That New York Times Profile

As some of you might have seen, this past weekend, the NY Times ran a very nice profile about me, written by Kashmir Hill. There's not much to say about it, other than it was an interesting (if somewhat awkward-feeling) experience to be the subject of a story, rather than the journalist covering it. But Hill is an excellent reporter and spoke to a bunch of different folks for the profile (including one who kindly called me in a panic to alert me that the NY Times was sniffing around" for what they feared was a hit piece).

Whenever tech policy news breaks I always want to see what Mike's take is going to be," said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, has called him insightful and reasonable." The tech entrepreneur Anil Dash said he shows up and ships every day" and has been filing constantly for decades on a beat that is thankless."

Anyway, I thought regular Techdirt readers might enjoy reading it. I'll just note a few bits that I found amusing. First, I'm going to make use of this description any time anyone asks me what I do for a living, since I've always struggled with that question:

The best way to describe how he makes a living is as an intellectual gig worker, equal parts business owner, tech journalist, policy analyst, research fellow and game designer.

This description is also fun and would go on my business cards if I still had them:

an outsider whom insiders read..."

Finally, Hill (gently) mocks Techdirt's design:

What Mr. Masnick apparently hasn't had time for is a redesign of his blog. A wall of text, heavy on hyperlinks, it has not evolved much since its founding.

Which... fair enough. Some day, perhaps, we'll update the site to make it a bit more modern, though it would help if companies and policy makers just stopped doing so much stupid stuff for just a little while to let us catch our breath. (But also, every time we mention updating the site, we get comments from people afraid that we're going to destroy it and take away the blog format - that's unlikely to happen. We like the old school blog setup, and changes would be more about improving the site and modernizing it around the edges, rather than the entire concept - and have no fear: we won't fill every page with unnecessary images or pivot to video or anything like that).

Anyway, if you hadn't yet seen it, figured we'd share it here.