Q&A: NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson

On the site's new science and technology section and blog

On Tuesday, The New Yorker launched a science and technology page on its website, along with a companion blog called Elements. The new Science & Tech vertical, wedged prominently between Books and Business on the homepage, had been on NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson’s to-do list for a while, and in January he hired BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan to be deputy editor of the section and the blog. On Thursday, Thompson, who joined The New Yorker as a senior editor in 2010 after five years at Wired, and left print to manage the website in 2012, shared his thoughts on the foray into science and technology online.

Why did you decide to add a sci-tech page and blog?

It’s something I had wanted to do more or less since I took the job. Traditionally, content on The New Yorker’s site has been grouped into news and culture. A couple months after I started, we added a books category, and it seemed like science and tech was the natural next step. Even before I took over as editor of the site, I had been blogging a lot about technology. Sometimes it would run in News Desk and sometimes it would run in Culture Desk. Science and technology are things that The New Yorker has done really well for a long time, but we didn’t have a clear home for them online.

Are there any particular stories or issues that made sci-tech seem like the natural next step?

The question of how technology is changing the way we think, the way we relate to one another—that’s a huge question that requires in-depth coverage from all sorts of places, some of which we can provide.

You can look at our initial posts to see what we’re interested in. There’s Maria Bustillos, who had a big post about bitcoins and the global economy—how technology is changing finance, changing the way markets work. And Michael Specter had a post asking, “Can we patent life?” The patent system is one of the most inscrutable, but also most interesting, features of the American economy. How do you reform it? What should and shouldn’t be patentable? Who owns our genes? These are big topics, things that as a society we have to figure out the answers to, and we’re not going to figure them all out on a New Yorker blog, but they are conversations we want to contribute to.

Joshua Rothman had a great article, “Nine decades of science coverage in The New Yorker,” that described a longtime focus on technology—the things we create and how they shape our lives. Will that continue at NewYorker.com?

Absolutely. The principle is to take what we’ve always done in the magazine and expand it to this fast-moving world of the Internet as best we can. We want to take the things we’re good at, and try to cover of them at Web speed.

Josh’s post is a great example of how The New Yorker has covered science and tech, what we’ve done well, what has interested us, how we’ve written about it, how we’ve covered it. It appeared on the first day for two specific reasons: to remind people that this a magazine that has done this great work, and to serve as a set of guidelines for what we want to do, to help us determine what to cover and what not to cover.

So, in terms of approach, will that mean more newsy posts, or a lot of enterprising, feature-y kind of stuff?

We want there to be a mix. Facebook is announcing a new phone today, for example, and we’re certainly going to see if we have a good way to respond to what people are talking about. If we don’t have a way of saying something new, we won’t publish anything, but we’ll try to engage in that discussion. So, as best as possible, we’re going to be involved in the conversations of the moment.

But what’s the point of having a New Yorker blog about science and technology if you don’t also use it to really dig into stuff? Ideally, we’ll end up with a lot of pieces like the one about bitcoins. They’re in the news right now—everybody’s talking about them—but our article is about 4,000 words long, with history, in-depth interviews, and real reporting that involves actually going out and talking to people and finding out things.

You’ve recently published some great work by new writers like NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus. What other novelties can readers expect?

We’re definitely going to be adding writers. I’d worked with Gary while I was at Wired, and edited one of his feature stories. He started writing for NewYorker.com and loved it, and it turned out he had new ideas every week. So, he’s been churning them out, and they’ve been excellent. We’d love to find more writers like him. Tim Wu has done a couple of pieces. Gareth Cook, who’s never written for The New Yorker before, wrote a piece for us yesterday, and just filed another one.

So, there’ll be a group of writers that I hope will develop into regular voices on the Web. It’ll be open to freelancers and there will be pieces from staff writers, but I also want there to be another tier of writers who are regular contributors like Gary. Part of what we’re doing now if figuring out who those people will be, who consistently comes up with ideas that work for us, who’s easy to edit—all of those things that go into making an editor-writer relationship work. I suspect that there will eventually be a regular set of 10 or 12 voices. We’ve kind of seen that with Page Turner, our books and literary blog, where people like Teju Cole are now regular voices.

