Slipr

All startups require founders who are persistent as well as passionate, and the fact that any two people can bring the required sustained intensity to a shared enterprise is a minor miracle. That said, research suggests that longform science magazine startup Matter would be more likely to succeed if its founders included someone who wasn’t a dude.

I asked Bobbie Johnson, co-founder of Matter, whether there are any women in his founding team. Here’s the entirety of his response:

Hey Chris

No problem: this issue came up quite a few times over the last month.

The “leadership” is just the two of us, so I suppose the very, very short answer is no… but that doesn’t really tell you a lot since the sample size is so small and the limitations so specific.

The medium sized answer is that the writers and editors we have been talking to and working with are roughly split down the middle in terms of gender, as is the pool of advisors we’ve been talking to. You won’t get to see that until the product is launched, though.

The longer answer is that not only are we working with plenty of women, we’re also trying to make sure we keep our contributor base diverse in terms of ethnicity and nationality too. It’s all important when you’re trying to think about how to do things and tell stories well in ways that can bring people in. It’s definitely something that’s important to us.

The campaign has obviously gone very well, but if I have one element of disappointment it is that the video doesn’t accurately reflect that part of what we’re doing — and, since we have had to answer this question a lot in various channels, it’s obviously an issue that we could have dealt with up front.

Still, the final product should send the right message — and until launch we are still on the lookout for great stories, wherever or whoever they come from.

B

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Update: Chris Unitt of Made Media has just posted an interesting — and orthogonal — take on this story.

A couple of days ago a Kickstarter to launch the new longform-only science magazine Matter popped up. Less than two days later, the project has already reached its goal of $50,000. In the meantime, I found myself intensely curious about the business model of Matter, because (I realize now, rightly) the project’s Kickstarter page did not include an explanation of how Matter will make money beyond this initial bolus of money.

Similar thoughts inspired Stephen Morse to write “Why I will not donate to this Kickstarter campaign that purports to save journalism and why you shouldn’t donate to it either.” It’s a systematic error of screed-writers (I’m one of them) to assume that a flaw in a project is inherent in it rather than in our perception of it, so rather than pile on I reached out to Bobbie Johnson directly.

“What’s your business model?” I asked. Here’s his response. I’ve highlighted the parts I find most interesting.

There are a few particular things we are going to keep under our hats because we think they’re going to be our secret to doing really well, but sharing the central part of it is something I’m happy to do — not least because, frankly, it’s not rocket science.

We’re going to sell the stories and a small, discreet amount of advertising. Stories will be available as e-books, on tablets, and maybe apps later on if it makes sense. The stories also live on the web behind a wall for a short period, before going out into the free world when our right to exclusivity with the writer ends.

That’s it.

It’s not crazy: The Byliner and The Atavist have blazed a trail to some degree. There are plenty of others looking at this space in the same way. And we think if we can get the economics all in the right place, and build out now — rather than wait until it’s so blindingly obvious that everyone and their brother’s doing it — we can bring in enough revenue to remain afloat.

Now, of course the basic contradiction is obviously the cost of production versus the amount of income you can claw back. Stories need to bring in more money than they cost us. And sure: big, investigative pieces cost money. But in fact, if you choose the right people and the right investigations, you can get enough hits to keep you in the hunt.

Through the research and intelligence we’ve gathered we have a very good idea on what we think strong, timely, well-written stories sold in the right places (Kindle Singles, ibooks, etc) will do. We have worked hard to bring the costs of producing stories down. That’s made easier by the fact that, say, we don’t have legacy infrastructure to service, we have a very focused amount of output, we don’t have an existing print business to compete against (like many magazines and their websites), we hire writers and editors in small teams on a project-by-project basis, and we pay competitive — but not insane — rates. Plus we don’t plan on pulling a salary unless it’s highly successful.

Including all of our extras, legal bills and so on, we think we’ve brought our unit costs down to a point where MATTER can wash its face by selling a reasonable amount of stories. And we think over time the market is going to grow larger, giving us the chance to pull some extra levers… all of which makes doing it now a smart move.

To be honest, that’s it. There’s nothing more complicated than working really hard to know the market and understand where we can find efficiencies in production… and then actually trying.

