Hello again • Joshua Topolsky

First: Josh ran Vox Media and The Verge, and most recently, Bloomberg's online media.

This, particularly, stands out::

And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my industry.

The reality in media right now is that there is an enormous amount of noise. There are countless outlets (both old and new) vying for your attention, desperate not just to capture some audience, but all the audience. And in doing that, it feels like there’s a tremendous watering down of the quality and uniqueness of what is being made. Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs. In both execution and content, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the rat race for maximum audience at any expense. It’s cynical and it’s cyclical — which makes for an exhausting and frankly boring experience.

I think people want something better, something more meaningful. Something a lot less noisy.

I've been thinking about this a lot as well (check recent HN submissions, and discussion under the "Media" flair at https://dredmorbius.reddit.com), and also reviewing some old lectures of Dana (Donella) Meadows.

She makes two points that are key, one pertaining to the importance of media, the other to changing systems.

First: systems cannot work properly where the data they're fed is unreliable, and especialy where it is deliberately distorted or falsified. Which is increasingly happening in media.

Second: the most effective way to change a system is to change its goals. And the goal of most media, presently, is advertising. Hence the pursuit of marketshare, the homogeneity of content, the outright gaming and manipulation, and the lack of incisive, deep, relevant reportage.

Meadows' Twelve Leverage Points addresses this (and other influences) in more depth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points

If Tapolsky's going to change that, he's got his work cut out for him. And he should be starting at the tail end of Dana's list.

TL;DR (between the lines): the money was good, performance was good, but the management was not flexible enough; off to make a next startup (animated parallax HTML5 pages are to be expected).