Five years ago, I wrote a letter to the bow tie-wearing Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler. Finally, today I get an email back from the company. But, you guessed it, through the passage of five years they have managed to entirely miss the point of my original proposal! They want me, the Knackered Hack, holed up in the long-tail of journalism to promote a podcast they have done with Nassim Taleb. If you are me, there is a rich irony in all this. If you are not me, it is Friday afternoon and you have better things to do.

As I recall, the gist of that old letter to Winkler was to say what a good idea it would be for his news organization to be less hierarchical and develop a more networked model of journalistic interaction. My experience had suggested that that was the way large editorial groups needed to operate to have a chance of scaling our ever more complex news environment effectively, by sharing expertise more readily in real-time. Those people who know the Bloomberg news organization would probably tell me that I didn’t have a prayer. Continue reading ‘bloomberg not real-time at all’

Diligent readers will know that “hack” (short for “hackney”) originally meant “horse for hire”.

I’d no intention, when adopting the title, of any involvement with real horses. Indeed, the last time I was on the back of a hoofed mammal was in 1969, aged four at Longleat House. A donkey “race” ended abruptly with my mount deciding halfway round that it was going no further. It lay down in the paddock, trapping my leg and filling my special lucky blue nylon shorts with sand. Not so lucky after all, nor the last time I would feel stymied in my competitive efforts by being allied to a complete ass.

I must have silently vowed to never get on an animal again. But that changed at the weekend, when I found myself £80 the poorer, with the hack family on four real hacks of various sizes heading across a river bed and up a rocky path in Exmoor’s Doone Valley (home of Lorna Doone). This was the first of our deliberate attempts to Continue reading ‘back in the saddle’

We’re probably some of the last to notice it here, but 64-year-old Sir Paul McCartney has upped sticks and joined the digital music revolution.

He has left EMI after 45 years and gone to Starbucks’ Hear Music label as its first major signing. Yes, Memory Almost Full, McCartney’s 21st studio album since the Beatles, can be found nestling temptingly alongside the biscotti. As McCartney explained recently to the LA Times:-

I was bored with the old record company’s jaded view…They’re very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they’re a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they’ve got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways — because they’ve been at it for so long — to what they call ‘market’ it. And I find that all a bit disturbing. Continue reading ‘macca flees record industry dinosaurs’

At the risk of indigestion — though with a fitting break since the last serving — we reach the final course that has left the Knackered Hack out to lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb for so very long. One of the quant-professor-turned-essayist’s most digestible dictums is “don’t run for trains”. So, in full keeping with the Slow Food movement, this nutritional saga continues, unhurried yet inexorable, to its wafer-thin mint conclusion. Continue reading ‘caveman lunch with taleb – part 3′