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"I just try to write good stuff."

The article's author might consider that a humorous quip, but I think that's the crux of it, really. DF is always well written and usually well researched (and when it isn't, for whatever reason, he will follow up with a correction). Unlike others, John's not scared of going into technical detail where necessary.

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More importantly, his signal-to-noise ratio is very high. Obviously, being very narrowly focused helps a lot with that. But it's nice to know that every post he makes is going to be worth my time. Most bloggers are very hit-and-miss, such that 1-in-10 (or at most 1-in-3) posts are really good, and the rest range from filler to kinda-interesting. Gruber doesn't write a whole lot, but nearly everything he writes is good.

This is exactly right, and down in comments, the author mentions that larger operations can't let content dictate schedule without a whit of awareness that perhaps the larger operations are failing precisely because they are too frequently letting arbitrary schedules (i.e. hewing too tightly to a historical "way we've always done it") dictate content.

Not always easy and certainly rarely painless to break those schedule/content cycles, but it can be done and, if we're to have anything resembling newspapers around in a decade, it has to be done. By somebody...and soon.

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