Despite the decline of science coverage in the mainstream media, it’s really booming online. What’s your view of the current trajectory of science writing on the Web?

This blog and the Science & Tech page cover two things—science and technology—and of course technology is a big thing online. People who use technology like to read about technology. People who use Twitter like to read stories about Twitter. So tech journalism thrives online. It always has. It always will.

But it’s also the case that science journalism is showing remarkable growth. There are great blogs coming out, and a lot of great young science writers. When we were looking for a deputy editor, we read through lots of blogs, and were incredibly impressed. It’s something about understanding who we are, how the world works, how our lives work, and how our lives interact with nature. These are huge questions, and it turns out that the Internet is a great forum for debating, discussing, and investigating them.

I think it’s now kind of the cool, smart, hip thing to be a young science journalist in a way it may not have been 10 years ago. The way that our knowledge is evolving and the way science is changing our understanding of fields like neuroscience or genomics really draws people in. These areas where we really know next to nothing, but where it’s clear that what we do learn will be profoundly important in all sorts of ways.

Science is also a place for great photography, and as the Web has become more image-based, that has probably helped science journalism. Tech journalism has always had a problem with how you represent it visually. When you write a story about hackers, it’s kind of hard to illustrate it. It’s hard to find a good photograph. You can come up with some kind of conceptual drawing, but it’s tough. When you write a story about science, on the other hand, there are all these beautiful images, whether it’s something on a microscopic level, or it’s outer space, or it’s the beautiful picture that accompanied Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece about global warming and droughts.

Where does The New Yorker fit into the online, science-writing ecosystem? Is there any particular role that you’re trying to play, or any particular gap that you’re trying to fill?

I don’t know if there’s a gap in that new ecosystem. We just want to be part of it and do things really well. But we don’t want to compete in the, who-can-summarize-the-new-paper-in-Nature-the-fastest race. We’re not going to be able to win at that game; we don’t have a large enough news operation. But when it comes to explaining science and technology in the clearest, crispest language, and exploring different corners of research to find something new, I think we can do a good job and compete well.

I also think that there are going to be certain topics and ideas that we continue to push forward. Michael Specter, for example, who wrote a book about denialism—whether that’s doubting the benefits of vaccines or the science of climate change, or fanciful thinking about the effects of genetically modified foods—and why a rational approach to science is what’s best for the world, and I think that is an idea that we’ll continue cover at The New Yorker.

What’s so important about bitcoins, then? On Wednesday there were three pieces about them at the top of the page: the Elements post by Maria Bustillos, a News Desk post from Nick Traverse, and a 2011 feature from the archives by Joshua Davis.

The fact that there were three pieces was partly random. It just happened that we had a really good piece in the archives, and the Nick Traverse piece was just 100 words; it was part of a little feature we have in our new Business hub, “The Number,” where we pick a number every couple days. So we picked the price of bitcoins that day.

But they’re amazing for a couple of reasons. First, you can write about them in a way that ties us into the global economic crisis, as Bustillos did. Second, there is this amazing mystery about how they were created and who created them. Joshua Davis’s piece from the archives was all about trying to find Satoshi Nakamoto, the man, or the group of people, who built them—no one knows. It’s unbelievable.

So this is a sort of enduring question for journalists who are interested in narrative and mystery, and figuring things out. Somebody built this thing that is worth tons and tons of money, and nobody knows who he is.

And then there are the incredible questions about bitcoins’ volatility. This is a currency that is worth actual money, and it used to take thousands of bitcoins to buy a pizza, and now a bitcoin is worth around $140. It’s an extraordinary story about a mysterious invention that is actually changing the world.

Must-reads of the week

Margaret Thatcher dies, Anthony Weiner returns, the Maine hermit emerges

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week:

Thatcher, liberator — Andrew Sullivan remembers the insane Britain of his youth, and the prime minister who turned the lights back on

‘North Pond Hermit’ is arrested — Crazy story of a man who lived alone in Maine woods for 27 years

Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s post-scandal playbook — “It reached this point where I just sat down with Huma and said, ‘Listen, I can’t… . I don’t want to lie.’ … I just didn’t want to lie anymore to her”

Reasons my son is crying — “We asked him to stop hitting his brother with a plastic wand”

Jeff Zucker is remaking CNN — Are viewers tuning in?

