We spent the past few weeks at a lot of events, including Qualys’s QSC in London. Good conversations abounded across vulnerability management, patch management, neurodiversity and leadership. Among the things that came up: the challenges that emerge as those with great technical chops but lower soft skills move into leadership roles; aligning patch management and business continuity; moving from reactive security to taking proactive and risk-informed decisions. Interviews on these coming to The Stack soon. 

What really stood out for me though was the unexpectedly human conversations we kept between the cracks of these more formal chats. The way a talk about AI and exploit development segued into one about raising children in a world moving so searingly fast; how a conversation about global SOC responsibilities pivoted into one about work travel and parental guilt as a working mum; a chat on patch management turning into one about the need to carve out “human” spaces in algorithmically intermediated places. Beautiful. 

Amidst these conversations what was abundantly clear was most people feel increasingly overwhelmed by the pace of digital change we’re facing; the breakneck development of AI and what it means for their career, their skills, their family; and often even where it leaves them, as a human being. A rich seam of existential anxiety glimmered in most directions. 

I feel it too: I’d be mad not to.

Journalism: Battered

The publishing world has battered in recent decades. 

A necessarily crude recap of the past decades: 1) The internet ate print; 2) Google et al cannibalised digital advertising revenue; 3) algorithm decisions destroyed entire publications that had over-indexed on certain platforms like Facebook or on search engine SEO. 4) The surviving publishers are seeing AI synopses and further Google search changes slash their traffic.  They’re also having to consider how to “write for bots” rather than to write for human readers, so that AI scrapers will surface their content, even if it doesn’t drive traffic

Mainstays of the technology media for many years like TechCrunch have been eviscerated. Business Insider and Fast Company; Wired and IT Pro: wherever you look, reporting roles have been cut. Others, like the late (and excellent) Protocol barely survived three years, even with a billionaire’s backing. Many more are ancient history. Nature abhors a vacuum, and myriad new publications have started to spawn meanwhiel, populated entirely by AI-generated “content” and bot-authors, most of it dogshit; nicely crafted, superficially convincing, but vacuous. 

From then ‘til now… 

The Stack has thrived in the 4.5 years since we launched on a £300 budget and a prayer.

We made a few simple early decisions: Run lean and remote; don’t misincentivise reporters to chase sugar rush clickbait by avoiding any explicit traffic-dependence, so that we could focus on building a “quality” audience over a “quantity” one; minimise reader friction with a stripped back site (we didn’t even have a newsletter for a fair while: Our Command Line newsletter now has over 10,000 subscribers including the vast majority of Fortune 500 CIOs and CTOs,) and monetise through a mixture of private events and thought leadership.

It worked, give or take a few hiccups. We have a modest war chest that sustains a core full-time team of four (Ed, Nish, Liam, Noah), and are interviewing for a news editor. 

We have built important commercial relationships and demonstrated real value for partners across brand marketing and beyond; helping many join up previously siloed PR, marketing, and customer engagement budgets. (Because marketing is also evolving very, very fast.)

But we cannot afford to get left behind. The risks are mounting, including from AI: publishers almost everywhere have seen search engine-driven traffic fall sharply as Google looks to steer users to AI synopses.

And we need to think about “The Stack 2.0”.

The Stack 2.0

I increasingly feel – harking back to those conversations I highlighted at the start – that our challenge as a publication is going to be finding a way to marry the intensely human with the intensely, newly digital. So… what does that rather philosophical sounding idea look like?

In the spirit of building-in-the-open that has characterised The Stack’s bootstrapped journey to-date, I want to share what we’re thinking and invite you to participate in building with us!

The human side 

On the human side it is more community events. These will be curated by us, sans sponsors – for learning, networking, and connection without someone shoving another “single-pane-of-glass” down your throat and spamming you relentlessly afterwards.

Here's the first.

Register on LinkedIn here.

We’ll also be looking to invite some of the digital leaders in our community to share recent lessons and priorities with peers as part of that series of events. More on that anon. 

