What's the most important question?

The question is “Why.” Tech can answer almost any “How” question, but we still have to ask ourselves the “Why” questions. Why do we need to do this? Why will the audience stay with us? Why do we need this platform, this tool, these people?

“Why” is still the most important question in journalism, in media, and in product management. Without it all “how” questions don’t mean much.

A year from now, what will we be shaking our heads at?

I actually have at least two answers to this question. We’re living in pure tech chaos (thanks, AI disruption). But I think that over the next 12 months the ecosystem will start to clear up a little. A year from now it might simply be easier to navigate because the number of choices will shrink: big tech will get even bigger, offer even more, and most of us won’t need to look far beyond them.

But I also have a second answer (more product focused probably). In a year news media might finally be able to choose between relying on big tech or using open-source tools with comparable power (I believe that the capabilities of OpenAI-type models and open-source models will become increasingly comparable). We’ve already talked about the problems around AI infrastructure, and I hope that once the pace of AI development slows down (because of compute limits or worries about stumbling into AGI) we’ll hit the next phase: AI infrastructure becoming simpler, cheaper, and more diverse that helps us to look closely to open source LLMs.

If that happens, newsrooms will stop asking how to implement AI and will start asking why and where it actually makes sense. So AI will become more regular thing for news media. Instead of constantly trying to stay “up-to-date” and hopping from one tool to another, we’ll be able to focus on building real products and making intentional choices. I don’t know if this is exactly what will happen, but I’m 100% sure it’s the direction we need to be moving toward right now.

What's a good hobby to pick up?

I live near the ocean, so I often walk along the shore and one day I started picking up old pieces of driftwood because I thought: “Hey, this looks like a whale,” or “This could be part of an old rusty lighthouse.” Eventually those random pieces turned into small driftwood sculptures — rusty lighthouses on rocks, little surfer villages, sea creatures, and so on.

This hobby helps me to go beyond the digital world I spend most of my time in. It gives me something tangible to work with, and it lets me extract images out of my head and turn them into something real. And frankly I do love the rusty aesthetic of old lighthouses.