@reckless.bsky.social, I have always had a lot of respect for you personally and what you do, but this is piece-of-shit slop. You should be embarrassed. I'm canceling our subscription.

bad lapse in judgment. saw him defending a lot of the articles's choices elsewhere, and really revising my opinion of a couple things RE the verge now.

yup. I am not saying this is bad journalism, I'm saying this is piece-of-shit behavior that is also bad journalism, and doesn't surprise me from the author - but does surprise me from somebody as generally thoughtful as he is

completely agreed

I am happy to entertain substantive criticism but so far all I’ve heard is irritation that we even profiled the subject

Here's substantive criticism- Will Stancil took your mans on a ride-along with the understanding that you would be covering the situation in Minneapolis and instead you put out a story about how Will Stancil is annoying according to people you anonymized and kept out of the piece.

This isn't a profile in courage and it isn't even a serious discussion with or about Will. It is gossip-column shit for Bluesky that's occupying space that could have been taken up by a more worthy article.

You, of course, will not listen to this, because you published it and are now in siege mode, but I'd advise you- please do. If you want The Verge to be a good, newsworthy publication it needs to aspire to do more than play stenographer to a DSA splinter group's Signal chat.

And McDonalds serves salads alongside the McDoubleBypass Burger, that doesn't make the burger health food suddenly.

Like, the issue isn't even with the fact you did a profile on Will Stancil, it's that you did it in a perfidious manner in the name of publishing some mean-girl gossip piece about him. It's yellow journalist shit, and the fact yellow journals could run good articles didn't redeem their misdeeds.

This is gossipy stuff, that implies maybe what Stancil is trying to do and bring attention to isn’t that serious, and we have time to talk about whether he annoys people, undermines your other coverage though. That’s what people are trying to tell you. It’s also just jerky behavior.

Like why? In a time when we desperately need to come together why is this shit helpful or necessary or informative? My God I hope we’re all getting tired of people being jerks to each other.

'our' is doing a lot of work here, post your own articles if you want to appeal to the good work you're doing

Congrats on polarizing people against your coverage.

well then why didn't you do this one like all those?

Remember that part in Bowling for Columbine where the guy tries to return the K-Mart bullets lodged in his spine, and a K-Mart PR flack comes out and thanks the young man in a wheelchair for being a K-Mart shopper? Because I sure do.

This is the excuse you're going with. Really.