My career in journalism coincided almost perfectly with the rise and fall of the profession during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Thus any narrative of those years could serve as a personal version of the historical record. The first half had lots of highlights, Rolling Stone, the Patty Hearst stories, the Center for Investigative Reporting, “Circle of Poison,” Salon, Wired News, book deals, Hollywood, and awards.
The second half was a constant dance from job to job as media institutions lost out to Internet-based companies including social media.
During the dozen years before my first retirement, I held jobs at startups MyWire, Predictify and GreatNonProfits; consulted for clients including Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia, and the California Academy of Sciences; worked with a wonderful French software company called Smub, and took on part-time gigs as a media analyst/blogger for BNET and 7X7.
In the last two positions, I met and interviewed founders of Twitter, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Nextdoor, Getaround and dozens of other companies as the age of social media came into being.
Occasionally, I put my investigator hat back on; for example, I wrote a report that of the 44 board members of the largest social media companies early on, none were women.
As I reached the age of 65, further employment opportunities seemed to be limited, so I decided to retire. This was early in 2013.
But retirement bored me and within months I had rejoined a former employer, KQED, as a part-time blogger. The public media company had a large radio and TV footprint, but only a minor web presence.
Next, as senior editor for digital news at KQED, I assembled a team of writers and producers that built a large digital audience to complement the legacy broadcast services.
We also started an ad hoc investigative team at KQED that produced award-winning reports on police violence, sexual abuse, and official corruption.
Finally, in late 2019, health issues forced me to retire again, 53 years after I had started at the age of 18.
Once again “retire” was probably not the right term because that was seven years ago now and marked the start of my daily newsletter, several thousand of which have appeared to date.
HEADLINES:
Iran’s foreign minister in Islamabad as US team prepares to travel (CNN)
Hegseth calls war in Iran a ‘gift to the world’ (USA Today)
Hezbollah defiant in face of Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extension (WP)
Iran's use of a swarm of small, fast boats to seize two container ships near the Strait of Hormuz could undermine suggestions US forces have disabled its naval threat. (Reuters)
US justice department drops probe into Fed chairman Jerome Powell (BBC)
Kash Patel’s Atlantic Lawsuit Is Already Backfiring (TNR)
Trump embraced the gambling industry for decades. Now he’s hedging his bet on prediction markets. (NBC)
Kevin Warsh’s Fed Confirmation Hearing Just Killed Rate Cuts for 2026. Here’s What It Means for Your Portfolio (Yahoo)
Congress keeps holding all-nighters, creating dysfunction after dark (AP)
Rove warns of proposed Florida Republican gerrymander ‘risk’ (The Hill)
Meta employees react to pending job cuts: ‘28 days of hell’ (BI)
Gen Z wants to turn back the clock as more of the young generation yearn for the days of no social media (Independent)
The Billionaire Trying to Build the ‘Next Great Washington Newsroom’ (WSJ)
People will be ‘living and working’ on the moon in the 2030s, says space tech CEO (CNBC)
Eric Swalwell paid $40K in campaign funds to lawyer defending him against assault claims (SFC)
Pope Leo firmly condemned the killing of protesters in Iran, after Trump criticized the U.S. pontiff last week for not doing so while denouncing the Middle East conflict. [Reuters]
Elon Musk’s near-daily online posts about race are turning off some fans (WP)
5 AI Models Tried to Scam Me. Some of Them Were Scary Good (Wired)
Anthropic says engineering missteps were behind Claude Code’s month-long decline after weeks of user backlash (Fortune)
The week that Meta employees became training data (Platformer)
A secretive AI hacking system has sparked a global scramble (WP)
Sam Altman’s Next High-Wire Act: Getting OpenAI to Make More Money (NYT)
Bottle Girl Nods As Kash Patel Screams State Secrets In Ear (Onion)
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