The internet isn’t hurting for a lack of tech coverage.
A quick glance at the rolls of electronic and future-of-media outlets on the news aggregator Techmeme reveals a tech press obsessed with every industry development: Mashable. The Verge. TechCrunch. Gizmodo. Ars Technica. WIRED. Tech Insider. Re/code.
The list goes on and on, and it’s growing every day — earlier this week, New York magazine launched Select All, a site that promises to explore “the weird and wonderful ways people express themselves on the internet and social media.” It come just days after Vox Media announced a Facebook-first gadget page called “Circuit Breaker,” which aims to report electronic news and gossip at a blogger’s pace.
Leading Select All is Max Read, the former editor in chief of Gawker.com, who for the last several months has been running a social media-focused blog on New York’s site called Following. Select All will share the same DNA as Following, with an editorial focus that veers away from commodity news (boilerplate product stories, press release rewrites) to focus on “the best stories from the smartest angles,” Read said.
“Select All will be like Following: funny, smart, knowing, and curious,” Read said in an email interview. “We’ll use fewer swear words than Gawker.”
But how will it distinguish itself among the raft of well-resourced, deep-pocketed tech operations and avoid becoming a “me too” site?
“The center of our coverage is the human experience of technology,” Read said. “We’re not hugely interested in incremental changes in specs, subscriber numbers, or stock prices, or in dressed-up press releases or content-free product announcements. We want to know how the tech we use — from gadgets to social networks to apps — might actually affect our lives, and write for a general audience that’s looking for useful information about the same thing.”
Select All isn’t even the only site to chronicle the intersection between humans and the technology they use. The Verge, a website owned by Vox Media, has a stated mission of covering the “science, art, and culture” of tech. WIRED, one of the original standard bearers for tech coverage, is known for its ruminative takeouts on culturally relevant stories.
But Select All will approach tech coverage from a general interest perspective and leverage the institutional heft of New York magazine, Read said.
“For one thing, I think we’re less interested in ‘the culture of tech’ than we are in the way that technology influences, adapts to, and creates culture across contemporary life,” Read said. “In other words, we’re coming at it from the ‘culture’ side of the equation, backed up by the considerable resources of an institution with a long and distinguished history of cultural commentary and reporting.”
Read, along with associate editors Brian Feldman and Madison Kircher, will eventually be joined on Select All by two additional staffers. That’s a relatively small staff compared to New York’s culture site Vulture (about 20 staffers), but it still represents a significant investment for New York, which has steadily built itself from a standalone magazine into a media company that aims to capitalize on its authority as a chronicle of culture.
Within the last two years, New York Media (the parent company of New York Magazine) has gotten into podcasting, launched a branded content studio and targeted niche audiences with sponsorship-driven pop-up blogs.
Read and New York won’t embrace the all-in approach to social media adopted by Circuit Breaker, although they will experiment with livestreaming and plan to optimize stories and video for Facebook.
“We’ll be on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr at launch, and will have an email newsletter ready within a few weeks (we’ll have promos to increase signups even sooner),” Read said.
Will that be enough to separate it from the pack? There’s a litany of publications vying for circuitry-focused readers, so the appetite for tech news isn’t going away. Ultimately, Read and his colleagues might only need to capture a sizable chunk of that audience to build a sustainable publication.
