Linked List: February 22, 2024

Thursday, 22 February 2024

Yahoo Lays Off the Leaders of Engadget 

Mia Sato, reporting for The Verge:

Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

As part of the layoffs, editor-in-chief Dana Wollman is out, according to posts on X, as is managing editor Terrence O’Brien. People with knowledge of the situation say that there are no plans to replace Wollman.

“[The changes] will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity, and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers,” Sarah Priestley, who is listed as Engadget’s general manager on its masthead, wrote in a memo shared by Max Tani at Semafor.

That memo contains this gem of a sentence (boldface emphasis from original):

I am reaching out today to share that we’re making changes to our organization, which will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers.

The sort of executive who calls what their own publication creates “content” is exactly the sort of asshole who thinks talented editors and writers can be laid off while increasing “velocity” and the quality of the work. I predict the next time Engadget is in the news will be when they’re caught in a Sports-Illustrated-esque AI-generated content (there, content is apt) fiasco.

A great brand and publication laid to waste. That’s the Yahoo way.

Apple Sports and Lock Screen Live Activities 

Yesterday, in my piece on the new Apple Sports app, I wrote:

Live activities for your lock screen are available, but Sports doesn’t — yet — offer any Home Screen widgets.

A bunch of readers emailed to ask how to get Live Activities from Sports. Turns out, it’s not the new Sports app that provides them, it’s the existing TV app (which has offered them since last year in iOS 16). So if you want to follow a particular game from your lock screen, from the card in Sports for that game, you tap “Open in Apple TV”, and there you can tap “Follow Live”.

That’s a bit convoluted, really. But it wasn’t clear to me at all yesterday that you couldn’t initiate a Live Activity directly in Sports, because at the time I was writing, there weren’t any live sporting events.

(Also: I wondered yesterday why Journal is built-into iOS 17 but Sports is only available from the App Store. The obvious answer is that for the time being, Sports is only available in the US, Canada, and the UK.)

Apple Sports Is Eddy Cue’s Baby 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

It turns out that those scores, fed from Apple to the TV app and the Apple TV and a few select other places, are from a data source that Eddy Cue also cares about a lot. He’s been pushing it to be as close to real time as is technologically possible, right down to watching his phone and comparing it to the scoreboard at a Warriors game. And now that data source is driving Apple’s latest app, a free iPhone app called Apple Sports, which is debuting today.

“I just want to get the damn score of the game,” Cue says. “And it’s really hard to do, because it seems like it’s nobody’s core [feature].” In a sports data world increasingly driven by fantasy and betting, Apple’s not trying to build an adjunct to some other app business model. [...]

“We said, ‘We’re going to make the best scores app that you could possibly make,’” Cue said.

I love the idea of Cue personally field-testing the app while in development courtside at Warriors games. “I just want to get the damn score of the game” and “We’re going to make the best scores app that you could possibly make” are downright Jobsian in their clarity, and in the fact that they’re driven simply by the notion of making a good, fun, simple, fast app that is highly focused in scope.

Remember the story about Jobs and iDVD? I feel like Apple Sports is a lot like that:

Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”