Will the things we wrote today sound as good tomorrow?
A conversation with journalist and blogger Clive Thompson
“I’m sort of a blogger who, as a side hustle, does magazine pieces and books.”
Case study assignment
I began what younger folks are now calling a “micro-retirement” late last year and found myself wanting to keep moving and learning, so I found my way into a community college to study “Podcasting, Digital Media & Journalism”. If you are curious at all about making career changes later in life, you can refer to my newsletter for more on that.
As part of the adult learning course journalism assignment, a writer case study was needed and I reached out to Clive Thompson, the Canadian freelance journalist, blogger, science and technology writer for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Smithsonian and other publications. Clive is the author of a couple of books, one I particularly loved, “Smarter Than You Think” and most recently, “Coders”.
Clive is a raconteur and is one of my favorite people on the Internet. We have interacted many times over the years on the old version of Twitter and more recently on Bluesky social network. I was delighted when he agreed to talk over Zoom and take some questions on his work as a journalist.
The thing with Clive’s writing over his career is I have always learned something from it, in whatever medium he publishes in. He has this wonderful curious lens he looks through in his work which provides excellent additional historical context, delivered in a humorous manner. I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time, and there’s so many articles that are memorable, but here are just a few examples, I loved his description on the invention of the Walkman for the Smithsonian, The Walkman’s Invention 40 Years Ago Launched a Cultural Revolution where he wrote:
“What was the allure? The sudden portability of gorgeous, head-filling sound. Previously, if you wanted to hear hi-fi music on headphones, you were stuck tethered to a home stereo. The Walkman unmoored you. Now you could walk down the street, and the music altered the very experience of looking at the world. Everything — the pulsing of traffic, the drift of snowflakes, passers wandering by on the sidewalk — seemed laden with new meaning”
In his piece How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever on how technology has impacted music in the past and reminded us of the example of the Phonograph, he explained:
“A confusing time, to be sure. But it’s certainly no more confusing than the upheaval that greeted a much older music technology: the phonograph. Back in the 19th century, it caused fights and joy too — as it forever transformed the face of music.”
But some of his most witty writing is when he broaches the subject of modern productivity. He has tapped into the subject more than once over the years for Wired:
and in blogs, and those pieces are so relatable.
He never fails to make me smile as I nod my head in agreement as I read further examples like this from How To Practice “Productive Procrastination”
“There may exist, somewhere, writers who do not procrastinate at all — who never poke around on Wikipedia or social media or Youtube instead of working. But holy moses, I’ve never met one. Every other writer of my acquaintance has the same issues. We all dawdle, delay the beginning of research, and postpone the dreaded act of actually typing sentences until a deadline growls behind us like a spectral wolf.”
Time to Zoom
We met up on Zoom, and after some catching up and discussing other features and profiles he has written including a wonderful Wired piece on Arduino called Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
we got back on track and reverted to the subject of my assignment and the reason for the call, it is easy to get sidetracked when in conversation with Clive, he’s fascinating company and super fun to talk to. I am trying not to barrage him with questions while attempting to remain somewhat coherent and contain my excitement. I mentioned to him that I had read in a recent Reuters report, a survey of 95,000 people, that only 40% responded saying that they trust most news… most of the time. Reading those numbers out loud, I asked him what does it feel like being a science and technology journalist in 2025?
To which he replied:
“Watching trust in major institutions — including journalism — erode over the last 20 years, has obviously been a little unsettling, because I’m a writer, and I’m trying to get people to be interested in, and learn from, what I write. So they have to trust it in the first place. It’s a prerequisite to them learning from it. Right? Because if they don’t trust it, they’re not going to learn from it.”
Clive elaborated further,
“On the one side, the erosion of trust is very unsettling, because I’m aware that a chunk of it — I’m not going to make percentages here, but, like, a nontrivial chunk of that erosion of trust — has been a political project. Right? It’s been literally the active project of a lot of reactionary and alt-right forces to basically say, ‘we want to de-legitimize daily journalism.’ That’s not the only reason people have lost trust in journalism. Media itself is to blame — it hasn’t reacted well to the shifts in the way people learn about things, the way that they explore them on their own.”