Of course, it’s no surprise that people are going to take potshots. But they’re mainly based around a set of false assumptions. We don’t think it’s going to be a mainstream smash; we don’t think it’s going to change the world; we don’t think we’re going to out New Yorker the New Yorker; we don’t think we’re going to be billionaires. But we do think, done right, we can offer something valuable and remain sustainable in the medium term.

The other big error is mistaking the Kickstarter appeal with an investment pitch. Going on KS was not meant to be a validation of our business model: we’ve done plenty of that with the smart business people we’ve spoken to. It was meant to be a litmus test, for ourselves, of whether there was appetite in the market for what we want to do. I think we’ve proven that point well enough.

We’ve spent thousands making a slick video to sell snake oil? No. We just realised that success on Kickstarter takes some hard work and a coherent campaign that doesn’t waste time banging on about business model shit when what people really want is to get a feeling of what they’re buying into.

That’s not scamming anyone, that’s not being too slick: that’s knowing your audience… which, frankly, is what this whole endeavour is about.

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The world uses 85 million barrels a day.

At 42 gallons to the barrel, that’s three billion, five hundred and seventy million gallons of oil (3,570,000,000).

Niagara falls has a flow rate of 150,000 U.S. gallons per second.

3,570,000,000 of oil / 150,000 gallons per second = 23,800 seconds of flow equivalent.

In other words, if by some horrific means you were able to replace the flow over niagara falls with nothing but oil for 6.6 hours a day, that’s how much oil the 6 billion inhabitants of the earth burn every single day of every year, and have been for more or less the past ten years.

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Spotted in Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: a transcultural neuroimaging approach

Abstract:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

Of note:

By comparing cognitive functions in people from Western (European and American) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera) cultures, the ‘culture-and-cognition’ approach104 demonstrates that different sociocultural systems give rise to dissimilar thought styles. Westerners generally think in an analytical way, whereas East Asians generally think in a more holistic manner5, 7. For instance, during a perception task, Americans were better at detecting changes in salient objects than East Asians, and were less affected by contextual information24, 26, 27.

Cultural differences are also evident in social cognition. In a game that involved two individuals interacting, Chinese participants were more in tune with their partner’s perspective than Americans105. Furthermore, Chinese people were more likely to describe memories of social and historical events and focused more on social interactions, whereas European Americans more frequently focused on memories of personal experiences and emphasized their personal roles in events106. Westerners were better at remembering trait words that they associated with themselves than they were at remembering words that they associated with people close to them84, 107, whereas Chinese people remembered both equally well108. Americans tended to explain behaviours in terms of peoples’ dispositions (for example, a person’s gender and education), whereas East Asians showed a preference for attributing behaviour to situational factors (for example, environmental events)9, 109 and were more likely to use situational information to predict other people’s behaviour110. Chinese people endorsed contextual explanations of physical events (for example, friction influencing the movement of an object) more often than Americans, who were more likely to attribute physical events to dispositional factors (for example, an object’s weight or composition)111.

Culture also influences category-based classification of objects: Chinese people organized objects in a more relational (for example, to group a monkey and a banana together because monkeys eat bananas) and less categorical (for example, to group a monkey and a panda together because both are animals) way than European Americans7, 112. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the diversity of multiple-level cognitive processes across cultures and the dependence of human cognition on sociocultural contexts.

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“Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.”

My Genome, My Self — NYTimes Magazine

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• People will eventually pay for content, one way or another. They already do, in some places (WSJ, Cooks Illustrated, etc.)
• Many people say that whatever is coming next isn’t here yet – I disagree. I know individuals who are building entire (nascent) media brands on little more than sweat equity – without anyone noticing, some bloggers have begun, as their revenue streams have expanded, to turn into actual reporters – ecogeek.org is a good example.
• Charity is probably not the answer, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its place. (e.g. Spot.us) For-profit businesses, by definition, are capable of expanding, even thriving; charities are inherently self-limiting (or limited by the availability of those kinds of funds).
• Things seem bad now, but remember, advertisers still want to reach audiences, and they’ll do it one way or another. This terrible advertising market will bottom out — and whoever is left standing will reap the benefits when it finally recovers.

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