Slashdot Mirror
Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) Joins the Washington Post
kodiaktau writes "Slashdot founder and long time cat herder Rob Malda joins the Washington Post per an announcement today. According to the press release, he will be the Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large working for WaPo Labs."
Rob has a more detailed description of the job on his blog: "Don Graham is trying to accomplish something that is a bit of a cliche these days: A startup inside an established corporation. A group that can exist at a nexus between newspapers, websites, cable networks, and TV stations and think about the big picture and the future without the normal burdens associated with a business operating at a large scale. ... They are actively iterating and experimenting in many directions, with strong support from the top of the organization. ... Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli assures me that I'll also be working with the newsroom where I can contribute words, ideas, and tools that will improve the experience of the journalists doing work that I personally believe transcends the bottom line."
Mr. Taco, we understand that you know a lot about this Twitter/Internet/Facebooks stuff. We would like to be hip with that vibe. You'll be in charge of helping our geriatric writing staff learn to do the twitters. You'll also be in charge of producing press releases with lots of hip jargon for the kids. But mostly you'll be in charge of bailing water out of the lower decks. It's starting to get pretty deep down there.
If you think you can handle that, please report to your new office and write up some press release about how you're going to change the face of the tired old Washington Post into something the kids will want to read--something with a cool new name like "WoPo" with a bunch of exclamation points after it, maybe some asterisks in there too--you be the judge on that. And more importantly, try to get the kids to give us their money and twits too. "Twits," that's what they're called right? Use a lot of that net jargon we're told you're down with. Then fax it over to Wired. We want to get this out before they run the presses.
Oh, and hire my grandson. He's lazy as dirt, but he knows a bunch of strange words and phrases that I think will help us still appear relevant.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Didn't he rather famously pan the iPod?
I was going to make a quip about how he'd be in charge of dupe-checking and ensuring all WaPo blog blurbs are high quality and accurate, but more seriously, this sounds like a cool job, so congrats!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We realize that you have been involved with 'journalism' on the interwebs for quite some time, and understand it better than us old rich farts. Consequently we would like to pay you to help us figure out how to co-opt it into our greedy corporate hands.
I don't know if any of the above is true but it sounded funny.
Silence is a state of mime.
I came to the page expecting to see "First Washington Post" in the comments, and was disappointed.
-2B
Step 2 == "Infiltrate Washington Post"
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I don't know if Cmdrtaco's site is slashdotted or just broken, but it's currently returning "Error establishing a database connection" when you try visit it.
Save money on your cell phone bill: Republic Wireless
A group that can exist at a nexus between newspapers, websites, cable networks, and TV stations and think about the big picture and the future without the normal burdens associated with a business operating at a large scale...They are actively iterating and experimenting in many directions...
Nexus, iterating, big picture...my head is spinning.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAH ahahahahhahahha ha hahahahahhahahahahhahaah
HAHAHAHHAhahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahaha
...that a famous buggy whip factory has hired one of the first combustion engine mechanics to help them figure out how to put six cylinders inside a horse without killing it.
Not sure if I feel more sympathy for the mechanic or the horse...
Still and all, Malda is a good and talented guy, slashdot has noticeably deteriorated in his absence, and I wish him all the best.
Wait, April is not here yet. WTF. This has to be a joke right?
The Washington Post hiring Rob is sorta like Apple hiring Gil Amelio..and we know how that ended.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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Congratulations on your influential new job. I hope you guide this startup into delivering journalism from the Washington Post. Not just some "new media" buzz factory like most media startups that might even claim to be "journalism", like and the Washington Post online and in print have degenerated into along with their industry.
Journalism is when people tell a true story accurate to the facts and meaning of the events. Just whipping up "a conversation", or featuring "trending memes" isn't journalism.
I hope you've seen enough on Slashdot to recognize what this new venture shouldn't waste it's time on. I hope the Washington Post has brought you on to do better reporting on "stuff that matters", especially interactively.
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make install -not war
Are we talking about the *same* Washington Post that continually loses my ID so I have to re-register over and over again so I can post comments on their politics articles?
The same WaPo that employs Jennifer Rubin who writes hateful articles, and when we try and correct her, those posts are deleted?
The same WaPo that won't load the page at all if the ad server is a little slow to respond? Instead you're staring at a blank white page, which is just as well, since the article will likely be filled with factual errors as well as spelling mistakes?
Taco, if you're going to start anyplace, fix their online presence first, as right now, I'm hesitant to even load the site on my browser.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What's his WaPo user number?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Best of luck with this new endeavor! =)
They are losing relevance, not to say their ass:
February 11, 2012
(NYT) The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stands at less than 640 people....Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are gone. There were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing employees last summer that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t overlap.
