February 2012
26 posts
Earlier today, I broke some news.
I don’t typically do this anymore given my new job. But from time to time this will happen. But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.
I’m going to push back here. The WSJ did credit the actual source of its information: it got the information from Apple. Did MG Siegler have the scoop? Yes. Did the WSJ initially find out about the news from MG Siegler, directly or indirectly? Probably, yes. Would it have been polite to mention that in the story? Sure. But ultimately the WSJ was just doing the boring-but-important part of its job, here, acting as a conduit for press releases from big companies. Sometimes those press releases contain news, and when they do, it’s incumbent upon a comprehensive news source like the WSJ to report that news. Does it matter whether someone else had the news two hours earlier? Not in the slightest. Is MG Siegler overreacting massively? Yes. Breaking the news of an M&A deal is the most transient high in the world. Once you’ve done it, the news is out there, you get about 1.5 seconds of glory, and the world moves on. If you feel the need to complain that the WSJ doesn’t help you relive those 1.5 seconds of glory, then you’ve got much bigger things to worry about than the WSJ.
The power of consultancy to make even seasoned journalists start talking in meaningless managementspeak never ceases to amaze. You’d think that speaking-in-English would be the obvious way for journalists to differentiate themselves in this market. I guess not.
Condé Nast U.K. Launches Wired Consulting - Fashion Memo Pad - Media - WWD.com
Can we please have a moratorium on beautiful women saying “math is hard”? I simply can’t imagine someone like Ashton Kutcher saying something like this. Never mind the fact that it’s horrible from a role-model perspective, it’s just plain annoying.
“OK, the idea that kids these days are “digital natives” is a nice, self-serving fairy tale. It makes tech-lovers feel good, because they feel like they are at the front of a curve. It makes educators feel good, because then they don’t have to teach a complicated and multi-level sets of skills and knowledges that they don’t have a strong grasp on themselves. It makes government types feel good because they don’t need to devote resources to it. It makes the kids feel special, and kids need that. The problem is, of course, that it’s pretty much false — saying kids are “digital natives” because they can text, send email, and use facebook (all services provided by profit-driven companies, who love this false paradigm as well), is like claiming that kids these days are all automotive engineers because they have driver’s licenses. I teach freshmen. Most of them have the barest idea of how to use the Internet except for simple, pre-packaged tasks. They have little concept of wider issues, like selecting a tool outside of their very limited set of daily resources, dealing with privacy (which they care very much about, but don’t have the understanding to guess how to deal with it), or asking questions about the purpose of the technology. And these are the reasonably well-off kids who have had access to the web for most of their lives. Students from less advantaged backgrounds have greater hurdles. So, yeah, forget this idea of “digital natives.” Now, a library could help them get closer to that ideal, but we are busy closing the libraries becaue the “digital natives” don’t need them. And who, I wonder, benefits from a large mass of people who can’t do anything except what the tools they are sold let them?”
- FINGAL: Do you have any documentation of that, like notes from your trip?
- D’AGATA: You’re asking for evidence of a rumor?
- FINGAL: If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of the rumor. Do you remember the name of the company that ran the tour?
- D’AGATA: Are you serious? No, I don’t remember the name of a tour company from more than fifteen years ago. Sorry, readers are going to have to feel factually unfulfilled here.
- FINGAL: Then what about the notes you took during that trip?
- D’AGATA: In 1994 I was a sophomore in college, studying Latin and Greek—not writing—and on vacation with my grandparents. We were going to Hoover Dam on a thousand-hour bus trip through the desert without any air-conditioning. No notes were being taken, Jim.
your interest in BankSimple. We are currently in a closed beta as we
await final approval from our banking partner. While we’d love to share
our product with you today we need to ensure that we comply with the
litany of banking regulation and that all of our deposits are FDIC insured.
Your early interest has placed you toward the top of the queue and we
hope to have you on board soon.” —The email I got from Simple’s Josh Reich on February 8, 2010 — two years ago today. I’m sure that if I asked him today, he’d give me the same answer, that he hopes to have me on board “soon”.
I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE WROTE THIS ARTICLE
Also:
If you do quick math, the $1.6bn comp package Sandberg now has was worth ~$300mm when it was granted by Facebook’s board in March 2008.
The board hired her for COO role with a $300mm compensation package because they thought she could build a massive business at Facebook, including a supporting organization.
She did it — and is now number-two at one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Along the way, she turned that $300mm comp package into a $1.6bn comp package.
Luck this was not.
Also infuriating: one reason why she was “lucky” was that she had the right “mentors”. The whole point of her discourse is to seek out those mentors, which men do more than women. And she did. Again, opposite of luck.
