Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller — Technology director at ProPublica, indie publisher
Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and the open web.
werd.ioA good open source project is a community, not a package.
An independent blog at the intersection of technology, journalism, and the open web. Ben writes about digital rights, open source culture, and what happens when newsrooms and tech companies make decisions that shape how information flows. His perspective draws on years building publishing tools and working at ProPublica — he's as comfortable discussing hiring practices as he is dissecting the collapse of open-source journalism.
Written by Ben Werdmuller.
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Good vibes, bad vendors
When I was thirteen or fourteen I had a really comfortable sweatshirt that I wore to school all the time — but it did have a few inherent problems. For one thing, it had a great big target on it, and wearing a literal target to high school was just asking for it. For another, on top of that, in Looney Tunes writing, was the confident phrase: “It’s a good vibe!”I was bullied as mercilessly as one might expect, but I honestly think it might have killed in the AI era. I&...
Notable links: February 20, 2026
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.This week: the trouble with innovation and revenue in news, and some of the societal forces (political manipulation, exploitation) that mean figuring those things out are vital.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.Journalism lost its culture of sharingI agree, strongly, with this piece about (re)building an open source culture in news by Scott Klein and Be...
Stop calling optimization "innovation."
[Yoni Greenbaum]I really appreciate this distillation of the twin needs of optimizing the Engine — getting as much value as you can out of your existing business model — and the Explorer, which is all about actual innovation that seeks out new products, markets, and models.“If your staff meetings are all about how to hit next month’s KPIs, you don’t have an Explorer. You have a very well-oiled engine. True resilience means insulating your Explorer team from the...
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
[Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya in Nature]This is a very significant finding. Users who moved from a reverse-chronological social media algorithm to X’s:“[…] were 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritize policy issues considered important by Republicans, such as inflation, immigration and crime. They were also 5.5 percentage points more likely to believe that the investigations into Trump are unacceptable, describing them as...
In Graphic Detail: Subscriptions are rising at big news publishers – even as traffic shrinks
[Sara Guaglione at Digiday]This is exactly why micropayments — a model akin to Spotify’s streaming payments where each pageview receives a share from a reader’s monthly budget for all articles — are not the right solution for news.“For a bunch, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, growth isn’t just continuing, it’s speeding up, and likewise so is The Guardian’s paid reader contribution model. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’...
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Thoughtful, independent writing about technology and media from someone who's been building tools for both — and thinking critically about where they're headed.