An aside: The Stack inevitably has two core audiences; technologists themselves, including CxOs who together manage over $150 billion in annual IT spend, and technology communicators who want to reach them. Our priority and core audience is the former, but as we plan our roster of events, we aim to serve the latter too, building on and formalising a recent informal series of technology media meetups we have been running in Soho that have drawn folks from the BBC, The Register, Business Insider and many other publications, along with 60+ agencies.

The digital side: AI "NIBS" and NLweb?

For every incipient crisis like the Chicago Sun-Times syndicating content on summer reading lists that turned out to include hallucinated and entirely non-existent books, and our abiding scepticism about some of the sheer quasi-religious hogwash that permeates so many conversations about generative AI, there’s been growing signs that this new generation of models coming through may be able to augment, not just undermine journalism.

Here’s what we’re thinking about… 

On the digital side, for starters as a result, we’re exploring the possibility of building clearly demarcated “snackable” sidebars of AI-powered news synopses to synthesise some of the endless flurry of news from across the enterprise tech vendor world. Why? We tend to eschew the majority of vendor updates. There’s too many and we’re a lean team. But interesting tidbits slip the net as a result. If we can automate the CMS as well as the synthesis element, an AI sidebar element of “news in brief” could be useful for readers. We’d also like to explore deploying Microsoft’s newly open-sourced NLweb to see how The Stack could be made to work with natural language. There’s lots to explore!

These are all big ambitions for a publisher still tracking below £1 million in annual revenues and operating in a very volatile market.

The heartbeat behind them has to be original reporting too: we want to keep hiring and we need to do something differently to get there. 

Let’s build together

I’ve always shied away from a paid subscription tier. It feels like the walls of the open internet closing in; information wants to be free, dammit! But to thrive and serve you better in changing times, we need to work together. And we see an opportunity for real symbiosis with our readers in which subscriptions are re-invested clearly and directly back into reporting.

To cut to the chase, to that end we are this month launching a unique paid community membership proposition for £250/year. We firmly intend this to be more than far more than just a paywall for premium content. Here’s what The Stack’s community members will get. 

  • Monthly independent events for technology practitioners. Sponsor-free (no sales), informal and inclusive.
  • An exclusive members’ only newsletter with members’ only analysis, interviews and reporting 
  • Direct access to our team via members-only channels through which you can help shape the above (Want to read a deep-dive into Kamal Deploy, or encrypted messengers, or the evolution of FinOps? Get in touch, we’ll commission a team to deliver it!) 
  • An in-person social for technology communicators three times/year
  • A biannual whitepaper based on our industry insights

Here’s the big promise: For every 300 annual subscription buyers, we promise to hire a reporter. We have tens of thousands of daily readers, including CxOs in aggregate who manage over $150 billion in annual IT spend. If 2,000 of our readers pay for an annual subscription we can hire six more journalists dedicated exclusively to serving you, our subscribers. 

  • That’s someone laser focused on AI
  • That’s someone solely focused on exciting startups.
  • That’s someone full-time focused on CxO priorities
  • It’s someone focused on developers and platforms
  • That’s someone full-time on investigations
  • That’s wide, deep coverage from tech events.
  • It’s someone full-time supporting you, our community

Let’s build something special. 

https://www.thestack.technology/membership/

A few further thoughts: I am aware that at this price point we are competing with a ChatGPT subscription, for example.

Those are really helpful for many people. But they scrape sites like ours and give very little back, even if they do serve us a small but steadily growing number of users… (example above).

More importantly, they don’t file FOI requests, ask vendors probing questions, surface PDFs hidden from their scrapers, or sit down with real IT budget holders, the CIOs and CTOs, the CISOs and CDOs in large banks, pharmaceutical companies, defence agencies et al to ask what they are focused on and why. And they certainly won’t buy you a beer, commiserate over your job loss or celebrate your promotion, connect you with people who may go on to be immensely helpful to you.

So  join our community and not only will you stay in the loop, get served fresh insight, support independent journalism and help create jobs, but hopefully forge some really valuable relationships too. You can be a trailblazer and subscribe below. Get in touch directly for corporate subscriptions and we will sort you out with a significant discount. 

Thanks so much for being part of our journey.

Join the tribe

Any questions, reach out on ed@thestack.technology with "membership" in the subject or find me on Signal @Targett.11

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