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value — And will never be a threat to fiat currency

Kermit Gosnell: the alleged mass-murderer and the bored media — “Let’s just state the obvious: National political reporters are, by and large, socially liberal”

Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s trial should be a front-page story — The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy

DART to Newsweek for its Bitcoin debacle

The magazine blazed back into print with “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” a cover story allegedly unmasking the mysterious creator of the digital currency as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese American living in California. Except a lot of people weren’t convinced. And Nakamoto himself said Newsweek had the wrong man. Most media observers were undecided. “It would have been less satisfying, for Newsweek,” wrote Reuter’s Felix Salmon, “to present the Dorian-is-Satoshi theory as just a theory, rather than as fact. But it is only a theory.” A DART, too, to the horde of reporters that descended on Nakamoto’s doorstep and chased him and an AP journalist around town after he decided to grant the AP an interview.

DART to Fox News for managing to misspell “spelling bee” in, yes, a report on a spelling bee. The Fox & Friends segment featured onscreen graphics asking if the Kansas City, MO, contest had been the “longest spelling be ever?” Can we get a definition for the word “irony”?

DART to The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, who, in a profile of MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, revealed that he thinks “Zaire” is “today’s name for the Congo.” Zaire is, in fact, yesterday’s name for the country that became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.

DART to a local BBC radio station for broadcasting the sound of a woman screaming and dogs howling during a report on the Oscar Pistorius murder trial. The double-amputee sprinter is accused of killing his girlfriend. As the reporter said, “he admits shooting Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year,” a woman’s screams could be heard. A technical glitch meant that special effects being prepared in another studio were accidentally aired over the news bulletin, a BBC spokesperson said. The show’s host apologized immediately afterwards.

LAUREL to students and alumni at the Mohyla School of Journalism in Kiev for launching StopFake.org, a crowdsourced website that debunks fake and propagandistic stories on Ukraine and Crimea.

LAUREL to New York magazine for poking fun at The New York Times’ claim that monocles are making a comeback. It seems the Gray Lady has heralded the return of Mr. Peanut’s favorite eyepiece as a must-have fashion accessory, over and over again, for the past 112 years. We look forward to future Times trend pieces on the bustle, spats, and lorgnettes.

LAUREL to CNN’s Brian Stelter for exposing how a single press release misled news outlets—including Time, ABC, NBC, and CNN itself—into thinking ads for medical marijuana had been broadcast for the first time in New Jersey. MarijuanaDoctors.com claimed it was buying ads through a division of Comcast and that the commercials would mark the first time a major US network had allowed advertising for medical marijuana. But the ads never aired. MarijunaDoctors.com sent out the release before Comcast agreed to broadcast the ads, and reporters didn’t wait to confirm the commercials actually aired before publishing their stories.

DART to the ludicrous spectacle that was CNN’s nonstop coverage of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370. The plane departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8 and subsequently vanished, with the loss of 227 passengers and a dozen crew. CNN anchor Don Lemon speculated about supernatural reasons for its disappearance, then asked guests if the plane might have been swallowed by a black hole. Because as we all know, real life is identical to episodes of The Twilight Zone and Lost.

Speaking of Lost, a DART to KETV in Omaha, NE, for comparing Flight 370 to the show and tweeting a photoshopped Lost poster to promote the station’s coverage. The backlash was so great the station was forced to apologize.

LAUREL to Deadspin for skewering an ill-advised lede on a CNN.com article about newly released photos from the scene of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s suicide 20 years ago. The offending lede quoted a line from the song “Come As You Are”—“And I swear that I don’t have a gun”—then said, “Despite the pledge in those lyrics that went around the world in the early 1990s, police in Seattle say that Kurt Cobain did have at least one gun.” Deadspin responded with nearly two dozen attempts at a worse opening, including: ” ‘Here we are now/Entertain us,’ Kurt Cobain once sang, but apparently we weren’t entertaining enough, because he shot himself.”

