Now, the newsletter itself could be the scoop. In the past, if I had a scoop, I would just put that on The Verge and then the newsletter would be a separate thing. Where I hope that I can start to separate it from The Interface is that there’s just going to be more original reporting in it. And I think that format is going to endure for a while. Each day, I’m still bringing you a column about today’s biggest news and platforms, and I’m bringing you the best links about that subject from the best journalists in the world. Right now, it looks almost identical to The Interface in content. I wish I could pay for this.” And at some point, I thought, “Maybe I should let them.”Īnd how is Platformer different from The Interface? How is it the same? People would email me sometimes saying, “I can’t believe this is free. I felt like the thing I was doing was valuable. I wanted to figure out if there was a way where I could do it forever, and it seemed like the best way to do that was to just totally control my own destiny. Now you’re leaving The Verge to produce your own newsletter with Substack - what influenced your decision to make that move? So you started at The Verge in 2013, and while there you started a daily tech newsletter, The Interface. But this was definitely a happy accident. It’s honestly terrifying! I’m more impressed with people who are very intentional about their careers. Wow, it’s really amazing how that just fell into your lap almost, and then changed the trajectory of your whole career. Like, can I do that?” So they hired me to do it, and it really was the best thing that ever happened to me. Two months after that, one of the editors at the Chronicle called me and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about being a tech reporter?” And I was like, “No, but what would that be?” And he said, “Well, you know, you just move here and write all about Apple and Google and Facebook and whatever seems interesting.” I was like, “That sounds like the greatest job in the world. While I was here, I stopped in and saw some old friends who were working at the San Francisco Chronicle, two of whom had been my former editors in Arizona. I spent about two years looking for a job here. This is the greatest city in the world.” And so my initial interest had actually just been moving to San Francisco. And then a couple of my friends moved to San Francisco and I visited, and it was just a love at first sight thing where I felt like, “Oh, this is where I should have been the whole time. I worked in Arizona for like six and a half years. My first job was covering state and local politics, and I kind of bounced around. What led to your interest in tech journalism? Was that always your intended field? Now you’re a pretty prolific tech journalist. So I had a great experience at Medill and Northwestern generally, but it was really The Daily that was at the center of it for me. And I really feel like most of the journalism education that I got that I still use to this day, I learned from the other editors at The Daily who would sit down next to me when I, you know, wrote my terrible story about some event, and would just go through it line by line and fix it and teach me that way. I mean, the people who were working there at the time were just the best, most patient teachers. And I thought, “Well, I don’t know if I’m ready to join a cult, I kind of want to enjoy college a little.” So I didn’t start working at The Daily until I was a sophomore, but I completely fell in love with it. So I visited the school, I loved it, applied, got in and showed up to campus.Īll my friends who worked at The Daily Northwestern talked about it as this all-consuming cult. I’d been the editor of my high school paper, and then liked it enough that when I asked my guidance counselor where I should go to college, she said, “Well, if you want to be a journalist, you should go to Medill.” And that was basically it for me. There were sort of two phases of me getting into journalism at college. How did your education and your experience at Northwestern help prepare you for your career? I talked with him about his Medill experience, how he fell in love with tech journalism and what the future holds for his career. Now he’s stepping out on his own, releasing a new newsletter, Platformer, on Substack. He’s best known for writing daily newsletter The Interface for The Verge since 2017. Casey Newton (BSJ02) is a leading voice in tech journalism and a finalist for the 2020 Ellie Award for Reporting.
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