Newsletters Archives - Page 2 of 3

How To Cope With Shortages

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the one from Tuesday, May 4, 2021. If you’d like the email version, sign up here!

Last week, Catherine and I had a multi-hour, intense Pipe Wrench Zoom call that clarified things that had been unclear, put some longer-range ideas on the back burner, and made concrete things that had been inchoate. We’d both been carrying around more stress than we’d wanted; now we’re not. It was productive and exciting and useful, and we were both so physically wiped and addled the next day that Catherine thought she had a hangover and I wondered if I’d had a stroke.

That said, here’s a story about a dog.

Hey, Stranger

(PS: We Love You)

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the one from Tuesday, April 27, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

My laptop makes a little knock-knock sound every time someone new subscribes to Pipe Wrench. “Who’s there?” I ask the coupla knockers. Sometimes it’s an old friend, sometimes it’s a new friend. More and more often, it’s a total stranger. Friends-to-be, you should know that whenever we happen to see a name we don’t recognize in one of our tech queues, our hearts flutter in unison. Pipe Wrench has several mottos, but one of the big ones is “We love strangers.”

You Can’t Control Feelings: A Bulleted List

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the one from Tuesday, April 20, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Oh, did we tell you? We published a magazine last week.

If you’ve also been thinking about publishing a magazine, I can tell you that it involves a lot of email, a lot of clicking “preview” and then panicking that you published to the actual internet instead of just previewing, a lot of coffee, a lot of take-out, a lot of help, and a lot of feelings. So that you might be prepared for what you’ll have to deal with, I offer you this comprehensive list of all the feelings I had in the 24 hours leading up to publication.

We’re Heading to Venus (Venus)

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the one from Tuesday, April 6, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Niew niew niew niewwwww.
Niew niew NIEW NIEW NIEW.

Because we publish issue one next week so it’s the final countdown, do you get it, PLEASE LAUGH AT OUR JOKES, WE ARE OVERTIRED AND MISS YOUR VERY SPECIFIC LAUGH.

The Rhinestone-Encrusted Badminton Racket of Disruption

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the one from Tuesday, March 30, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Media companies that are actually tech companies are playing their weird competitive badminton again.

I don’t have to link to which ones! Share this whenever you want: a tech company, while wearing its handy-dandy media disguise, recently announced some kind of labor shakeup because growthiterationchangeordie. A ruling minority is batting one or two marginally differentiated ideas back and forth, taking less-than-athletic swipes at the same multimillion-dollar shuttlecock.

How to Reach X,XXX,XXX Goals by XXXX

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the newsletter from Tuesday, March 23, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Knowing what counts, without the quota

Last week, the Medialyte newsletter ran an interview with Pipe Wrench’s favorite Catherine that included this question and answer:

Is it the hope that Pipe Wrench will become a full-time job for its members? What kind of financial and audience goals have you set internally?

We expect the business to sustain itself. Michelle and I both work second jobs that we intend to bequeath to successors when the time comes. There are break-even numbers.

But to quote Margarita Noriega, “Metrics are not goals. And goals are not values.”

That Friend of Yours, You Know the One

If you already know how a conversation ends, you’re giving a lecture or watching a rerun.

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the newsletter from Tuesday, March 16, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

When we say that reading an issue of Pipe Wrench should be like being at a great dinner party, that’s a deliberate description, not a glib tagline. Conversation isn’t planned, or linear. We carry our own experiences and sets of knowledge and opinions and moods into every conversation, and all of that influences what we respond to and how. Although every issue of Pipe Wrench centers on one core story, we’re not a thematic magazine.

What if we were just super honest?

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the newsletter from Tuesday, March 9, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Catherine and I chatted last Thursday about this week’s newsletter and what we wanted to talk to y’all about; we ended up deciding to tell you more about Pipe Wrench’s approach to conversation pieces (spoilers: not just writing!) and asking you to introduce us to your most interesting friend.

We promise never to use the word “learnings.”

Also synergy, although, at least that one’s a real word.

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the newsletter from Tuesday, March 2, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

It’s been a full month since the website went live, and we’ve learned a few things. We call them “lessons,” aka the perfectly good, pre-existing word to describe things one has learned, and our monthiversary seems like the apt time to talk about them.

On Rejection, and Rejecting

Because something is better than nothing, and it’s not hard to be kind.

Don’t get the newsletter via email? Here’s the newsletter from Tuesday, February 23, 2021. If you’d like the email, sign up here!

Here’s a great thing about the Pipe Wrench model: we get to be picky, always selecting for the stories that are too specific or too off-kilter or too (insert adjective here) for other publications. The story doesn’t have to fit into a larger issue, because it IS the issue.

Here’s a hard thing about the Pipe Wrench model: we have one big story per issue and issues publish every two months, which means we can assign six stories a year (although we hope to be able to grow into a monthly).

Which means saying no. A lot.

(PS: We Love You)

Niew niew niew niewwwww.Niew niew NIEW NIEW NIEW.

Knowing what counts, without the quota

If you already know how a conversation ends, you’re giving a lecture or watching a rerun.

Is it a newsletter or isn’t it? WHO CAN SAY.

Also synergy, although, at least that one’s a real word.

Because something is better than nothing, and it’s not hard to be kind.

Niew niew niew niewwwww.
Niew niew NIEW NIEW NIEW.