experience in spite of my personal financial purgatory. </digression>

I've always wished Crosscut well, but I do so especially now that Brewster has hired Mark Matassa (left) to be editor, part time for the time being. Mark is one of the best journalists in Seattle. He was a reporter and then political editor at The Seattle Times when I was there, went to the Los Angeles Times for a while, then returned to Seattle to be an editor at the recently ink-less Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (His significant other, Michelle Nicolosi, remains at SeattlePI.com as executive producer. Not to be confused with Mark's sister, Michele Matassa Flores, who also worked at the Times and about whom I wrote recently.) I can't think of anyone more qualified to take Crosscut to the next level than Mark Matassa.