alexismadrigal

See my comments further down: I was summarizing the way other people reacted to the book. That context was lost. I found the attitude depressing, too, then got it attributed to me in the New York Times. :shruggie:

Hah. Dude, this was an unbelievably labor intensive project. I have an editorial team to run, a 2-year-old, and another baby on the way. There is no fucking way I could have executed this thing, even if I wanted to.

I mean: just to be clear, as the giver of the quote, the context for it is that I was summarizing the feeing of other people who saw the book. I was a super strong supporter of the idea that this was too well-done to be a marketing stunt.

That said, it was just incredibly labor intensive for something with no commercial or even reputational return.

I think you should read more pre-Internet journalism. You'd be shocked (SHOCKED) at what a NYT really looked like from 1970, let alone the zillions of regional papers, weeklies, newsletters, etc.

We remember the good stuff.

Yeah, but it's the only cheap way. Video costs like 10x more than text to produce. (NB: I'm an editor at The Atlantic and I love video and I love text.)

I trust PG to make the right decision.

As an Atlantic editor, I'd only note that this decision was not made by the people who produce our magazine's journalism.

Agree. It's pretty obvious where they are going with this. And from an advertiser's perspective, it's pretty sweet. Right now, the distinction they are trying to draw seems to be that they'll only use you to advertise things that you choose to follow.

But what's to stop them from your "implicit" endorsements of products/services you use from location data or with machine vision (something Google can already do with many logos in Street View imagery, I've discovered in my reporting)? Oh, that's right. Nothing. Which is why they don't want to have to ask for permission to do these things.

Sheeeit. We've had animated gifs on TheAtlantic.com HOMEPAGE since like 2011.