Ben Thompson: disagreement

Transcript context

…What do you do to optimize what you might call reader input — emails you receive or WhatsApp messages— as a part of your daily workflow? Should you be doing more of that and less reading of news or vice versa? How do you balance those two things? The feedback is very valuable. I get lots of email every day from readers. I have a forum for members to post on. People send tweets to me all the time. I think it goes in a few ways. One, you do get really valuable, concrete feedback like this specific thing, like details about something, or you’re wrong about this and this is why — which is extremely valuable. Sometimes it’s, oh, I disagree with you and it’s an opinion sort of thing, which is fine. It’s good to gauge that. One thing that was hard for me at the beginning — most writers have to figure out — is to understand you have a core group of readers that are going to send you messages and tweet you all the time, and they’re not representative of your audience as a whole. Having a mental filter around that, to be aware of it. But it’s — one of the best things about writing on the internet is the immediate feedback, and it can adjust what you write the next day, as opposed to, if you’re writing a book or whatever, and you have to wait for the next book or the next paper or whatever it might be. It’s a tremendous benefit. You have an MBA from Northwestern, correct?…

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