my two cents on this is that even if the hyperloop doesn't pan out all, the tunnel project could still be a big deal. If you stick regular state of the art high speed trains in musk's hypothetical NY-DC tunnel, that would be worthwhile.
the crazy thing is most people who heard that talk seemed quite taken -- despite the outrageousness of the whole thing (for instance, the comparison to EVs and the end of slavery)
I'm so happy somebody brought up his wacky paragraph about steelhead trout that classified them as a "fancy" rainbow trout, which is like exactly how Glenn Beck would have put it. It's exactly the kind of equivocating BS that a professional editor would have caught and cut.
Also, there's some irony that Parker chose to publish this rant about click bait (and other journalistic sins) in Techcrunch.
I would guess that the median New Yorker staff writer gets more like $150-200k, all in (when you add up magazine fees + book advances + speaking fees.) The mean is much higher, because a handful of outliers (heh, Gladwell) make $1 million plus.
He wasn't speaking on behalf of the Times, he was speaking as an observer who is pretty firmly against pay walls. If you asked someone at the Times what their pay wall is, they'd say its the good old retail news model: Asking customers to pay money for your product.
The fact that artists are getting screwed by publishers is not a justification to screw them harder. I wish people spent more time imagining ways to pay for the arts rather than just coming up with arguments for why it's OK to download a song without paying for it.
The New York Times took on this topic a few years back in a very good article that argued that the whole idea of the 8-hour sleep was invented by the mattress industry (and other purveyors of sleep products), and that humans don't need anywhere near 8 hours of continuous sleep.
Ironically, all of the industry's marketing makes people anxious about getting enough sleep--and makes it harder for them to get to sleep (thus propagating the need for more expensive mattresses and pillows.)
I take exception to this point--You want a table? Make a table--But so you know: There are very few stats on reverse migration because the U.S. government stopped tracking it in 1957. There have been some really great studies academic studies, if you're interested in checking them out.
I didn't work on this year's list, but I've worked on them in years' past. The bottom line: It's a subjective list--based on reporting by Inc.'s editors and writers (basically we talk to people and ask them who they admire/who they think should be on the list). We assemble a long list of names and narrow it down to 30, based a sense of who we feel is most impressive and most interesting.
One of the cool things about this list is that it's a one-shot deal, so we'll be looking for 30 new names next year. You can send nominations to [email protected]
Or put them in the comments here and we'll find them.
I don't understand how this is being spun as a failure. It sounds like a success based on the bottom line:
"Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers."
Right on. The problem is the advertisements. Someone needs to figure out how to charge print CPMs for online content. It means thinking beyond banner ads--maybe even the whole CPM model.
Meanwhile, the calculations in this post are very conservative. Lots of journalists make more than $300 for a 1000 word article. The financial situation for working online journalists is even more difficult than suggested by the post.
To clarify: This is not a cost-cutting measure--and it wasn't introduced by managers. (I, humble writer that I am, proposed it.) It's a month-long editorial experiment that I will be writing about in the April issue of Inc. magazine. But yes, we will have to face all of these issues you describe. Hopefully that's what will make the story interesting. Would love to hear your thoughts on what you think will be the pain points. (I'm at mchafkin at Inc dot com).