Otis Chandler

Great artists don’t study art history to figure out what art to create. Great founders don’t analyze the market to figure out what product to build.

Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever.

On Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and almost every other big social media platform, the link is deprioritized in favor of keeping your eyes on the platform at all costs. This has had disastrous consequences for journalism, art, and the fundamental connective nature of the web.

When I’m writing in Google Docs, any time I get stuck with a concept, I can select a sentence, press “CTRL” + “R”, and Sublime’s browser extension (available in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Arc) will pull up relevant ideas, like this:

Smashing, a new app curating the best of the web from Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler, is now available to the public.