Tedium Highlight in Journalism: Journalism’s odd, fleeting relationship with the fax machine. 

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Tag results: Journalism

Caught In The Middle

The mess with Bezos and The Washington Post is reflective of a trend that keeps popping up this year: The powerful entity stepping in it without considering the collateral damage.

Gatekept

Thoughts on a bruise to the ol’ ego that hurt a little more than I thought it would. But hey, it gives me a chance to talk about gatekeeping.

The Paywall’s Final Frontier

Word that CNN is getting a paywall feels like a sign that good information is more expensive than ever.

When Robots Aggregate

The mess between Forbes and Perplexity AI highlights how soulless and extractive aggregation can be in the wrong hands. It’s the wrong direction for LLMs.

Berliner Goes Tabloid

Considering the tale of the longtime NPR editor who decided to pull a Bulworth at the tail end of his long career.

The Post-SEO Era

What happens when a news site launches that basically ignores the SEO orthodoxy? Easy: They do fascinating stuff. Hence, Robinhood’s Sherwood.

Recapturing Real Time

A decade ago, real-time social news coverage was a machine that simply worked. With our recent social media disarray, it feels broken. Can it be fixed?

Spinning The Dead

I am so obsessed with trying to figure out who Deadspin’s new owners are that it led me to some late night spam-blog sleuthing.

Create For Yourself

With disruption hitting the media industry acutely in 2024, now is the time to lean into owning your creative work. Have a say in your creative destiny.

An Incomplete Picture

A recent scandal around a popular YouTuber’s nonprofit foundation has created a lot of drama, but what it’s missing are voices that understand the nonprofit sector.

Give ’Em Less Data

What if the problems with the news ecosystem could be solved by shutting off the data pipeline to the advertisers? After all, they’ve spent the last 30 years aggressively exploiting it—and us.

In The Age Of Culling

Discussing the dumb thing CNET did in an effort to please the Google Gods: Don’t cull old news content to improve your SEO ranking. That’s your history!

Old Archives, New Controversy

The New York Times has the most robust online archives of any newspaper, but it’s proving difficult to square their handling of a recent controversy with the quality of those archives.

When Newsletters Were Printed

What can modern newsletter authors learn about newslettering from an era when people actually mailed these things? A lot, it turns out, according to this book I bought.

Longform Brevity

Alt-form storytelling, a key magazine-and-newspaper design trend, hasn’t truly flourished on the modern internet. Axios could go way further than it does.

❝The Quote Issue❞

“We use a lot of quotes at Tedium, but we’ve never done an issue of Tedium ABOUT quotations,” Ernie said when writing this piece. “Let’s fix that.”

Dead on Archival

Considering the challenges that face shuttered newspapers with decades or even centuries of material to preserve.

Pushing Photos Through Wires

The technology used to distribute photos through news wire services inspired a whole bunch of innovations with use cases beyond newspapers. Like television.

Source Tags & Codes

The saga of the Missouri governor reflects a failure by the powerful to embrace curiosity—curiosity encouraged by the HTML language he fails to understand.

How I Research Stuff

If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you might wonder how I manage to uncover so many strange stories. Well, let me tell you. Hopefully it’s inspiring.
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