The forever curious journalist continued to explain why this mistrust intrigues him at the same time, saying:
“There’s like eight or nine reasons why that lack of trust has emerged … and while it’s distressing to me, it’s also been fascinating, because I’m a science journalist. I’m kind of interested in how this happened! And I’m also kind of interested in.. well, what do you do about it? Because if you want to be a reporter and a writer — and help find things that you think would be useful for people — then you need to grapple with the trust question.”
“So where did a large number, not all, but a large number of journalism places sort of fail to understand the way that people’s habits of mind and their habits of reading and viewing were changing? How do they fail to track that and what could they do about it? It really does get damn interesting.”
The Times They Are a-Changin’
We continued our conversation, talking about the disrupting influence of technology and the changes it brings, and one of his passion projects of online independent blogging. Knowing the kind of technology reporter he is I would expect no less from him, but he once scraped all of his online work for publications to try figure out his word count online in his articles which turned out to be many millions of words! He jokes,
“I mean, I’ve written 2 books and I’ve written scores and scores of, you know, these 5,000 word magazine articles. And if you total them up you’re talking 100 and 100 of thousands of words. But that’s dwarfed by the millions of words that I blogged over about 12 or 13 years at Collision Detection, and then, like, 10 years now on and off at Medium, and now my newsletter.”
He was referring to his “Linkfest” newsletter on Buttondown where he shares all sorts of wonderful curiosities from around the Web.
Thinking out loud
Clive went on to explain how much he learned from communicating online in the early days of the Internet and about what it is that helps people trust you. He has encountered distrustful audiences that he inevitably has won over, when he started piping up and interacting back in early online forums and when people communicated a lot in instant messenger. Also, even though he answered the question on being a journalist in 2025, he was still ruminating on the trust problem, something he has been observing since the very beginning of sort of indie media online, blogging as it emerges around 2000.
“it became clear to me though, that as I hung out in the discussion forums for months and sort of read them and talked to them, that one of the things that made them go, oh,.. I actually can I can trust this guy was that I had been at that point in time for 4 or 5 years blogging, and you could just see this massive record of me sort of talking out loud and thinking about things, thinking out loud and interacting with people that showed up in my comment things. And that sort of gave them the sense of, ..oh, yes… this is a person who can be spoken to and who can be reasoned with. And that was really interesting because, they regarded the New York Times as a suspicious authority, but they regarded a blog as a mark of authenticity.”
That led to another of the questions that I had for him, because one of the things I always admired about his writing so much was that clarity of thought that comes across as you’re reading down through this articles whatever the subject matter is. I asked him about his historical context he always puts in and his thinking out loud, I wondered, if he had any advice for honing that internal editor? While I had that trail of thought, I also asked about if he felt precious about his writing and how many iterations of a post would he actually go through to call it finished? (This is what happens when you meet up with someone so interesting, it’s like a jolt of caffeine, stimulating and firing synapses.)
Clive, Are you always still going back saying, I wonder could I make that better? Or once it’s done, do you let it go? He chuckled,
“I mean, I think I’ve definitely learned to let it go after a certain point of time, partly because I need to finish the piece so I can move on and write more to make money! And also with blogging the idea was always, well … this is always a little provisional. I’m going to sort of write this to be entertaining and informative and as correct as I can make it. But you know, this isn’t the last thing I say on this. I’m probably going to post about this over and over again. So that kind of makes it a little easier to sort of feel that I don’t have to write the perfect polished gem?”
Writing advice
I can relate to that and I have often fallen into that same cycle when blogging about wider music subjects especially and when I am trying to convey every single thought in my mind and additional references, to the point where something that may have been articulate early on ..simply disintegrates into kind of a meandering brain dump that stays as a draft, destined to not to see the light of day.
“I noticed I had a problem, early on in my writing, that I think a lot of writers struggle with — which is that, when you’re first starting out writing, you’re thinking, “this is the only thing I’m gonna do on the subject! And so it has to be perfect, and it has to be totalizing! Everything I think about the subject has to be in here!” But what you wind up with is like essentially an insane manifesto, right? It’s unreadable. It’s like modem noise. It’s unparsable. And what I learned, over time, is that there are big areas in general I’m interested in, and I’m gonna pursue these things for a long time over many, many years …decades! I’ll write many piece about each subject. I don’t have to fit everything into one piece. It makes it easier to do each individual salvo”
That made so much sense to me and it was very re-assuring to hear this from someone at his level, he continued:
“There’s also differences. I mean, like, when I’m writing for a piece of industrial media, they have a lot of processes to work and polish it. I have a word count limit because it’s on dead trees. And so that imposes concision that’s not there with a blog post where I’m like I can kinda go until the thoughts complete.”
