mchafkin

did you read the story? we discuss the very disagreement you reference.

my two cents on this is that even if the hyperloop doesn't pan out all, the tunnel project could still be a big deal. If you stick regular state of the art high speed trains in musk's hypothetical NY-DC tunnel, that would be worthwhile.

the crazy thing is most people who heard that talk seemed quite taken -- despite the outrageousness of the whole thing (for instance, the comparison to EVs and the end of slavery)

Did you see the Shai Agassi hologram?

I'm so happy somebody brought up his wacky paragraph about steelhead trout that classified them as a "fancy" rainbow trout, which is like exactly how Glenn Beck would have put it. It's exactly the kind of equivocating BS that a professional editor would have caught and cut.

Also, there's some irony that Parker chose to publish this rant about click bait (and other journalistic sins) in Techcrunch.

I would guess that the median New Yorker staff writer gets more like $150-200k, all in (when you add up magazine fees + book advances + speaking fees.) The mean is much higher, because a handful of outliers (heh, Gladwell) make $1 million plus.

That wasn't the executive editor of the NYT, that was Clay Shirky, the news-should-be-free guru. (Referenced here: http://www.sundance.org/festival/article/qa-page-one-a-year-...)

He wasn't speaking on behalf of the Times, he was speaking as an observer who is pretty firmly against pay walls. If you asked someone at the Times what their pay wall is, they'd say its the good old retail news model: Asking customers to pay money for your product.

The fact that artists are getting screwed by publishers is not a justification to screw them harder. I wish people spent more time imagining ways to pay for the arts rather than just coming up with arguments for why it's OK to download a song without paying for it.

The New York Times took on this topic a few years back in a very good article that argued that the whole idea of the 8-hour sleep was invented by the mattress industry (and other purveyors of sleep products), and that humans don't need anywhere near 8 hours of continuous sleep.

Ironically, all of the industry's marketing makes people anxious about getting enough sleep--and makes it harder for them to get to sleep (thus propagating the need for more expensive mattresses and pillows.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pa...

I take exception to this point--You want a table? Make a table--But so you know: There are very few stats on reverse migration because the U.S. government stopped tracking it in 1957. There have been some really great studies academic studies, if you're interested in checking them out.

http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/immigration-and-...

But even these studies are pretty small and fairly limited. Definitely more research is needed into this area.

I didn't work on this year's list, but I've worked on them in years' past. The bottom line: It's a subjective list--based on reporting by Inc.'s editors and writers (basically we talk to people and ask them who they admire/who they think should be on the list). We assemble a long list of names and narrow it down to 30, based a sense of who we feel is most impressive and most interesting.

One of the cool things about this list is that it's a one-shot deal, so we'll be looking for 30 new names next year. You can send nominations to 30under30@inc.com

Or put them in the comments here and we'll find them.

Thanks for reading!

just an FYI: I recorded this video as a compendium to a June 2009 cover story on YC. That article is here

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/the-start-up-guru-y-com...

Just an FYI to those who haven't seen it in print: "How to Get Good at Making Money" is the cover-line we used for the hard-copy.

you might want to try "magazine view"

https://w1.buysub.com/pubs/FC/ICM/10for997.jsp?cds_page_id=5...

(Jason's article is the cover story this month.)

I don't understand how this is being spun as a failure. It sounds like a success based on the bottom line:

"Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers."

Sounds pretty good to me.

If anyone is interested, we'll be hosting a live chat with Tony at 1pm EST. http://www.inc.com/live

Right on. The problem is the advertisements. Someone needs to figure out how to charge print CPMs for online content. It means thinking beyond banner ads--maybe even the whole CPM model.

Meanwhile, the calculations in this post are very conservative. Lots of journalists make more than $300 for a 1000 word article. The financial situation for working online journalists is even more difficult than suggested by the post.

Yes, it's only going to last a month.

To clarify: This is not a cost-cutting measure--and it wasn't introduced by managers. (I, humble writer that I am, proposed it.) It's a month-long editorial experiment that I will be writing about in the April issue of Inc. magazine. But yes, we will have to face all of these issues you describe. Hopefully that's what will make the story interesting. Would love to hear your thoughts on what you think will be the pain points. (I'm at mchafkin at Inc dot com).

These are great suggestions--and good points about the limitations. Thanks! Do you think IRC is superior to other IM clients? A lot of folks in the offices have never used IM before--and may be more comfortable with something like AIM or GChat.

Sure. But the experiment is about taking a company culture that is built on face to face contact (and moving around a bunch of printed pages) and taking it virtual. Should be interesting to see what happens.

That's actually not true. All a business has to do is register. They'll get sales calls, but they don't actually have to buy anything.

Thanks Scott. I led with her because I think the incident, while extreme, is a vivid illustration of the way that Yelp (and not just Yelp, but all online review sites) is making business owners feel. This owner is not the first or the last to take criticism personally and respond without thinking.

As to your second question, I don't think anyone thinks that the the owner's actions were reasonable. (As I say later I the story, she feels terrible about what happened.) Sean C.'s review was negative, but not overwhelmingly so. And whatever someone says on a review site, I think that everyone has a right to privacy.

Thanks for the comment. And sorry if it seemed late--that's one of the drawbacks of a monthly mag.

But it's also advantage since we have time to sift through these claims. I talked to a lot of business owners for this story and I was unable to find a single verifable instance of pay to play. All of these stories end up being hearsay. As I tried to convey in the story, the problems that Yelp creates for business owners are more complicated and more subtle. Like Google, Yelp is based on an algorithm that can make or break businesses and that is ever-changing and hard to understand. That's what is at the heart of most business owners' complaints.

They offer a bunch of tools. and they've gotten a lot better at being sensitive to business onwers. Owners can respond to negative reviews, either publiclly or privately. (Later in the story, I talk about a hair salon that has done a really awesome job managing its Yelp reviews by being fanatical about responding.) The difficult issue is that the interests of business owners and those of Yelp will never align perfectly. If they did then Yelp would essentially be useless to its readers. (The tension is similar to how some companies feel about GetSatisfaction.)