Here's What I Think About 2015 and This Website You're Reading

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For the last two months or so, I've had a whole bunch of people ask me what Motherboard's plans and goals are for next year. It's a question with a pretty simple answer: We want to do more of everything—more reporting, more video, more scoops, more travel, more drones (we've got five but that's not enough)—and do it better.

Naturally, actually figuring out how that happens is the tough part, but we laid a good base for it this year. If I could go back a year ago and look to where we are now, I'd be stoked. (I'd also probably have spent more time at the beach in 2014.)

We more than doubled our traffic this year, and our YouTube channel had nearly double last year's views, both of which are fairly important and good metrics to pay attention to. More importantly in my eyes, our quality and standard of reporting has never been higher, our video p​roduction is ​consistently peerless, and we've expanded our global reach and staff with some of the best people I've ever worked with.

Great! Good shit! And so on. Then I look to next year, when we've got to do all of that again and then some. That's exciting, as we all got into this business with the hope that we'd always get to tell as many stories as we can. But it's also terrifying, because as you grow, the temptation to get lazy becomes more powerful, not less.

My philosophy is pretty simple, and it's shared by the rest of the Motherboard staff: We want to put more into the journalism ecosystem than we take out. What's that mean? Every time we can break a story, tell one that hasn't been told (including fictional ones, with Terraform), or advance one that's in flux, we're giving something new to readers. (Every time our colleagues elsewhere do the same, it's the same result, which I also think is great!) The alternative would be to write the same stories—some great, many not—as 100 other publications, and do it all day, every day, which sounds like a huge soul-sucking bummer.

Thing is, that alternative is cheaper and easier. If our only goal was to simply make more content, rewriting science press releases and riding reblogs of other outlets' tech news to the top of reddit would be a pretty simple editorial plan. And despite the internet's love of complaining about clickbait, producing it remains an effective strategy. But I don't think I could take such a myopic view towards simply getting traffic and still be able to sleep at night. Thankfully, our readers (that's you, hi!) are more than willing to call us out when we get lazy.

The goal for us isn't to get traffic for traffic's sake. It's to help ensure that the most important stories we tell, which aren't always the sexiest, can reach more eyes and have more impact. I look at the internet like gravity: The bigger we get, the more we can pull into our sphere, regardless of how much viral potential a story might have.

You're always going to have stories that you know are going to be a hit—a scoop on drone porn will always be more popular than a piece on an Indian bird trauma unit, and that's totally chill. But getting bigger means that nuanced stories on underreported topics—stories that are hard to put a hook on, or make clicky, or however you want to think about it—will still do well, and seeing that happen is more heartening to me than all the viral hits in the world.

And that world is changing faster than it ever has, and that change is only accelerating with the pace of science and tech. Forget the tech world's filter bubble, I want to find the stories that show how our whole globe is evolving, the ones that help explain the futures to come.

Five years ago, the idea of publishing 4000+ word reports about Ecuador's tribal politics or running 16 minute (or hell, 36 minute) documentaries on YouTube seemed like crazy talk for a tech blog. Now those types of things are amongst the most successful we do, and from our perspective, being able to do such involved work is a blessing. Seriously, thank you for supporting us with your eyeballs!

So yes, we have to do more, and we're committed to telling more of the ambitious stories you've come to expect of us. We won't stop writing about YouTube videos or blogging about literal shit when we want to because I love blogging and we're not haughty, stuffy Old Journalist assholes—if you disagree, go ahead and give me the finger next time you see me, but do so knowing you're missing the point—and because hey, you all seem to enjoy the weird and wonderful too. And yeah, not every s​tory will be a blockbuster no matter how huge we grow, even if I'd like to think it's somehow possible.

But what we're not going to do is slap a headline on someone else's story to get you to read some worthless bullshit, or produce brainless bite-sized videos, because we see you as more than just one more site visitor among millions of others. All of our time is more valuable than that, especially in the spastic internet world we live in. So as we head into 2015, know that we value you enough to try to always bring our best, and we hope you hold us to it.