The Magazine Editor relationship
Writing for the different publications with various word count limits and different styles, I wondered if Clive had a different relationship with those editors from each of those publications or how does it feel?
“Right, Yes, they all have different styles because the things that each magazine does, they have a little bit of an internal style and focus. They have different audiences. Wired is a nerdier one. Mother Jones is more political. The New York Times Magazine is more like, well, anyone on the planet has to be able to read this. So it has to be written for the broadest possible audience. And Smithsonian, you can definitely go deeper into history because it’s a history magazine.”
“That said, with magazines, they all have certain commonalities — which is that with a magazine piece, you’re working for many, many months on a few thousand words. In contrast, with a blog post I might write a few thousand words in a single sit-down. And the way you gather information for a magazine piece is really different from how you gather it for a blog post or daily news article. If I were writing a news article or a blog post, I might spend two days gathering a bunch of information, and then I’m gonna give you 70% of what I’ve learned. But with a magazine article you gather 100X of your info and you use a tiny amount, like only 3X. Most is never in there. Magazine pieces are much more tightly crafted. You’re gathering not just ‘a bunch of interesting facts’, but the most impressive interesting fact. Not just ‘a bunch of snippets from the life of someone you’re profiling’, but the most interesting, revealing ones.”
Mentors?
I asked Clive if there were mentors along the way, or is that internal editing skill something that he just continually worked on and developed by himself or if there were influences on it? I was interested to hear more about finding that inner voice and honing a skill that he utilizes so well, and he explained:
“I wish I’d had more mentors! I wish I’d actually reached out to more people. I think I had this idea that “I should know how to do this on my own”. That was wrong. That said, I definitely had a lot of key editors along the way who were amazing at helping show me — through their editing — a better way to organize or think about a piece, or how to ask questions that I wouldn’t have thought of. Editors also taught me how to see the big picture. When you’re in the middle of reporting a piece, you get obsessed with interrogating all these edge cases that don’t matter to the reader. The editors would help me see things from the readers’ perspective, so I wouldn’t get trapped in the local minima of my particular obsessions.”
He thought further for a second, I mean.. literally a second and before I could get another question in, he added
“Pretty much every magazine I’ve written for has had an editor I’ve written for who has been amazing in this regard.”
and Clive continued,
“I’ve also learned a lot from other writers. Magazine writing is really just a weird craft. There’s not a lot of people that do it full time, because it’s hard to make a living at it. So we sort of know each other, and sometimes we’ll trade stories of how we’ve done stuff. And this is one of the other fun things about magazine writing.”
Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Our conversation continued at this snappy cadence, and we spoke about print media and something I wasn’t aware of regarding the fact checking process. Clive began to describe the fact checking process which people don’t understand or are just unaware of how awesome it is. This also comes back to the point about trust that we discussed earlier and how industrial media, organizations don’t talk about their processes openly. I felt he wasn’t finished on the particular subject yet:
“What I love about magazine writing is they give you a lot of time to distill it and craft it. That’s why a magazine piece feels like a nice rich sausage, with lots of stuff in it.”
This is his type of phraseology that has me grinning at this point, you can clearly see how much he enjoys his craft and he shared more about his writing,
“Whereas with a blog post that I write, you can kind of read through it a little faster, and that’s kind of cool. But the thing is, a paper magazine article has a style that’s very different from a blog post, very different from a news article, and very different from a book. It’s a really unique form.”
Clive is beginning to fully get into the rhythm of conversation mode, and begins to distill the critical details of the fact checking process almost on a single breath,
“Print magazines in the US are the only media on the planet, as far as I’m aware — including books, including documentaries — that have a fact-checking process. When I finish an article for Wired or the New York Times Magazine or MIT Tech Review or Smithsonian, they edit it — and we’re going back and forth and trying to make it as good as possible. When that’s all done, when we are both equally happy with it (or as I like to joke, equally unhappy with it) then they give it to a fact checker. Sometimes the checker is on staff, and sometimes it’s a freelancer. And I have to give that fact checker the contact information for everyone that I spoke to.”