LAUREL to The New York Times for its detailed investigation into illegal immigration, which proved that the Obama administration is deporting immigrants at a record pace, and that most deportees aren’t hardened criminals, but people with minor infractions or no criminal record at all.

The Face of Bitcoin promised too much

Leah McGrath Goodman tells Felix Salmon this about her controversial Newsweek piece on the founder of Bitcoin:

“If I read my own story, it would not convince me,” she says. “I would have a lot of questions.”
And that sums up the problem with Newsweek’s piece claiming to out Satoshi Nakamoto: Newsweek, by its own admission, didn’t prove its assertion promised on its cover that this Satosh Nakamoto is the Satoshi Nakamoto.

Goodman has been taking the heat on this, and some of it is truly vile. Whatever else happens, the Goodman experience should be added to a growing file of cases demonstrating why the internet is a more hostile place for women journalists than their male counterparts.

But let’s be very clear: The Newsweek story is an editing problem, not a reporting problem.

Goodman’s reporting has held up fine thus far.

For what it’s worth, I think (and hope, actually) that Newsweek probably has its man. But I’m nowhere near 100 percent certain about it, much less 90 percent. And if you read Newsweek’s piece carefully, you can see the uncertainty is in there too:

Standing before me, eyes downcast, appeared to be the father of Bitcoin…

Of course, there is also THE CHANCE “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a pseudonym…

Calling the possibility her father could also be the father of Bitcoin “flabbergasting,”
While Goodman certainly lays out her case for it, nowhere in the body of the piece does she say that Dorian Nakamoto is the founder of Bitcoin. It’s the headline on the cover that does that.

Even assuming Newsweek has Dorian Nakamoto’s disputed admission correct and there was no misunderstanding, it still wouldn’t have conclusive proof that he invented Bitcoin. But it’s the temptation of headline writers everywhere to overplay what you’ve got. That temptation is much stronger when you’re trying to make a splash with a magazine launch. In journalism, we talk about bulletproofing a story and this one certainly isn’t bulletproof, at least as presented.

As Felix said the other day, “the responsible thing to do, from Newsweek’s perspective, would have been to present a thesis, rather than a fact.”

In this case simply adding a question mark to the headline would have been the way to go, along with some more explicit hedging in the actual piece. The bitcoin/redditor types would still be outraged about even attempting to find Satoshi. But Newsweek wouldn’t have been asserting a fact it couldn’t conclusively prove.

The Newsweek/bitcoin affair shows how much more accountable news organizations are than they ever were before. In other eras, news organizations saw stories go sideways, but they always had huge advantages over people who might want to complain. Most of the complainants were obscure, and the news organizations were famous and let’s just say it helped to own the means of distribution. Getting a complaint publicized was always an uphill struggle. Now, a piece can be shouted down by sheer volume on Twitter, which can also pass along humorous and deeply skeptical line-by-line annotations on News Genius.

It’s worth pausing here to note that Bitcoin is not a case of grievous error, like Wen Ho Lee, which eventually came back to haunt The New York Times. So far, this is a case of a story not proved, at least to the satisfaction of many, and it may stay that way for some time.

But one thing we know for sure: The days of “trust us” journalism, for better or for worse (but mostly for better), are long gone.

The Satoshi Paradox

Newsweek out on a wire with a Bitcoin blockbuster

Newsweek wanted a scoop for its relaunch cover story, and boy did it deliver: it uncovered the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of bitcoin. Who then promptly came out and denied everything. Which means that one of the two is wrong: either Nakamoto is lying through his teeth, or Newsweek has made what is probably the biggest and most embarrassing blunder in its 81-year history.

But before we try to work out what the answer is, it’s important to separate out the various different questions:
Is Dorian Nakamoto the inventor of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto?
Do we, and/or Newsweek, have enough evidence to conclude, with certainty, that Dorian Nakamoto is the inventor of bitcoin?
Is it reasonable to believe that Dorian Nakamoto is the inventor of bitcoin?