February 24, 2012
(AP) — The Washington Post Company reported on Friday a 22 percent drop in fourth-quarter net income.
CmdrTaco helped build something worthwhile at Slashdot. He's the kind of talent the Post needs more of if they are not to circle the drain with the rest of the sorry-assed newspaper industry, which the Web is destroying without replacing it with something better.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Finally- I'll be able to buy Washington Post subscriptions using my bitcoins.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...what CmdrTaco missed was exactly what Apple saw. There was a massive untapped market for user-friendly consumer electronic & computing products. While the smug technoratti were still obsessed with stats & features, Apple saw what people wanted before they did and gave it to them. CmdrTaco's "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame." will go down in history (like "Let them eat cake") as emblematic of a group of 'elites' detached from reality.
BTW: In case you haven't noticed, Apple tapped that market and now they have a $500B market cap.
...what CmdrTaco missed was exactly what Apple saw. There was a massive untapped market for user-friendly consumer electronic & computing products. While the smug technoratti were still obsessed with stats & features, Apple saw what people wanted before they did and gave it to them. CmdrTaco's "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame." will go down in history (like "Let them eat cake") as emblematic of a group of 'elites' detached from reality.
BTW: In case you haven't noticed, Apple tapped that market and now they have a $500B market cap.
Which is why he is now working at a desperate old media low budget boiler room instead of in a plush corner office.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Please explain to me what Apple saw back in 2001. iTunes store opened in 2003, two years after the original iPod. Apples success came from iTunes, not the iPod. People bought the iPod because they wanted iTunes. Are you suggesting because CmdrTaco in 2001 didn't guess that Apple was building an iTunes store 2 years into the future, somehow that makes him smug?
Slashdot, conservative! Hahhahaha
What makes you laugh is the connotations associated with U.S. use of "conservative", which refers to less government control over economic issues but more government control over social issues. This comes from a long-standing alliance between free market advocates and the religious right wing. If anything, Slashdot has tended to lean libertarian, which is fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
The iPod took off with the Windows-release, which was well before the iTunes Music Store.
Wrong. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg
Windows release was in late 2002. You can see here that iPod didn't really start to take off until 2004.
Or that the windows release didn't increase the popularity that much. The 2G sold about double the units, while the 3G sold easily 8 times the units of the 2G. So you could attribute windows to doubling the sales, and iTunes to 8x the sales, and it just skyrocketed from there.
This is really cool, because I just finished reading how badly Washington Post screwed up with the "Inventor of Email" story. In fact, if you look at the comments you can see that former OSDN CEO Robin Miller (aka roblimo) suggested that they hire someone from the slashdot crowd to work on IT reporting. Maybe they took it to heart.
Sorry, but the numbers back the other guy up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg
The iPod was averaging about 100,000 units per quarter until mid 2003. That's not so impressive, honestly. It didn't break 1,000,000 units per quarter until late 2004. So yeah, it was really the iTunes music store launch in April 2003 that made people interested in the iPod.
...what CmdrTaco missed was exactly what Apple eventually saw.
FTFY. When Taco panned the iPod, it still had a lot of growing to do, and Jobs could have as easily mandated the next iPod to be the next Newton or the next NeXT (right products, at the wrong time.) Jobs hit the contemporarily correct spot between price, cool and performance and now he is a saint to all who worship monetary success. Doesn't mean that CmdrTaco was wrong in his evaluation of that generation of iPod at that time.
Seriously, Rob, break a leg! If anyone can bring a dinosaur like WaPo into the modern age, it's you. You built a vibrant community here on Slashdot, no matter what the naysayers and nitpickers might say, and a large part of that is because you get what a community needs and how to build a system architecture to deliver it.
The moderation system we enjoy here is still unsurpassed online. It has allowed the best, funniest, and most insightful comments to rise to the top in such a way that I always know more about our world and feel better about it, too, for having read the posts of our excellent fellow Slashdotters. And I therefore value being part of the community and rue to this day the 4-digit userID I lost when I exchanged living on the West coast for the East back in the day.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
CmdrTaco missed what was important about a portable music device, portability. He was focused on the capacity, while Apple knew that having a device you could fit in your pocket while having enough capacity to have a good collection of music was important. The Nomad was around the size of a CD player, something you'd end up carrying in a bag or backpack.
The original iPod could fit in your pocket, the Nomad couldn't. The iPod had a slicker UI and a higher speed link. And a couple years later they integrated it with a slick online music store. That was game over.
But by all means, please continue to believe it was all just 'marketing' while I purchase some more Apple stock.