Josh Topolsky of The Verge Is Joining Bloomberg
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Unfortunately, I have noticed, and I think others as well, that they've kind of been in a downhill stretch for the past few months at least. Maybe not creativity-wise, but structurally and even grammatically. It's been a bit disappointing.
Hopefully Nilay can begin to refresh their vision and work on bringing overall quality back to where it used to be.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/3/2504531/jetpack-history-fu...
When The Verge launched, it was creative and full of interesting articles.
Something changed, and for the past 12-18 months, it's been pretty close to a "Cosmo for Geeks". They've also started getting some basic technology facts wrong (I first noticed this on their Nexus 4 LTE article, and have continued to notice it off and on through their latest Net Neutrality / Verizon vs Netflix articles)
I've actually noticed the opposite for me: I've enjoyed the articles more over the last 6 months than I have previously.
It might have something to do with how I read it: these days I tend to read Verge on my phone, whereas I used to be more web-only. Their homepage has always overwhelmed me, so maybe the simplified interface has something to do with it.
It's likely that a lot of these sites that made a name following consumer tech are just growing tired of it? What helped grow sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc was the rapid growing arena of cellphones, laptops and tablets. All of that has pretty much stagnated, and to be honest is pretty damn boring at this point. So what do you do? You explore and open to other areas beyond straight consumer technology. The problem with The Verge is I think they went too far into pop-culture type stuff.
He wrote a bunch of aggressive 'state of the internet' op-eds that were praised, but they didn't seem to be anything more than popular rallying-cries for semi-knowledgeable tech enthusiasts.
Their Seinfeld story a couple of weeks ago with the headline "That time Elaine threatened to kill herself with a gun" was when I added The Verge to my timewaster list. A few people complained in the comments about that one.
Scamworld is still my favorite Verge article, though "Finding Oz In The Heart Of CES" was also memorable.
Also interesting that The Verge hasn't broken this story yet.
It's this sort of bullshit newsspeak that makes it difficult for me to take The Verge seriously.
Good on him though, excited to see what he writes about. Fingers crossed we get some good podcasts though!
NY Times, ladies and gentleman. What an age we are in.
Just goes to show: you never really know people. Or, of course, that every man has his price ;)
Unless there's going to be a techie Bloomberg podcast - I'll miss Josh's work.
@TheVerge: hopefully you can now put all this behind you, and crank it into second gear. There's still so much potential in what you have.