He continues to elucidate the details of this intense scrutiny,
“I also go through the entire piece — like, a 5,000 word article — sentence by sentence, and I annotate it to tell the fact-checker where I got every fact or assertion. If there’s multiple facts in a single sentence, I’ll explain where I got each one. I’ll show them each document, each URL, each interview. Then the fact-checkers spend days — or weeks — going through and verifying for themselves every single factual assertion in the piece. If I’ve said “this thing happened in this year” or “this quantity is this”, they go to that document, they look at it, they make sure I got it right. They email back all of the people that I interviewed and say, “we have you saying this. Is this correct?”
“And when the checkers are done, they come back to me and the editor to explain everything they’ve found — everything I got wrong. Or sometimes I won’t be that I got it outright wrong, but they think the sentence’s assertion needs to be slightly rephrased. Like they’re “yeah, this is mostly correct, but I think you’ve sort of left this out.”
Building trust from fact-checking
“And it’s amazing! It’s just this wonderful process that catches all these problems. It feels so wonderful to go through that. And at the end of it, you’re like, damn, this article is more rock solid than I could ever make it on my own.
It makes me feel really terrified when I write a book, because book publishers don’t do this. They don’t have their own teams of fact-checkers. So I wind up hiring — with my own money — a team of five fact-checkers to fact check my own books. Because here’s the thing: I know that even if I am working with absolute, purest motivations to try and get this stuff right, and to be fair to everyone and all sides of an issue that I’m writing about; and if I work incredibly hard, and I take careful notes; I still know that errors can easily creep in. That’s for a bunch of reasons. Maybe I read something and I failed to understand it. Or maybe I understood it perfectly well, but I described it poorly. Or maybe in the process of editing, we’re truncating something and in rewriting it, we screw up something that was previously correct.”
The due diligence is one thing but hiring your own fact checkers? Wow, that was a bit of a revelation for me, but then again, …the more I thought on it, this is actually what I expect from Clive and it makes total sense.
“If you don’t have this fact-checking process, in a magazine piece or a book, those errors will be in there. And so this connects back to the trust issue. I’m always telling the editors of these magazines, “we should be describing and illustrating, to our readers, how this fact-checking process works!” Because it’s incredibly impressive. I tell people I’m interviewing how the whole process works, I tell them — “before we go to press, a checker is going to contact you to make sure how I’ve described your work and your ideas is accurate.” And they’re like, “what? You’re going to do what?” They’re blown away. Because again, nobody but American glossy magazines does this. And they wind up actually being big fans of the publication. They understand how that process works and how valuable it is.”
“So I’ll tell the editors of these magazines — “guys, you should have videos showing off the fact-checking process. Have videos talking to the fact checkers and going over this stuff. It would be fun and interesting to see! And this is trust-building.”
The joy of career learning
His passion for details is just one of things that make him such a talented writer and I got the brief opportunity to pop in with another question about his research.
So, Clive..to me, when I read your writing I get the feeling that the research is as enjoyable to you as is the actual writing, would that be fair?
“Absolutely. And I love the feeling of discovery, when I hit upon something new through my research … It could be a story. It could be a piece of research where I’m like, “Oh my god. I’m gonna get to share this with the rest of the world!” It’s an incredibly pleasant feeling.”
I know from what Clive terms “ambient awareness” in his book “Smarter than you Think”, which is social connections we develop with each other via short-form status updates on our social network activity, that he does indeed get a kick out of sharing interesting facts and anecdotes ..there are so many examples in his social media timeline and in his newsletter too.
“One downside of my career is that I’ve always been a freelancer — I’ve never been on staff anywhere — so every year, I don’t know where my next check is coming from. I mean, I hope I’m gonna make the amount I need to make! So that’s the downside. The upside is, I only really write when there’s something I absolutely am in a lather about.”
“And I always feel like I’m learning something new. And over my career, several times I’ve been able identify a whole new area swimming into view — and then go and learn about it, get paid to learn about it. It was technology and social media and chip design in the nineties and early aughts. In the tens, it was the sort of massive civic impacts of social media. When I wrote Coders, I dove really deeply into computer languages and their authors, and I sort of did a lot more programming myself. And now I’m writing more about energy and mobility and the clean energy transition.”
