Paul Boutin

Mark Pilgrimís anniversary story makes a better blog entry than my own, but Iíll post mine anyway.

It was a year ago today I announced that, no surprise to me, Iíd been laid off from the new regime over at Wired magazine. Which was fine, aside from the timing.

I realized I could lie to save face: I was fired for my blog!

But no. Iíd never wanted to be a career magazine editor. Iíd been hired at Wired as a technology expert, and my personal goal had been to turn the opportunity into a writing career.

So, with a bit of a push into the deep end, Iíve spent the last year as a full-time freelance writer.

My anniversary present

One year later, the same folks who sacked me just published my very first op-ed article for a national magazine. We’re all pretty happy about it. Especially my uberwife Christina, who’s been both supportive and patient throughout my new one-day-at-a-time career.

Burn, Baby, Burn in the magazine’s December issue details the confessions of a serial copyright violator ñ me. Upshot: The real action in music sharing today is offline. P2P vs RIAA? So two years ago. You guys hash it out; I’ll be over here upgrading my FireWire drive.

The print version even has a little photo of me. Look Ma, Iím a technology expert and a writer.

The Wired mafia is pretty hard to leave. My biggest freelance gig has turned out to be writing daily items for Wired News, which I helped launch in 1996 as an engineering manager. Daily online reporting can be grueling (how … does … Michelle .. Delio … do it?!?) , but the editors have put up with my baby steps and I seem to be getting the hang of it.

Wired News and its ilk are, like blogging, the only publishing fast enough to feel like a real connection to readers to me. Without realizing it at first, I’ve lived on Internet time more than twenty years. Internet Time was slower back then. As Ray Kurzweil notes, it has been accelerating, and thus has become recognizable only in hindsight.

îWeíre going to break some of your appsî and other good news

Yesterday afternoon was one of those I-love-my-job days. I sat in on Craig Mundieís talk about ìTrustworthy Computing: Year One,î then drove to a nearby Wi-Fi Starbucks to file the first story on his hard-line statements about security.

I expect the reaction to Mundieís statements will be thus: People will complain loudly about Big Brother and Microsoft arrogance, while secretly being relieved there wonít be another Netcraft survey that shows half the servers on the Net havenít been patched against the latest supervirus.

Sort of like last Tuesdayís elections.

Tired: Mastheads. Wired: PageRank

The one downside to being (a) a freelancer and (b) an online reporter is that most of the worldís public relations professionals still consider both dÈclassÈ compared to the traditionally prestigious role of staff writer on the masthead of a print publication.

It felt like that was why my repeated attempts to get Microsoft to let me break the story of Trustworthy Computing last spring were flat out rejected in favor of giving the scoop to less, um, freelancery reporters for less Internet-y publications.

That left me to write about TWC from an outsiderís point of view, which meant far more negatives in the sourceable information. A shame, because my sense was that Trustworthy Computing wasnít as Dilbertesque as it came out seeming in the press.

After MS execs finished giving exclusive interviews and onsite presentations (one of them three blocks from here, I later learned), I had to settle for a short phone interview to run a belated story about Palladium. By then, the street had already decided Palladium was the whole of TWC. It’s not.

ìI hope you understand,î one of the PR people said to me. I suppose I do. But I’m sticking to online reporting and my weblog rather than chasing another print or magazine gig, or a book deal, to impress the PR industry.

Why? Because I know how most people will get their information about Trustworthy Computing. Between Wired News, Salon, and the blog, I’ve got three of Google’s first ten results.

Don’t even bother looking up Palladium.

Via Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list:

–

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release November 12, 2002

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:

Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)) provides
for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, prior to the
anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal
Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to
continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. In accordance with this
provision, I have sent the enclosed notice, stating that the emergency posed by
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems
declared by Executive Order 12938 on November 14, 1994, as amended, is to
continue in effect beyond November 14, 2002, to the Federal Register for
publication. The most recent notice continuing this emergency was published in
the Federal Register on November 13, 2001 (66 FR 56965).

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means of
delivering them continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the
national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. Therefore,
I have determined the national emergency previously declared must continue in
effect beyond November 14, 2002.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

November 6, 2002.