Behind the Blog: Getting Political

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss “staying out of politics” and what it means to be a tech news publication.

EMANUEL: I’m very proud of our output for the last few weeks. When we worked at Motherboard, I really felt like the site was firing on all cylinders when one story was dominating the news and our entire team could pivot, bringing its various areas of expertise to meet the moment and publish unique reporting that was valuable to readers, even if the story that was dominating the news was not something they imagined they’d be covering previously. 

I wasn’t sure what that was going to look like with a team of just four people, but I think a look at 404 Media’s site shows that it’s breaking a ton of news on one of the most important stories in the world right now, which is Elon Musk’s aggressive takeover of various government agencies and systems. Covering this story requires us to talk about Musk and Donald Trump, think about them, interview other people about them, and put images of them in our articles so someone who is scrolling their feeds can easily spot what our stories are about.