“And of course, A.I. went absolutely nuts. I’ve been writing about that since the nineties, but you could say I’m now on my second big wave of it. And today’s AI has a new style — it does new things, which I’ve had to learn about.”
Probably good to point out that this interview took place before the news and calamity around A.I, OpenAI and Deepseek broke.
The next chapter
Clive is a keen cyclist and went on to talk about his new book,
“My next book is a memoir of me cycling across the entire United States, from coast to coast — and using that as a framework to think about this question: To what extent could America actually scale back a little bit on its use of cars for every single purpose? How much could we actually decarbonize the way we move around — by shifting to more walking, more public transportation, more cycling, more those crazy unicycles, or whatever it is. So this required a huge amount of now learning about how suburbs got designed, and the history of cars and the history of bicycles themselves. It’s been just incredibly fun to be able to dive in and learn this stuff.”
And that comes back my points about his writing, his enthusiasm and curiosity for learning are infectious. It jumps off the page when he’s excited, just giddy as a goose to share what he’s found, and this resonates with people. I felt I was almost gushing at this point, but I was just glad I hadn’t overdone on my coffee intake that day and was keeping up. I referred back to another of his magazine articles that I loved, which was on the “to do list” in the Wired piece Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done — and We Still Don’t
“It’s one of my top five favorite pieces I’ve written in my whole life! That’s because it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about for 20 years — and kind of biting off little chunks of it. So it was wonderful to be able to dive deeply into this area that’s part technology, part human nature, part philosophy — and part these big questions about, “what does it mean to be productive? What does it mean to live a good life?” It was fun to be able to weave all that together, while also doing another thing I love, which is talking to inventors — entrepreneurs who have built some crazy new tool. I love talking to people who have made something interesting. And so I got to call all these founders of these companies who had written the code themselves and wrestled with this problem of, like, how do you make a to-do list? And then realizing: “I’m not sure anyone’s actually getting done with my software”.
Getting distracted by the shiny things
Speaking of software, I asked if he was familiar with Obsidian which is another of the modern writing apps, which has some nifty features but sometimes it can be distracting with some of those same features.
“Of course! I think it’s really cool. I recently started using Obsidian for a new project, and now I’m like deep up the butt of all the customizations people have written. I’m, like, “oh, I could add this! And then I started wondering, how do you write a customization?” Eventually I’m like, “okay, am I doing any work on the actual assignment that I’m supposed to be using Obsidian to write?” No, I’m just yak shaving.”
Life long learning
It was encouraging and inspiring to hear Clive continue to talk so passionately about his craft, which he considers he is still working on. This is helpful for young and old writers, bloggers, journalists to hear. He mentions about his drive to continue to keep moving and learning,
“You know that 10,000 hour thing? Where you have to do 10,000 hours before you get really good at something? Well, in magazine writing, you write so infrequently at the start of your career that I don’t think you get your 10,000 hours until you’re in your forties or fifties. And even then, you’re still learning! I’m in my 50s now, and I’m still learning. I’m working on a new idea for a piece for the New York Times Magazine right now, and I feel like I’m still figuring out how to do this! But that’s not bad. That’s good. It’s good to be honing your skill 30 years into your career.”
“One of the things I loved about talking to software developers it’s theoretically a white collar job, but they have a passion for learning new things. In their jobs, software coders will work with these very old frameworks — because they’re very stable. But then they’ll go home and they’ll spend hours learning some crazy new technique in Rust, because “I wanna write a modern memory-safe language.”I think I said this in my book, but I don’t think accountants go home and do more accounting in the evening just for fun.”
Originally, I was just going to write up my case study assignment and hand in it, but because Clive shared so much great content and advice in the conversation that I thought this would be helpful information for any online journalists/bloggers at all stages in their writing. Also, the fact that Clive is a great advocate for the open Web and blogging, the interview needed to be made accessible even if people struggle to find human written pieces through modern search engines, which is another subject that we touched about in the second part of the interview because Clive wasn’t finished just yet. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
You can sign up to Clive’s linkfest newsletter or follow him here on Medium or on Bluesky. And if you are interested in reading more from the next part of our conversation, please leave a comment below.
