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

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.

The promise of 3-D printing is that we can generate any arbitrary shape at the push of a button, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that auto-generating any arbitrary 3-D shape is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.

The United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth.

Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S.

This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency…

…But biology happens for the precise reason that utopian nanotech can’t: The world of the ultrasmall is astonishingly violent. The surfaces of objects turn out to be seething frenzies of motion — atoms vibrating thousands of times a second, bonds forming and breaking. This energetic mess is what powers cellular machinery — but it blows apart anything humans engineer to do the same job.

The original draft of this story included a discussion of Cooper’s Law, Shannon’s limit and the fact that 3/4 of a circle’s area lies outside an area delimited by half its radius. All of which explain why AT&T isn’t crazy to ask you to pay an extra $150 to make your smartphone’s 3G radio achieve data throughput better than a local WiFi network. But that was a bit much for a piece of this scale.

The real story here is Skyhook. They had a fleet of vans cruising the streets of the U.S., mapping wi-fi hotspots, back when Street View was just a glimmer in Sergey’s eye. Now they’re in every iPhone on the planet.

Worse: our food system is so dependent on fossil fuels that it’s entirely possible that it takes more oil to make the food that allows a person to walk a mile than would be expended in simply driving that mile.

This isn’t a result I expected when I started playing with the numbers, so it’s an object lesson in why it’s important to do the math.

Good’s editors came up with the idea for this one. It’s an interesting take on the problem of fuel efficiency – we all know smaller, lighter cars and the electrification of the drive train are the ultimate solution, but a certain amount of waste is inevitable. So: how can we recover it?

Sometimes a researcher is willing to talk about their work even before it’s peer reviewed. This can be tricky: whatever you think of peer review, papers are almost always better after experts have read them and demanded that they be revised. In this case I think it turned out all right, because Elliott is an especially smart scientist, and also I managed to catch him right after he’d presented his work at a meeting to 30 of the most knowledgeable researchers in his field.

There has been a lot of speculation about why Steve Jobs thinks the A4 chip at the heart of the iPad is so special. This piece is more of the same, but it comes from better-informed sources.

It’s weird that I had to be sitting in a conference room at NCAR to find this out. You would think it would be news! Just goes to show how little even the journalists who cover this beat really understand the consequences of increasing earth’s radiative forcing even just a little.

I really hope this works out. Because the last audacious technology project I covered – the Iceland Deep Drilling Project – didn’t.

Credit is due to Tom Halfhill on this one, who despite being mentioned only once in the piece, has written thousands of words about the Loongson processor and even traveled to China to really break this story open for Microprocessor Report. His insight was invaluable and there is probably no one else in the West who has thought as much about what a homegrown family of MIPS-compatible CPUs could lead to – especially when it’s backed by the full might of the Chinese government.

If you live in California or Arizona and you have a south-facing roof, there is a startup – possibly even startups – who would like to meet you. Their goal is simple: stick solar panels on your roof at no cost (or virtually no cost) to you. Really.