My tentative answers to the three questions are “we don’t know”; no; and yes.
One way to look at this problem is to try to calculate probabilities, and do some kind of Bayesian analysis of the question, given that either Dorian is Satoshi, or he isn’t. (To make matters even more complicated, Dorian’s given name is, actually, Satoshi. But you know what I mean.) But here’s the problem: if you believe either of the two possibilities, you have to believe in a reasonably long series of improbable propositions. Call it the Satoshi Paradox: the probability that Dorian is Satoshi would seem to be very small, and the the probability that Dorian is not Satoshi would seem to be just as small — and yet, somehow, when you add the two probabilities together, the total needs to come to something close to 100%.

The place to start is the Newsweek article, which brooks no doubt about the matter, and which is told using all the power of narrative journalism. The author, Leah McGrath Goodman, has constructed her 4,700-word article as a case for the prosecution, taking us with her on her quest for evidence and ultimately trying to persuade us that there can be no doubt: Dorian is Satoshi.

Goodman adduces lots of evidence, starting with the crazy coincidence of Satoshi’s name. Dorian’s name is Satoshi Nakamoto. He is an accomplished engineer and mathematician: “brilliant”, according to his brother. He was happy to correspond with Goodman until she asked him about bitcoin — at which point he stopped replying to emails and even called the cops on her. Dorian’s brother even predicted his response to Goodman’s article: “He’ll deny everything. He’ll never admit to starting Bitcoin.”

Goodman says that Dorian, “for most of his life, has been preoccupied with the two things for which Bitcoin has now become known: money and secrecy”. He’s a libertarian, whose daughter says that he is “very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge”. He’s 64, which would help explain slightly old-fashioned aspects of Satoshi, like his use of reverse Polish notation and his worrying about saving disk space. And then there’s the smoking gun — the quote that he gave to Goodman when she arrived at his doorstep.

This fits exactly with what we know about Satoshi: that he was deeply involved in bitcoin at the beginning, but has had basically nothing to do with it in recent years. It’s well short of an outright confession, of course — but if you add up all of the circumstantial evidence, it’s pretty hard to believe that everything is some bizarre coincidence. Goodman has presented a lot of pieces of the puzzle — and they fit elegantly together, at least at first glance.

On the other hand, even within the article there are signs that it’s not as clear cut as all that. There’s Goodman’s admission, in the article, that she “plainly needed to talk to Satoshi Nakamoto face to face” — something she never really did, except for a few quick words spoken in front of police officers while he was trying to make her go away. Goodman also quotes Gavin Andresen, the person most publicly associated with the development of bitcoin, as saying that even in the early days, Satoshi “went to great lengths to protect his anonymity”. Which hardly squares with the thesis that he was using his real name.

Then there are the duff notes in the piece. “This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he’s living a pretty humble life.” That, supposedly, is a verbatim quote from a Temple City cop: it’s possible that a cop uttered those words, but that doesn’t stop them from sounding like very bad expository dialogue.

Remember that the pseudonym theory was not a mere theory, up until yesterday — it was almost universally accepted as the truth. In terms of Bayesian priors, you need very strong evidence to be persuaded that “Satoshi Nakamoto” is not a pseudonym. And this argument doesn’t even come close.

There’s also the whole question of Satoshi’s English, where Goodman can be seen placing a very hard thumb on the scales. Dorian’s English is not good: you can see that in his Amazon reviews, or in the letter he sent about a proposed Los Angeles rail project: “good secruity system against usage of rail as a get away means from the low income generated theives/criminals from area of east LA et. al must be also put in place regardless of the rail passage chosen.”

That kind of language can be seen too in Dorian’s email correspondence with Goodman: “I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders.” Goodman uses this as evidence for her case: she characterizes Satoshi’s original bitcoin proposal as being “somewhat stiffly written”. She also says, reading the original bitcoin paper, that “the punctuation in the proposal is also consistent with how Dorian S. Nakamoto writes, with double spaces after periods and other format quirks.”