Interview: Casey Newton on covering tech companies in the middle of all this, when to shut off Twitter, and the joy of Bon Appetit’s YouTube Channel

Hello! I hope you’ve all been doing well this week. For this week’s interview, I spoke with Casey Newton, Silicone Valley Editor at The Verge. He also writes The Interface, a daily newsletter covering tech and democracy. We talked about how he’s adjusted his newsletter to cover the current pandemic, shifting the quest for the perfect productivity app, and lots more!

First, how have you been adjusting to quarantine?

Jordan, I have been fantastic. Thank you so much. 

You recently said you’re shifting your coverage on The Interface to focus more specifically on the current pandemic. How did you come up with your new urgency index?

I started The Interface in 2017 because the big tech platforms had begun to have these clashes with governments all around the world, and there wasn't a place I could go to catch up on all the day's events. Companies like Facebook and Google had already become, in some ways, quasi-nation states, making policy decisions that have huge consequences for the economy, democracy, and free speech. Then the coronavirus came around, and all of a sudden the platforms were making decisions that promised to have a huge impact on public health — whether it's Facebook generating 1 million symptom surveys a week for Carnegie Mellon, or Apple and Google teaming up for an exposure notification API. By March it seemed clear that tech was going one to be one of the most important stories of the pandemic response — and also something that fit really well with what The Interface tries to do. (In seven words: write about tech companies like they're countries.)My favorite press critic is Jay Rosen, and he recently proposed the idea of an "urgency index" — a list of the top subjects a publication covers, in the order that the writers believe them to be most important. Last year I published a guide to The Interface that laid out the subjects we cover and some of the big questions we're tackling, promising to modify it as events warrant. I think the pandemic is one of those events. And so we published a draft urgency index, our readers really liked it, and I'm in the process of incorporating their feedback into a final product that we'll publish soon. 

Since you send your newsletter out four days a week, I’m guessing you have to spend a lot of time reading and keeping tabs on social media. Have you had to shift how you do that in quarantine?

I mean, I was basically always looking at Twitter before quarantine, and I continue to do so now. I've definitely found that shutting down Twitter on weekends can be helpful in relaxing. But I'm also quite interested in the story, and so I don't mind mainlining the coverage for an unhealthy chunk of the day.

Before you covered tech and democracy, you wrote a lot about productivity software. Did that coverage prep you at all for how you’re covering the pandemic for The Interface?

I used to spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect productivity app, until I realized that 90 percent of that time was essentially procrastination. What was actually useful? Reading Getting Things Done, using a cloud-based to-do app (literally any will do); and using a lightweight note-taking app to easily transport text around your screens (I use Bear). All the rest is just a matter of preference, though I still keep my eye out for tools that feel like new superpowers. Otter's AI-based transcription and text editor is extremely good for recording interviews, though they just nerfed their free tier rather severely; and Notion is a beautiful collaborative workspace, though of course immediately after I paid for a year of the premium service I seemingly ran out of things to do inside it. 

Finally, what’s your favorite thing you’ve seen online lately? 

The Bon Apetit YouTube channel is an enduring beacon of hope and joy in these troubled times. It's like a modern-day take on The Office, and at the end of every episode they have mastered some task and made something delicious. It's tremendously soothing and I don't know why anyone wouldn't watch everything they make.